Chapter 1 examines the law’s role in defining status – free and unfree, male and female, citizen and non-citizen, including the acquisition, proof, and nature of citizenship, the position of Latins, the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Important routes to citizenship were grants by the emperor to individuals including soldiers in the auxiliary regiments, and groups or communities, and by manumission of slaves. This was a long-standing trend until Caracalla granted universal citizenship. The main social groups were senators and equites, but their status was hedged in by legal restrictions since Augustus placed great emphasis on social responsibility and the integrity of the upper classes. Outside this group the plebs and ex-slaves had a role to play, and the latter had a complicated position within the social hierarchy; often wealthy and successful (especially imperial freedmen) they were resented by the freeborn.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Twenty-first-century readers perhaps associate the word ‘citizen’ with nations and states. The inhabitants of England in the later Middle Ages, however, were subjects of the king, not citizens of a nation. The word ‘citizen’ did exist in late medieval England, but it referred to cities and towns rather than nations, realms or states. A citizen was someone who swore an oath to be a member of an urban political community: a person who paid taxes to the local urban government, took up municipal office when called upon and contributed towards the defence of the city. In return, the citizen received the right to practise a trade within the city and to be tried by the city’s own law courts.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

The relationship between democracy and sustainability is a contentious one. Yet diverse groups of citizens need to be engaged in the design and implementation of policies and actions across all scales and sectors for them to succeed and be socially acceptable. But how? From protest and mobilisation to participation in policy and the creation of new spaces of citizen engagement through citizens’ assemblies and the like, governments, businesses, cities and civil society actors are all grappling with the challenge of how best to engage citizens in addressing a series of threats to global sustainability but with uneven capacity to do so. In terms of transforming the democratic state, the chapter engages with the literature on ecological democracy and explores the idea that deepening democracy would extend to democratic control over the economy for the common good. In practice, this might imply expanded spaces and scope for deliberation over plural pathways to sustainability and the use of deliberative and inclusive policymaking processes such as standing panels of citizens, regular polling, multi-criteria mapping and citizens’ assemblies and juries. To really deepen democracy and open the state up would mean including issues of core state interest that are currently off limits for debate and not just what are dismissively termed ‘low-political’ issues.

The book ends by tracking the legacy of the Minorities Commission. The commission set a precedent for managing minority anxieties as Nigeria entered nation-statehood in 1960. It also failed to resolve the political tension these anxieties caused, leaving the newly independent Nigerian state with a crisis of citizenship that lingers to this day. This crisis of citizenship informed the national breakdown that led to the devastating civil war (also known as the Biafran War, 1967–70) and the ongoing fragmentation of Nigeria into smaller and more numerous states. Because certain Niger Delta peoples have been fixed as minorities in Nigeria, the needs and well-being of Niger Delta communities are not priorities, especially as they are construed as being at odds with national needs and priorities. It is in this context that their status as minorities has had the most devastating implications. The book closes by exploring the various ways these communities have used their minority status to simultaneously challenge and insist upon inclusion within the Nigerian state, asking what might be possible for their future as Nigerian citizens.

The Peloponnesian War affected how mass and elite interacted at Athens and how the public sphere worked there. The Athenians themselves thought in terms of two ruptures, one at the death of Perikles, one at the end of the war. But the degree of rupture in both cases has been exaggerated, and it is better to think in terms of how power was exercised. Here we see various ways in which the people’s control of the elite was strengthened during the war, and indeed the use of exile and atimia (disenfranchisement) as penalties fatally weakened Athens by causing factional strife. The Peloponnesian War concentrated the people inside Athens and the Long Walls and increased the number of spaces in which Athenians were mixed up with metics and enslaved people, enhancing the deep politicisation of Athenian culture, which affected the wealthy as well as the poor and promoted the hetaireiai and, eventually, concentration of political factions into particular spaces. War enhanced the Athenians’ emotional investment, and this came out in particular over the Sicilian Expedition. It was because war affected the Athenians in a variety of different ways, each with their own timescale, that the traumatic effects emerged only after fifteen years.

