Engaging citizens, depoliticizing society? Training citizens as agents for good governance

ABSTRACT

Discourses of citizenship are profoundly powerful tools both for defining membership of a national community and for establishing the expected dispositions of citizens. Governments and non-governmental organizations utilize formal and informal education to promote specific understandings of citizenship. However, efforts to promote citizenship are often marked by tensions and paradoxes in terms of content, delivery and reception of these ideals, not least in negotiating global and national, liberal and neoliberal agendas. This paper explores the rationale for and discourses of citizenship presented through a World Bank-backed on-line, transnational active citizenship training and critically interrogates the explicit and implicit ideologies and understandings of citizenship promoted in the course and certain limitations to these, including the types of ‘active’ citizen proposed and the normalized version of participation and civil society these reflect, and apparent limitations in relation to both state and citizen disengagement as well as the continued challenge of promoting security through engagement across difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship pedagogy
• difference
• active citizens
• responsibilization
• participation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of Lynn Staeheli and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks are also due to the participants at the Learning to be citizens: Promoting reconciliation, social cohesion and security in times of uncertainty workshop, hosted as part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Youth Citizenship in Divided Societies: Between cosmopolitanism, Nation and Civil Society’ (ERC295392) for their supportive input and discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Daniel Hammett http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9607-6901

Notes

1 Including John Hopkins University, University of California (San Francisco), London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh.

2 Coursera offers a financial aid scheme to those who are unable to meet the course fees.

3 In 2015, many courses, including this one, were offered for free.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council, under the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Youth Citizenship in Divided Societies: Between Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Civil Society’ [grant number ERC295392].