What is Global Citizenship?
What does citizenship mean today, and how does it need to evolve in an interdependent world?
On this page, we explore the history, dimensions and challenges of citizenship in a global perspective.
Also available as a PDF brochure.
1. Introduction
The geography of birth
The place where we are born and the citizenship we receive is not our choice. Citizenship creates a legal tie between an individual and a state. It is one of the strongest predictors of how anyone’s life will unfold. It can function as a key or as a lock, opening the door to safety, freedom and international mobility, or confining people within the borders of a state that provides none of these.
Depending on one’s citizenship and location, rights and opportunities are distributed unequally across the world. Yet, the principle that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights is widely affirmed. This gap between local reality and universal aspiration is a constant source of tension.
A global setting
Climate change, war and conflict, pandemics, and fast-moving technologies illustrate how deeply individual and collective fates are intertwined. Causes and effects of these issues cross borders but citizenship is legally tied to states. Given moral imperatives as well as common global challenges and threats, the question follows: what does citizenship mean today, and how does it evolve in an interdependent world?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted under the supervision of Eleanor Roosevelt.
- All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
- Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948
2. The emergence of citizenship
From subjects to citizens
Citizenship historically reflects a move from rule over people to rule by the people. Its early roots often go back to bargaining. In times of conflict, rulers needed revenue, soldiers, and compliance from the ruled. When coercion alone did not work, they had to concede rights, privileges, and protections. This logic appears in China’s Warring States period before 221 BCE and centuries later in medieval Europe. In classical Athens and Rome, dimensions of citizenship were already institutionalized in some ways.
Modern citizenship emerged alongside democratic states over the past 250 years through intense political struggles. Democracy builds on the idea that legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed, the citizens, or “demos”. In many countries that had to achieve liberation from colonial rule further battles followed against domestic authoritarianism.
- Citizens are the people of a democratic, rule of law-based free nation. There are no citizens under despotism.
- Xu Zhiyong, Chinese lawyer and political prisoner
- Photo: China Change
Empowerment and exclusion
Citizenship developed as a pathway to rights and political empowerment, but it was always ambivalent. In democracies it grants political rights that enable equal participation, especially the right to vote in free and fair elections and to stand for office, supported by other rights and liberties, and by the rule of law. Although women’s rights have strongly advanced in democracies, gender equality often remains incomplete even today.
In authoritarian systems, citizenship rights are hollow and largely exist only on paper. In countries such as Afghanistan or Iran, women face systemic repression simply because they are women. Citizenship also functions as a tool of exclusion and can be used to enforce conformity. Those who are not considered part of the “demos” are denied rights and privileges. Aggressive nationalism manifests internally through exclusion and oppression and externally through imperialism and war.
Colonial rule, slavery, Apartheid and the Holocaust show how exclusionary regimes went to extremes. They not only stripped away or denied citizenship but also dehumanized their victims and committed mass atrocities and genocide. In the 20th century more people have been killed by their own government than by armed combat.
Voting in and standing for elections is a citizenship right.
- Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
- Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist and world federalist
- Photo: Library of Congress, O.J. Turner, 1947
From citizens to people
Since the Second World War, many entitlements once tied to citizenship have increasingly been recognized as rights and protections that should be secure for all human beings. This concerns fundamental human rights as well as many civil and social rights. International human rights law, marked by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on human rights, and many other agreements, helped drive this development, alongside domestic legislation, court rulings, and a wider moral recognition that persons have rights irrespective of nationality.
States today owe core obligations to everyone within their jurisdiction, citizens and noncitizens alike. But implementation lies in their hands and international enforcement is absent. Where state capacity is weak or governments are unwilling, the promise of universal rights remains unfulfilled.
What remains today
At the core of citizenship today are political rights and mobility. Only citizens have the right to leave, enter and remain in their country. Regular admission and residence for non-citizens, on the other hand, are granted at a state’s discretion. Stateless people, who lack a nationality, are especially vulnerable because no state is legally bound to admit them and they have no government of their own to turn to for protection.
International mobility is tied to national citizenship to a large degree.
Control over cross-border movement is a central concern of states. Passports and visa systems have been developed into an administrative infrastructure that strictly regulates international mobility. The expansion in government control of migration and movement counters the idea of waning state sovereignty.
