Engaging citizens, depoliticizing society? Training citizens as agents for good governance

Discourses of citizenship are profoundly powerful tools both for defining membership of a national community and for establishing the expected dispositions of citizens. Governments and nongovernmental organisations utilise formal and informal education to promote specific understandings of citizenship. However, efforts to promote citizenship are often marked by tensions and paradoxes in terms of content, delivery and reception of these ideals, not least in negotiating global and national, liberal and neoliberal agendas. This paper explores the rationale for and discourses of citizenship presented through a World Bank-backed on-line, transnational active citizenship training and critically interrogates the explicit and implicit ideologies and understandings of citizenship promoted in the course and certain limitations to these, including the types of ‘active’ citizen proposed and the normalised version of participation and civil society these reflect, and apparent limitations in relation to both state- and citizen disengagement as well as the continued challenge of promoting security through engagement across difference.