Introduction The International Year of Global Understanding was proclaimed by the International Science Councils of the Social (ISSC), Natural (ICSU), and Human sciences (CIPSH). Why are such important international councils advocating for the IYGU, brought to life by the powerful writings and pract...

Invariably citizenship education is related to ethics and morality, and the politics of culture and official knowledge of the nation-state responsible for public education. Global citizenship education is different because it plays a role in the global system and does not depend on the politics of a...

Since the late twentieth century, the Middle East has been one of the world’s most unstable regions. Violent wars and both latent and manifest conflicts have raged almost non-stop due to ideological, socioeconomic, ethnic and religious conflicts. According to the World Bank, youth comprise rou...

The pursuits of global citizenship projects are both tantalizing and vexing. Despite various treatises and attempts to dissect and categorize various forms based upon their assumptions, motivations and nature, current manifestations still appear to be more a way of categorizing our existing states a...

“Everyone hates us, but everyone wants to be us”. I often hear this phrase to describe the public perception in Egypt of my institution, the American University in Cairo (AUC). Often called “the Harvard of the Middle East,” this outsider-insider contrast is not surprising. In...

In March 2017, UNESCO held the Third Forum on Global Citizenship Education in Ottawa, Canada. One of the features that distinguished this forum from the previous ones (Bangkok 2013 and Paris 2015) was that it combined two important educational programs: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) an...

Thank you – to AFS Dominican Republic and the AFS Caribe Region for organizing this important event and to UNESCO for your partnership. Ladies and Gentlemen, distinguished guests.  This has been an important forum – and for me the key take away is this: Intercultural understanding, ...

As a world-class intercultural education organization and a global movement to develop and activate global citizens, AFS prepares and activates future leaders, global citizens and change-makers with essential 21st century intercultural skills to engage, lead and collaborate effectively in different ...

In February, 2017 the Paulo Freire Institute of UCLA launched number zero of the Global Commons Review, focusing on education for “global citizenship”. The theme is not new, but it has only very recently caught the attention of international organizations like UNESCO. Therefore, this rev...

In 2015, SAGE published the second edition of its Handbook of Research in International Education. Our contribution (Akar and Ghosn-Chelala 2015) was a chapter that investigated the intersections of post-colonial citizenship, cosmopolitanism and citizenship education in the Arab region. Formerly col...

Is Europe in the process of colonization by a populist mind-set? One can ask if such a tendency is a matter of ideology, mere rhetoric or a renewed political style. Over the last three years, populist forces have dominated the political agenda on various occasions, from the European elections in 201...

Different nations have different understandings and experiences of citizenship education. Citizenship education in the Chinese context is often referred to as civic education, with the main purpose of training qualified students to serve the state. As a country with a long history, civic education o...