System Thinking for Global Political Citizenship Education

Abstract

Humans are political animals but need to be better ones, because like all other animals, indeed all life forms, they are connected, through their various social systems of all types and at all levels, more closely than ever before with a planet’s subsystems increasingly interlocking in a global system. Their role as political animals is crucial because politics remains the authoritative distribution of values. In a global society lacking an equivalent world government, humans are everywhere performing political activities on different levels, from households to villages, from cities to provinces, from states to suprastate entities, from individual economic transactions to membership in organizations interacting with other organizations, that, in the context of globalization, cannot help affecting the lives of others around the world. Because all political decisions matter, it is necessary in constructing a global society as a system for humans to cultivate their political citizenships, and for others to help them understand what the needs of a sustainable future for the earth require them to take into consideration in their political choices from the perspective of system theory.