Under international human rights law, everyone may seek protection from persecution in a different state and must not be returned to serious harm. Whether asylum is granted, and under what conditions, varies a lot across countries.
No barriers and obstacles can stop people from crossing borders if they are determined to do so. Residents without lawful status usually endure precarious work, exploitation and abuse, barriers to housing, health care and schooling, and the constant risk of detention and deportation.
Duties specifically tied to citizenship have become rare. Military service and legal obligation to vote are among them in some places.
3. The dimensions of citizenship
The notion of citizenship builds on four dimensions: membership, legal status, rights, and participation.
Membership
Membership means belonging to a community defined by a shared identity. The idea of a nation usually is a frame for citizens’ membership. It may be imagined in civic terms of shared customs, laws and institutions, or along lines of ancestry, language, religion, ethnicity and/or common history. Most countries are multicultural and blend these elements. But membership also draws a line between those who are considered included and those who are not.
Legal status
The legal status of citizenship is usually acquired by descent or place of birth. Additional routes may include naturalization, usually after a period of residence or through marriage. Laws about this are very different across the world’s countries. Some offer citizenship to investors. Dual or even multiple citizenships exist, yet most people have one citizenship for life and only a very small minority ever change their status.
Rights
Civil rights and political freedoms as well as many social rights often extend to all people regardless of citizenship. But in many countries they do not exist to begin with. Most important rights are tied to the legal status of citizenship though: to enter and remain in a country, to work there, and not to be deported. Voting in elections and standing as a candidate are also tied to citizen status. In some cases, residents are allowed to vote in local elections
Participation
Participation invokes the idea that citizens are not passive but assume responsibility. They are empowered to contribute to society in social, political, cultural, economic or other ways to advance the common good, and not only their self interest. It means citizens recognize and use their agency to help shape the community to which they belong.
4. Belonging beyond the state
Layered identity
Personal identity has many layers that form over a lifetime. Origin and citizenship play an important part, for better or worse, but they are not the whole story. Each individual has different feelings of connection to family and kin, neighborhood, town or city, local region, or country. Identity and social circles also grow from gender, ethnicity, language, heritage, faith, sexual orientation, education, profession, political views and other attributes.
Because identity is layered, a state-related sense of belonging is permeable and not absolute. Forms of belonging can expand beyond the nation-state. A case in point is cross-border regional identity which is both a driver and result of regional cooperation.
Regional integration and identity
In Europe, countries have sought to create shared institutions and identity as a means of eliminating war and creating prosperity. Now, anyone who holds the nationality of a European Union member state also holds EU citizenship. Established in 1992, EU citizenship complements national citizenship and confers rights under EU law, notably freedom of movement, settlement and employment. The European Parliament, a co-legislative body for the continent, has been directly elected since 1979, and more than two thirds of EU member states use a common currency, the Euro.
In Africa, there is a long history of Pan-Africanism, which is a cultural but also a political outlook. It emphasizes the shared experiences and aspirations of all African people and promotes continental unity. Pan-Africanism is a central guiding principle of the African Union, which pursues closer cooperation and integration of its member states. Plans for advancing a common African citizenship include a common African passport and free movement across the continent.
Regional blocs in East, West, and Southern Africa, Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia, have different arrangements that facilitate cross-border movement for their citizens and transnational identity. Features include visa-free short stays as well as simplified routes to residence and work.
Global identity
Researchers highlight that widening circles of empathy and solidarity can be observed which ultimately encompass the whole of humanity. Surveys show that many people already embrace a global perspective to varying degrees. Significant numbers of respondents even say they consider themselves more as world citizens than as citizens of their own country, making global identity a crucial layer of their personal identity.
People who identify as global citizens tend to be concerned for the well-being of other people worldwide, and for the global environment. The reasons for a global outlook differ across countries and contexts. It is usually based on a certain knowledge of the world, the challenges it faces, and a feeling of interconnectedness. Education can be an influential factor alongside exposure to global pop culture and diverse perspectives through movies, music, sports, fashion, social media, the arts, news, gaming, entertainment, fan and interest communities.
Personal experiences such as international business ties, migration, diasporic families, cross-border activism, travel, or tourism can also play a role for a small minority globally. The presence and use of global brands and products also contribute.
