Q.Find out about Global Citizenship Education (GCED) from UNESCO/GCED clearinghouse websites.

Three very different-looking events help introduce this idea: worldwide sympathy and aid poured in for victims of the 2004 South Asian tsunami; international networks link terrorists across countries; and the United Nations works together with many states to try to stop the spread of threats like bird flu. What connects all three is that we live in a deeply interconnected world, where both problems and the responses to them increasingly cross national boundaries.

Modern communication — the internet, television, and mobile phones — has changed how quickly and vividly we learn about events elsewhere. News that once took months to reach other parts of the world can now be witnessed almost as it happens; we can watch disasters and wars unfold on our screens in close to real time. This has helped build genuine shared sympathy and shared concern among people in very different countries — the outpouring of help after the 2004 tsunami is often cited as evidence that a wider sense of global society may be starting to emerge, and supporters of global citizenship argue this feeling deserves to be deliberately strengthened.

The idea of national citizenship rests on the assumption that a person's own state can, by itself, provide the protection and rights they need to live with dignity. But many of today's problems — pandemics, terrorism, environmental threats, or the plight of refugees and stateless people — cross national borders and cannot be solved by any single state acting alone. This is what leads some thinkers to ask whether individual rights, guaranteed only by one's own state, are still enough on their own, or whether the time has come to also think in terms of human rights and global citizenship. …