In the current debate on international cooperation, the focus has shifted from ‘problems and challenges over there’ to ‘problems and challenges over here and over there’. It involves issues in the area of poverty, sustainable and fair growth, availability of and access to water, food, energy, education, and health care, and threats to the environment and biodiversity. There is a growing sense that solving these major contemporary issues is a joint global responsibility.

With countries becoming ever more interwoven, mutually dependent and vulnerable, we are simultaneously citizens of separate nations and of a world in which our local and global realities are connected. This is by no means a new insight – Socrates and Diogenes, among others, already considered themselves world citizens, but this idea is in need of a fresh interpretation. This publication explores the concept of global citizenship by drawing on relevant, mainly scientific, literature.