- The more you know about the world, the more you realize that you’re a part of it.
- Malala Yousafzai—Pakistani human rights and education activist
- Photo: Government of Japan, 2019
5. One humanity
An old and frequent insight
The idea that all people belong to a single human family is ancient and appears across cultures. Korea’s founding ethos, for instance, dated back to 2333 BCE, urges living for the benefit of all humankind. In classical Athens, philosophers around 350 BCE began to imagine belonging beyond their city-state. This later developed into the notion of a community embracing all persons. In India, later Upanishadic texts convey the thought that the world is one family. Scholars in the medieval Islamic world likewise reflected on a community that spans the inhabited earth.
Indigenous ancestral traditions echo a similar outlook in their own terms. In southern Africa, the philosophy of Ubuntu affirms that a person becomes a person through other persons, emphasizing mutual empathy. In the Andean and Amazon regions, ideas of good living link human flourishing with responsibility to community and the living world.
The family of humankind is a thought found in many religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and the Bahá’í Faith. A related principle is the Golden Rule present in religious and ethical teachings, including Buddhism and Confucianism, which calls on each person to treat others as one would wish to be treated.
Meeting of the Parliament of the World's Religions 2023 in Chicago.
- We affirm that a common set of core values is found in the teachings of the religions, and that these form the basis of a global ethic. / We consider humankind our family.
- Parliament of the World’s Religions, 1993
The human species
It is perhaps no coincidence that the idea of one human family is common, because it is true. Fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence point to a common ancestry of the human species, Homo sapiens, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.
Genetic studies suggest that about 900,000 years ago, our distant ancestors, who evolved in Africa, may have fallen to only a few thousand individuals. Lines that moved out of the continent later gave rise to Neanderthals and others. Homo sapiens appeared hundreds of thousands of years after this. Small bands of modern humans who dispersed beyond Africa about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago account for much of the ancestry of people outside the continent today.
One of the most influential photos in history: the Earth seen from the Moon, taken in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission.
Human genetics are overwhelmingly similar. People everywhere share almost all their DNA. There are no fundamental biological differences. A common neurobiology underpins universal capacities for language, social understanding, memory, reasoning, imagination, and learning complex skills. Differences in outcomes reflect environments and opportunities far more than genetics.
- Anyone who goes to space tried to look at his own country first, but soon it appears that there is no boundary between the countries and the entire world is one family where our destinies are integrated.
- Rakesh Sharma, Indian astronaut
- Photo: Wikimedia/Mau1911, 2014
Common risks and challenges
When agriculture began around 8000 BCE, the species Homo sapiens numbered perhaps five million. The Human species grew slowly for millennia and reached about one billion in 1800. Industrialization then drove rapid growth over the next 225 years. In the last fifty years the global population doubled to more than eight billion. Fertility rates are in sharp decline in many places, yet the global peak has not yet been reached.
The unity of humanity is no longer only a moral outlook or a biological fact. People are linked through a shared global civilization. Prosperity and life expectancy have risen to historic highs. Yet, hundreds of millions still live in extreme poverty. At the same time, the globalizing consumer society is not sustainable. Key natural resources will run out and renewable ones are overused at a global scale.
Human activity now affects the entire Earth system. Planetary boundaries that supported a livable environment over the past ten millennia are being pushed toward their limits. Emissions from fossil fuels, for instance, drive global warming, which strains all living systems and magnifies droughts, floods, and fires.
Nuclear-armed states maintain thousands of nuclear missiles capable of annihilating civilization as we know it within thirty minutes. The COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have caused up to 36 million deaths. A future pandemic could be much worse. Some believe that artificial intelligence may run amok and destroy civilization.
A dense web of intergovernmental bodies and agreements has been woven attempting to deal with these issues. They have contributed to improvements in the lives of hundreds of millions of persons, but they also face grave challenges themselves.
- To survive as a species on this planet, we're going to have to see ourselves as Earthlings.
- Mae Jemison, U.S. astronaut
- Photo: World Resources Institute, 2018
6. A global polity
Common responsibility
For centuries, international matters were in the domain of governments. The United Nations, which is at the center of today’s global architecture, remains a forum of states. In an interdependent world, however, the line between domestic and international has faded. Global risks and challenges affect everyone and future generations.
