Obstacles and opportunities for global citizenship education under intractable conflict: the case of Israel

Abstract

Global citizenship education (GCE) is a global education trend that, like democratic citizenship education, has been adopted recently by many education systems for the purpose of preparing students to engage in global society. In this study we applied Qualitative Content Analysis to semi-structured interviews with Israeli teachers with the aim of shedding light on some of the barriers and opportunities to GCE in a conflict-ridden state. The main novelty of our study is first and foremost the delineation of factors that would hinder attempts at incorporating GCE in a conflict-ridden state, including a lack of consensus surrounding citizenship, increased nationalism and an ambiguous attitude towards human rights. In addition, we revealed that under these conditions, GCE as a concept may be threatening, and conflict-ridden states may choose to opt-out altogether or at least rephrase it under a less controversial title. Overall, this study suggests that GCE would need to be articulated differently in conflict-ridden states than in other Western contexts. We concluded by addressing the implications of our findings for GCE policy in conflict-ridden states.

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