Global Citizenship Education in a World Falling Apart: Re-centring Human Values in the Age of AI
The world today is falling apart in ways that no single crisis can explain. Across regions, longstanding geopolitical tensions have escalated into open conflict, while multilateral institutions built to sustain global cooperation are increasingly strained. Democratic norms are eroding as polarisation deepens, trust in public institutions declines, and political discourse is captured by fear, exclusion, and division. Meanwhile, the climate emergency is accelerating beyond projections, exposing the profound inequalities between those who have contributed most to ecological breakdown and those who bear its heaviest consequences. These crises do not exist in isolation—they feed and amplify one another, creating a compounding fragility that threatens the foundations of peaceful, just, and sustainable societies. Underlying all of this is a deeper fracture: a crisis of values, solidarity, and shared humanity.
Into this already fractured world comes the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—a force of transformation that carries both extraordinary promise and profound risk. Generative AI is reshaping knowledge production and decision-making processes through big data-driven algorithms, while AI chatbots now provide instantaneous, definitive answers that often bypass the need for deep subject mastery. Yet these efficiencies come at a cost. The use of AI in military operations, autonomous battlefield targeting, and deepfake propaganda is deepening the very conflicts and instabilities that already threaten global peace (UNESCO, 2018; 2024). The growing dominance of a few AI models risks further homogenising global knowledge systems, silencing the diverse epistemologies and cultural perspectives that sustain human solidarity. The environmental footprint of AI—from the extraction of raw materials to energy-intensive data infrastructures—adds new pressure to an already strained planet. And as these technologies operate without the nuance of human empathy or moral judgment, they do not merely reflect our fractured world—they risk accelerating its unravelling. What was already falling apart is now falling apart faster.
Global citizenship education (GCED) serves as a critical framework for navigating these compounding crises by re-centring human values at the heart of learning—values that no algorithm can generate, and no technology can replace. Grounded in the holistic pedagogy of the three domains of learning—cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural (UNESCO, 2015)—GCED acts as a catalyst for systemic change. It equips learners with the critical thinking skills needed to interrogate AI-generated information, understand the ethical dimensions of technological systems, and recognise how power shapes what counts as knowledge in an increasingly algorithm-driven world. At the same time, it provides the socio-emotional foundation necessary to address social fragmentation and polarisation—cultivating empathy, solidarity, and respect for diversity that algorithms cannot replicate, and fostering a sense of belonging not only to a shared humanity, but to a shared planet. Importantly, GCED empowers learners with the agency to act—to translate values into ethical and responsible choices at local, national, and global levels, in response to the profound opportunities and risks of our time. In doing so, GCED asks us to reimagine what it means to be human in a more-than-human world: a world shared with other species, ecosystems, and now, intelligent machines.