Global Tensions—The Denudation of the Post-1990 Consensus and the Need to Reconceptualise Citizenship Education

The article begins by examining the “post-1990 consensus,” an international orientation—emerging in the mid-twentieth century and consolidating after 1990—that promoted diversity, equity, inclusion, human rights, multiculturalism, and postmodernism as guiding values of the global order. Education was seen as both the site and the instrument for advancing this vision of a new socio-political world. However, this consensus has been undermined by what the authors term the “denudation of the post-1990 consensus”, an analytical turn that emerged in the early twenty-first century amid intensifying global tensions and the erosion of liberal-democratic ideals. (The term ‘denudation’ is borrowed from the science of geology, where it refers to the stripping away of layers of material, thereby exposing deeper, formerly hidden layers.) The article introduces the construct of the “denudation of the post-1990 consensus” as an analytical turn in interpreting how contemporary political transformations reshape the conditions under which citizenship and education operate. This turn is characterised by various interconnected processes, including democratic regression, deglobalisation, populism, nationalism, rising inequality, and social fragmentation, all of which point to the weakening or the stripping away of the normative foundations of diversity, equity, inclusion, and the liberal-democratic citizenship that lay at the heart of the post-1990 consensus. They have also been weakening or stripping away the foundational values that previously informed global educational reform. However, in its current form, the concept of liberal-democratic citizenship is not suitably equipped to meet the challenges brought about by the turn of events referred to as the “denudation of the post-1990 consensus”. It must, therefore, be reconceptualised as a critical, multilayered, human-rights-based, intercultural, and capability-oriented field of formation. It is contended that, in view of the “denudation” process, a reconceptualised form of citizenship education, capable of addressing fragmented identities, democratic instability, and multilayered forms of belonging, may offer an appropriate educational response to contemporary global turbulence.