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The essays in this edited collection argue that global citizenship education realistically must be set against the imperfections of our contemporary political realities. As a form of education it must actively engage in a critically informed way with a set of complex inherited historical issues that emerge out of a colonial past and the savage globalization which often perpetuates unequal power relations or cause new inequalities. The essays in the book explore these issues and the emergent world ideologies of globalism, as well as present territorial conflicts, ethnic, tribal and nationalist rivalries, problems of increasing international migration and asylum, growing regional imbalances and increasing world inequalities. Contributors to this collection, each on their own way, argues that global citizenship education needs to project new values, to reality test and debate the language, concepts and theories of global citizenship and the proto-world institutions that seek to give expression to nascent aspirations for international forms of social justice and citizen participation in world government. Many of the contributors argue that global citizenship education offers the prospect of extending the liberal ideologies of human rights and multiculturalism, and of developing a better understanding of forms of post-colonialism. One thing is sure, as the essays presented in this book demonstrate so clearly, there can be no one dominant notion of global citizenship education as notions of 'global', 'citizenship' and 'education' are all contested and open to further argument and revision. Global citizenship education does not name the moment of global citizenship or even its emergence so much as the hope of a form of order where the rights of the individual and of cultural groups, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity or creed, are observed, preserved and protected by all governments in order to become the basis of citizen participation in new global spaces that we might be tempted to call global civil society.
