7.1 – Global Citizenship
Citizenship is membership in and allegiance to a sovereign state.
The victory of democracies at the end of the Cold War encouraged people everywhere to embrace democratic ideals and explore allegiances greater than singular nations. Democratic expansion inspired a search for broader affiliations – across borders, across difference. This momentum gave rise to a modern articulation of global citizenship: the idea that a person’s identity can transcend national borders and have loyalties to the wider world. Cosmopolitanism is the idea that we’re all part of a global community and that our actions — social, economic, environmental, or political — can affect people far beyond our immediate surroundings. In his 1995 essay, Cosmopolitan Democracy and the World Order, David Held argued that democracy must extend beyond the nation-state to respond to globalization. He also built upon Immanuel Kant’s 1795 work Towards Perpetual Peace, to promote transnational institutions, a global rule of law, and a concept of global citizenship where citizens influence and participate in supranational governance structures. George Monbiot argues in The Age of Consent that current institutions, primarily the nation state, often contribute to injustice, inequality and environmental destruction, and he calls for the creation of global democratic institutions to represent humanity as a whole.
At the end of World War II, governments, nonprofits, and individuals created new initiatives to counteract tribalism, nationalism and the root causes of the war. One outcome was a multi-decade effort to invest in pan-European and ultimately global youth identity development processes via student exchange programs to promote greater intercultural and international understanding. Many institutions continue to promote global citizenship today. Children’s International Summit Villages create structured village-style residencies that encourage cooperation through daily relationship-building. United World Colleges pair rigorous academics with immersive, cross-cultural living to cultivate peace and understanding. Camp Rising Sun emphasizes shared responsibility and introspection as pathways to leadership. These programs laid the groundwork for what is now known as Peace Education: the process of cultivating the knowledge, values, and skills needed to live in harmony with oneself, others, and the natural environment. With support from the Global Campaign for Peace Education, the elements of the idea have now been integrated into school systems in dozens of countries.
Today, more and more people see themselves as global citizens, but there’s not yet a mechanism to channel this widely shared set of values into policy.
7.2 – Pluralism
We live in a moment marked by polycrisis: the compounding instability of climate change, forced migration, institutional distrust, and rising authoritarianism, and information ecosystems are fragmented and compound polarization. These overlapping crises destabilize the very conditions for collective action. Climate change raises disputes over responsibility, worldview, and time horizon. Migration and displacement provoke questions of identity, belonging, and inclusion. Authoritarianism feeds on institutional distrust and fractured civic narratives. And, information fragmentation produces disagreement over what is real and what is moral. Together, these forces expose the limits of governance models built on assumed consensus, and call for a deeper capacity to govern across plural and contested realities.
In this context, global governance must do more than administer or aggregate – it must be capable of holding complexity, repairing trust, and constructing shared authority across lines of deep difference. Many legacy programs were rooted in Euro-American ideals of modernist progress – assuming that exposure would lead to empathy, and empathy to peace. Today, global citizenship requires not just empathy and connection, but discernment and shared authorship across epistemic difference.
Pluralism offers a framework for this reimagining. It describes the civic and institutional capacity to live, decide, and govern across deep difference. Pluralism provides the structural capacities – relational, epistemic, and participatory – that legitimacy increasingly demands in fractured societies. It is a design logic for coherence without homogeneity.
As a worldview, pluralism rests on the belief that diversity is beneficial to society. It holds that the coexistence of diverse opinions, ways of life, and value systems, enriches the collective. As a practice, pluralism enables groups to manage disagreement without splintering. It brings people together to learn, share power, negotiate, and self-govern – creating communities where individuals feel safe, free, and fully alive. These ideas echo the Global Centre for Pluralism’s emphasis on inclusive policy and institutional design, and legal scholar John Inazu’s call for a “confident pluralism” rooted in civic trust without uniformity.
A new generation of initiatives is building pluralist mindsets, practices, and civic structures. Over Zero uses narrative and psychology to interrupt identity-based violence and build civic resilience across lines of division. Facing History and Ourselves equips students to examine historical context and moral complexity, helping them become thoughtful civic actors in a pluralistic society. Citizen University builds local civic rituals and culture, such as Civic Saturdays, to nurture relational belonging and collective civic responsibility across difference. Each represents a modern experiment in pluralism-as-practice: shaping worldviews, supporting relational identity development, and cultivating habits of shared civic life.
A pluralist orientation reshapes not only who participates in global governance, but how decisions are made, knowledge is validated, and belonging is constructed. Below are three key shifts that illustrate this evolution.
7.2.1 – From Identity to Worldview
Global governance structures often default to procedural liberalism: consultation, consensus, and technical expertise. These approaches typically focus on who is at the table – but less often ask how different knowledge systems are understood, honored, or granted authority. This shift calls attention to the epistemic foundations of governance – how institutions define what counts as knowledge, whose cosmologies are legible, and which worldviews shape the terms of legitimacy.
Whose logic is the system built on?
In many Indigenous and African traditions, governance is shaped through elder wisdom and intergenerational dialogue. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood following years of Māori advocacy, honoring a worldview in which rivers are kin, not resources. Because the governance framework draws from multiple ontologies, it’s more likely to be perceived as legitimate by both Māori and state institutions. This is the relational trust and epistemic humility pluralism fosters.
