Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices Vol 2:1 27 Global citizenship and the cultural politics of benevolence David Jefferess University of British Columbia – Okanagan, Canada As part of the “Stand Up and Speak” campaign (“An End to Poverty” 2007) to raise awareness of the UN Millennium Campaign to “make poverty history,” the Canadian coalition of volunteer cooperation agencies Global Citizens for Change mailed out flyers to thousands of Canadians addressed: “Dear Global Citizen.” Such an address presumes both an identity- position and an ethical-position of the addressee. The global citizen is one who identifies not (only) with their local or national community but as a member of a global community. Global citizenship, however, marks not simply a conception of belonging but an ethics of being: the global citizen is one who “Stands Up and Speaks” and who works to “make poverty history.” To be addressed as a global citizen seemingly marks the transcendence of nation and other exclusionary modes of affiliation. Yet, the context of this address suggests that not everyone can be a global citizen, which reflects both a social positioning within unequal relations of power and an ethical distinction between those who help and those who are in need of being helped. The contemporary notion of global citizenship, in its contested and multiple manifestations, has developed out of the idea of cosmopolitanism, which dates back to the Stoics, and more recent formulations of world citizenship and the ideal of world governance. In the past decade, the concept of global citizenship, as a concept which signifies the way in which one’s identity and ethical responsibility is not limited to their “local” community (i.e. family, nation), has increasingly become a conceptual mantra for international development and humanitarian agencies, and a primary mandate of the institution of the North American university. The emergence of the concept of global citizenship in popular discourses of globalization and humanitarian ethics, at least in Europe and North America, reflects, and is reflected in, the return to the hope of humanism in the fields of political philosophy and critical and cultural theory. For instance, in the wake of the Cold War, Euro-American political philosophers, such as Dower (2003), Singer (2002), Rawls (1999), and Ignatieff (2004) have all argued for a particular responsibility for the Other that is either explicitly or implicitly theorized as an expression of global citizenship. For instance, Rawls (1999) has argued for the West’s “duty of assistance to burdened societies,” and Ignatieff (2004) was influential in the development of the notion of the Responsibility to Protect. Dower contends that global citizenship is “premised on the belief that agents have global responsibilities to help make a better world and that they are part of large-scale networks of concern” (2003:vii). Dower’s presumption of agency fails to recognize the way in which agency is shaped or limited by social relations of privilege and power. Global citizenship functions as an ethical stance or political philosophy that an individual adopts; it does not identify a particular political subjectivity, it would seem. As I will argue, however, theories of global ethics, such as that presented by Dower, echo in their rhetoric the imperial project of civilization, and, more importantly, the discourse of global citizenship, while it represents the idea of universal inclusivity, produces insiders and outsiders: not everyone is a global citizen. In contrast, cultural theorists and philosophers such as Butler (2004), Mohanty (2003), and Appiah (2005, 2006) have sought to interrogate the ethical framework for a global community or transnational solidarity. The work of these critics, however, is informed by specifically feminist and/or postcolonial approaches to understanding global relations of power. In this essay I critically examine the discourse of