The making of global citizenship: education, liberal internationalism, and negotiating worldmaking in the globalizing 20th century

This thesis offers a historical account of the making of global citizenship as a political and pedagogical project embedded in the work of 20th-century liberal internationalist networks and institutions. It argues that global citizenship, far from being a natural or universal condition, was actively constructed through the ideological, epistemic, and institutional frameworks of actors born out of the two World Wars. Through archival research, this study traces how global citizenship emerged as a response to crisis, both as a normative aspiration and a technique of governance, and operationalized through internationalist educational programs, curricular discourse, and expert networks. By drawing on the conceptual resources of cosmopolitanism and epistemic community, this thesis situates global citizenship at the intersection of worldmaking, soft power, and moral internationalism. It pays close attention to the frictions, ambivalences, and exclusions that accompanied the spread of global citizenship as a norm, highlighting how its universalist claims were contested and negotiated amid the tensions of the 20th century. In doing so, the thesis contributes to a transnational historiography of internationalism that foregrounds education as an instrument of socialization, and a field in which competing visions of world order were imagined, contested, and institutionalized.