If equal dignity and rights are to be more than words, they must be implemented irrespective of national boundaries. All people then need to be recognized as members of a common community that shares political responsibility for global affairs. This is a foundation for global citizenship and a global polity: linking equal human worth with a say for everyone in matters that affect all.
- An individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.
- Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary from Martinique
- Photo: Collections IMEC
Universal, diverse and inclusive
A global polity builds on global identity. Membership at the core is based on a shared recognition that all people, despite their differences, are part of a single human family that cares for each other and life on Earth. Affirming a universal community does not flatten individual or collective identities. It adds another layer beyond the state and means committing to building common ground while accepting each other’s diversity.
The attribution of global citizenship as a legal status would be straightforward: every human being without exception is a global citizen. The global demos is all of humanity.
Rights and participation
People everywhere theoretically already enjoy fundamental human rights regardless of citizenship. Establishing the status of global citizenship can go along with strengthening states’ responsibilities to provide rights and protections. The global polity can help implement them and in serious cases, if all else fails, would have to step in.
In principle, the wellbeing of global citizens individually and humanity collectively would be considered more important than claims to sovereignty. This shift in perspective may be one of the most important elements of global citizenship. At the same time, global citizenship can be shaped to complement and not replace national or regional citizenship. Distinct rights linked to the latter can remain.
Global citizenship means expanding democracy to the global scale. Global citizens have the right to be represented and to participate in global deliberations and decision-making without mediation through national governments.
A global constitution
Modern citizenship emerged when constitutions turned people into the constituent power and bound governments to law. By the same logic, global citizenship gains real force when the global polity rests on a global constitution that distributes and limits public power, protects fundamental rights, and provides representative institutions such as a world parliament. Such a framework would be federal in character, adding a layer of shared sovereignty for genuinely global questions while leaving other powers with states and regions.
7. Challenges
It is possible to see global citizenship and a global polity as a step in a long-term trend toward emancipation and the realization of human rights for all. Nonetheless, there are strong countertrends and challenges too. Here are some of them.
Nationalism
Patriotism is widespread and often a positive layer of identity. It turns unhealthy when it hardens into exclusionary nationalism that glorifies the favored group and treats others as less worthy enemies. It becomes imperialistic when it seeks to impose its will on other states, even intending to redraw international borders by force. To varying degrees, such currents have gained ground in major countries, with serious effects on international cooperation and on peace and security.
Authoritarianism
Exclusive nationalism and authoritarianism often go hand in hand. Authoritarian regimes suppress rights and silence dissent. They have no interest in empowering citizens, let alone at a global scale. They intend to destabilize democracy where it exists and remodel international law so it helps entrench authoritarian rule. Democratic backsliding and increased authoritarianism observed in many countries over the past two decades contribute to a challenging environment for strengthening citizenship rights worldwide.
Failed states
Where states are fragile or failing, government institutions do not reliably provide security, public services, or justice, leaving people to fend for themselves. Such environments often become hubs for organized crime, terrorism, and insurgency. Weak governance produces instability that spills across borders and strains regional and global cooperation. This undercuts trust in higher-level commitments and complicates the delivery of rights that global citizenship would affirm.
Divisions and extremism
The world is crisscrossed by divides that can weaken confidence in any shared human identity. Inequalities of income and opportunity, urban-rural gaps, cultural and religious tensions, and many other splits run within nations as much as between them. Extremist movements of various kinds deepen these fractures. They seek to impose particularist visions and perceive pluralism itself as a threat. Their idea of universalism is enforcing conformity.
- We are all citizens of the world, and we need to take care of the world for the generations that come after us.
- Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations
- Photo: Chatham House, 2016
Relativism
In the intellectual realm, some strands of relativism hold that no shared ground exists at all because values and perceptions are always bound to particular cultures and identities. From this view, universal principles are suspect, read as masks for particular interests, often those of dominant groups seeking to cloak domination in the language of common human standards.
Anxiety over globalism
Attacks on “globalism” merge these currents in different degrees. The argument implies an alleged loss of control. It claims that decisions are made by far-away, unaccountable international institutions to the disadvantage of national communities. Global citizenship and a global polity are not recognized as means to strengthen cooperation, solidarity and democracy, but as threats to sovereignty and identity. Often it is elites themselves who amplify this critique.
