Global Citizenship Education and Claims of Ubuntu : A Philosophical Reappraisal

Abstract

This chapter advances the argument that global citizenship education (GCE) can only be considered as genuine if it is situated in the cultural-philosophical imaginaries through which societies understand subjectivity, justice, and ethical responsibility. Within the South African post-apartheid university, the African ethic of Ubuntu offers one such imaginary. Ubuntu articulates a philosophical position in which the human subject is constituted relationally, that is, I am because we are, rather than through the autonomous, self-sufficient individual presupposed in much liberal and Eurocentric educational thought. As such, Ubuntu is not merely an ethical sentiment but, instead, a philosophy of education that reconfigures what it means to learn, to teach, and to dwell with others in conditions of plurality and historical inequality. Considered through the lens of Ubuntu, GCE is reframed as a practice of ethical interdependence rather than a technical project of producing globally competitive subjects. Ubuntu disrupts the instrumentalization and managerial appropriation of GCE, where citizenship becomes a competency or market-aligned disposition, by insisting that the educational subject is always already embedded in relations of obligation, vulnerability, and reciprocity. This philosophical repositioning is particularly salient in South Africa, where the rhetoric of democratic and decolonized education often risks becoming declaratory rather than transformative. Ubuntu, instead, directs attention to the conditions of coexistence, asking how universities cultivate dialogical spaces where difference, dissent, and critical questioning are sustained rather than contained.