Governance must be able to hold divergent truths and cosmologies and to reckon with foundational questions of legitimacy and meaning-making, rooted in epistemic recognition and relational trust.
7.2.2 – From Representation to Shared Authorship
Shared authorship requires rethinking how wisdom is surfaced, how disagreement is engaged, and how legitimacy is co-created across difference. Even well-meaning forms of inclusion can reinforce hierarchies: who is heard but not followed, consulted but not co-creating. This shift focuses on the practices of governance: how decisions are made, how disagreement is engaged, and how people participate not only in consultation but in the construction of collective meaning and authority.
How are decisions actually made, and by whom?
In Colombia’s peace process, community memory circles and artistic dialogues were integrated alongside legal mechanisms during the transitional justice and reconciliation efforts post-conflict – enabling institutions to contend with complexity that formal negotiations alone could not resolve. Memory circles allowed victims and communities to express harm and grief that didn’t fit neatly into judicial language or evidence-based frameworks. Artistic practices enabled emotional and moral repair, opening space for shared mourning, symbolic reckoning, and narrative recognition — things the legal system alone cannot provide. The inclusion of these pluralistic formats increased trust in the peace process among communities who had been systematically excluded or harmed by state institutions. Without this approach, formal negotiations may have reached a technical agreement, but lasting peace would have been fragile, as lived experiences would have remained unacknowledged, and narrative wounds unhealed. These pluralistic practices allow conflict to be metabolized – a form of structural intelligence critical to durable governance.
Citizens’ assemblies, such as those pioneered in Ireland, offer another glimpse of shared authorship in practice. Ireland convened national citizens’ assemblies composed of randomly selected, demographically representative citizens to deliberate on issues like abortion and climate change. Without this approach, contentious issues likely would have stalled in Parliament, polarized the electorate further, or been resolved through elite-driven or technocratic processes, risking public backlash or legitimacy collapse. The citizen assemblies shifted the frame from polarization to deliberation, where participants engaged with complexity, not binary choices. The process bridged expert and lay knowledge, where citizens were not just consulted but actively shaped the recommendations put to national referenda or government action. This increased public trust and democratic legitimacy. Because the process was transparent, representative, and grounded in dialogue, even controversial decisions gained broader support. Assemblies balanced expert input with personal and communal experience — creating more legitimate and socially grounded outcomes.
7.2.3 – From Global Citizenship to Rooted Belonging
Many people today do not experience belonging in singular terms. Instead, they hold layered forms of identity: deeply rooted in place, lineage, or tradition, while also connected to global challenges and solidarities. This kind of belonging does not muddle or compromise experiences of identity. Rather, it is a multidimensional stance that enables people to act with both moral grounding and transnational relevance.
How do we design systems that are both accountable to specific communities and responsive to transnational interdependence?
When governance systems recognize only formal citizenship or assume a unified global “we,” they risk alienating the very actors most capable of bridging complexity. But when systems are designed to reflect and support layered belonging, they can become more legitimate, more trusted, and more capable of navigating plural realities. Some of the most effective global actors live in this both/and space.
Movements like Fridays for Future and the Indigenous Women’s Treaty Alliance embody layered belonging in practice. Though often described as global, their effectiveness stems from being grounded in specific histories, responsibilities, and ecologies. Fridays for Future includes figures like Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate, whose climate leadership is not just about emissions targets, but about food insecurity, deforestation, and economic justice in her own region. Her authority derives not only from data or global networks, but from lived experience — what she has called the “intersection of climate and daily survival.” Similarly, the Indigenous Women’s Treaty Alliance unites Native women across tribal nations to oppose extractive industry projects. Their moral stance is rooted not in ideology, but in ancestral obligations to land and community, expressed through ceremony, intergenerational memory, and treaty-based sovereignty.
In both cases, legitimacy arises not from abstract ideals or global positioning alone, but from the ability to speak from rooted commitments that resonate across scales. This dual orientation – grounded and global – enables these actors to challenge dominant institutions while simultaneously engaging them. It allows them to articulate alternative visions of sustainability, justice, and governance that feel real to those excluded by conventional forums. Without recognizing or designing for layered belonging, governance systems risk building engagement infrastructures that are legible to elites but alien to those with the deepest civic and moral stake.
In a global context marked by multiple truths, pluralism enables institutions to navigate conflict, construct shared meaning, and co-create authority with those they serve. Without this capacity, governance efforts risk eroding trust, hardening polarization, or failing outright in moments of collective stress. But where pluralism is embedded – through civic infrastructure, narrative practice, and participatory design – governance becomes more adaptive, more legitimate, and more capable of navigating a future that will only grow more interdependent and contested.
| While there is no donor affinity group focused on global citizenship or cosmopolitanism, two networks offer insight. The Global Centre for Pluralism advances pluralism in governance, education, and peacebuilding worldwide. Similarly, the New Pluralists works to foster pluralism in the US. Both offer practical pathways for translating identity into durable civic infrastructure. |