8. Ways forward
Advancing education
Global identity grows from knowledge and understanding. Global citizenship education should feature in national policies and school curricula worldwide. It is one of the UN’s agreed Sustainable Development Goals to ensure that all learners acquire knowledge and skills on sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity. A growing pool of lesson plans and classroom projects already exists and can be adapted to local needs.
A shared understanding of human and planetary evolution can anchor this learning. Tracing our common story from Earth’s formation and the emergence of life to human migrations, exchange and innovation, and today’s interdependence can help people see themselves as part of one species on a fragile planet. This includes recognizing conflict and harm as well as their causes on a path toward global reconciliation.
- No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
- Nelson Mandela—Anti-apartheid fighter and first President of democratic South Africa
- Photo: John Mathew Smith, 1994
- If we truly want to achieve equality and harmony among human beings, we must not neglect the time of life when the social, idealistic and linguistic differences which separate human groups do not yet exist.
- Maria Montessori—Italian founder of the Montessori educational reform method
- Photo: Nationaal Archief
Sustainable development
Development is the foundation on which everything else rests. Global citizenship means that people should be able to live decent lives everywhere. This starts with ending poverty and hunger, making health care and schooling available, advancing gender equality, and ensuring clean water and sanitation. Clean energy, decent work and a safe environment belong in the same picture. When these basics are met, opportunities grow, horizons widen, and pressures that feed conflict and displacement ease.
Global citizenship supported by a global polity should be seen as a way to help strengthen governance and the provision of public goods more effectively on the ground, assisting fragile states in particular. Sustainable development and the stability it brings at all levels serve the interests of governments and business alike.
Building institutions
Global citizenship requires channels for public voice where global rules and action are shaped. Three complementary proposals can improve public engagement at the United Nations and prepare the ground for more fundamental transformation toward a global polity.
A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly would introduce a representative chamber linked to the UN. It could start with advisory and oversight functions, composed initially of members drawn from national or regional parliaments. Over time, however, it should move toward direct elections and more powers. It would provide a forum for transnational perspectives and issue-based coalitions, and serve as an entrypoint for public engagement with global issues.
A World Citizens’ Initiative would create a formal right of agenda setting for the global public at the UN. Once a defined, significant number of people from a sufficiently broad range of countries and regions support a proposal, the UN would be required to discuss it and to respond in a reasoned way. This instrument would ensure that issues with wide public support receive attention and that citizens have a path to raise global concerns.
Global Citizens’ Assemblies would enable deliberation by diverse, randomly selected participants from many countries. Convened on specific themes, such assemblies can review evidence, hear from stakeholders and experts, deliberate across differences and issue recommendations to UN bodies and others. They bring ordinary people to the table and can help identify compromises that command public trust.
Practicing global citizenship
Everyone can help make global citizenship real by acting as a global citizen. This can begin with openness to other cultures and the wider world, meeting others with understanding and empathy, and engaging even when backgrounds and opinions differ. Tolerance and acceptance matter. But it is equally important to draw a line at intolerance that denies equal dignity, rejects diverse ways of life or incites harm. Respect and openness should be mutual.
Acting as a global citizen will usually involve voting for parties and candidates who do not scapegoat minorities and favor cooperation over nationalism. Careful judgment is needed. Firmness toward aggressive, rights-abusing regimes, for instance, may be a better course of action in foreign policy than appeasement.
It may also entail engaging local representatives on international commitments and speaking up when human rights are violated, including through responsible use of social media. Critical thinking and awareness of disinformation are key qualities. Seeking reliable and impartial information is part of this practice. In restrictive environments, personal risks must be weighed.
Where means allow, financial support can be directed to groups that defend freedom, democracy and human rights, including dissidents, human rights defenders and independent media, as well as to efforts that foster global solidarity and development. Relevant personal skills can be volunteered.
Taken together, individual efforts allow global citizenship to be lived in the present while helping advocate for the democratic global architecture that it ultimately requires.
Global goals—Governments have agreed to pursue 17 goals to achieve sustainable development such as eliminating extreme poverty. Goal 4 includes global citizenship education.
© Democracy Without Borders, 2025