The university and the crisis of twenty-first-century citizenship: Towards a global citizenship education to disrupt populist nationalism

The global resurgence of populist nationalism (PN) is grounded in divisive identity politics, affirms commitments to oppressive systems and provokes a crisis of citizenship. With universities being a significant battleground of this contention, the anti-globalist fervour towards xenophobia and against global ideologies and institutions has significant implications for critical possibilities of global citizenship education (GCE). However, research on how institutions are responding to PN, and how critical GCE programmes and pedagogies can disrupt exclusionary, violent forms of nationalism are limited. This study uses critical discourse analysis of 30 GCE programmes and asks: to what extent are discourses within university GCE programmes oriented to promote the disruption of the resurgence of PN? Findings indicate that most GCE programmatic discourses are not well oriented to promote the disruption of PN. Therefore, the article offers possible questions to consider when centring the disruption of PN in transformative models of GCE.