Global Citizenship in Comparative Perspective: Youth Perceptions of Global Rights, Responsibilities and Efficacy Across Five Continents

The quest for a global polity has faced many criticisms and barriers, yet it continues to have strong moral, historical, political, and practical foundations. In this exploratory study, we present a rationale and conceptualization of global citizenship as a response to contemporary global challenges. The study is premised on a need for a robust comparative understanding of youth values, civic attitudes, and perceptions of globalization to identify similarities and differences across cultures. The article makes a case for global empirical research exploring youth perceptions of globalization and modes of citizenship and participation. We first present a conceptualization of global citizenship, drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on globalization, cosmopolitanism, political theory, media literacy and civic engagement. We then survey students (n=1,214 students) from 10 countries (Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong/China, Colombia, Greece, Kenya, Lebanon, Peru, the UK, and the US) about the extent to which they are personally affected by globalization and other specific global issues. The findings reveal several patterns, including a divide between participants in Western liberal democracies, who feel more removed from globalization and express less global efficacy and civic responsibility, and those in the Global South, who demonstrate greater levels of engagement, responsibility and efficacy. In addition, only a small group was identified as super-globalized, a term we gave for those who scored high across all indicators of global citizenship.