Focusing on the same period as the two previous chapters, Chapter 4 examines a multiplicity of collective identities shared by most residents. Municipal citizenship was based on the defence of citizens against non-citizens, most especially the regional nobility. That defence consisted primarily of the ma armada (‘armed band’), which granted to Perpignan’s consuls the right to lead punitive expeditions against those who had injured citizens. Perpignan sought to extend the ma armada as part of an aggressive campaign against the regional nobility, and it maintained the ma armada against all comers, including monarchs. At the same time, Perpignan showed a growing willingness to be Catalonian, modelling its institutions after those of other Catalonian municipalities and accepting Barcelona’s leadership. And the royal state set the stage for its later triumph through the construction of urban fortifications. Garrisoned citadels enabled royal states to project their power against municipalities in ways that had not been possible before, and that rendered townspeople royal subjects first, municipal citizens second.

All young people have rich histories, connections to space, place and significant events, which fuel their curiosity about the world in which they live and provide an excellent platform from which powerful HASS learning experiences can be developed. The HASS curriculum, as presented in the Australian Curriculum, provides flexibility for educators to link learning to young people’s lifeworlds and experiences through culturally responsive and inclusive pedagogies. This chapter challenges you to place learners and contexts at the centre of planning, using co-design principles that value young people’s voice, histories, capabilities and connections with people and place in HASS planning, teaching and assessment. All educational settings are enriched with a diversity of learners, who need to be involved in learning designs from the outset, rather than having their diverse needs planned for after the event. Such universal design approaches to learning need to be embedded from the early years of education.

What does it mean to live a good life? Philosophers through the ages such as Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche have wrestled with what it means to be a good citizen and live a good life. More recently, Howard Gardner applied his thinking to the skills that future generations need to synthesise and communicate complex ideas, respect human differences and fulfil the responsibilities of work, life and citizenship. He identified ‘five minds for the future’, one of which is the ethical mind. To be ethically minded calls upon citizens to know their rights and responsibilities, actively contribute to the good of society and foster citizenship within and between communities. Communities encompass the family, educational setting, workplace, nation and global community. It is through contributing to others as active and informed citizens that meaning is acquired.

Educators within contemporary Australian educational settings are increasingly being called on to enact their pedagogy in multicultural classrooms, yet pedagogies remain oriented towards a narrow learner cohort. Meaningful inclusion of culturally and religiously diverse learners not only focuses on what is being taught or what knowledge is privileged, but is concerned with how it is taught and from whose perspective. Importantly, it prioritises what learners bring to educational settings – their diverse knowledge(s), languages, values and beliefs; all of which are embedded in their ways of knowing, being and doing informed by their cultural and religious traditions. This chapter aims to support educators in enacting culturally responsive pedagogy, including consideration of learners’ world views, knowledge(s) and ways of knowing, as well as respect for identities and backgrounds as meaningful sources for optimal learning, while simultaneously holding high expectations of them all. Educators will be challenged to examine epistemological and pedagogical diversity in HASS teaching and learning, to further develop learners’ knowledge, values and beliefs towards engaged and informed citizenship.

This chapter introduces you to Civics and Citizenship, one of the four subjects that comprise the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) learning area. It presents Civics and Citizenship as an active, participatory subject area that requires educators to promote an open and supportive educational environment through which learners can be engaged in discussing issues that affect them and their communities, and enables them to engage in democratic decision-making processes. The chapter covers the main elements of the Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship, as it appears both within the combined HASS curriculum for the primary years and as a stand-alone subject for Year 7. It also introduces methods and approaches through which Civics and Citizenship can be taught effectively. Throughout the chapter, key points are supported by research evidence, and supporting tasks and reflections will help you to develop your understanding of Civics and Citizenship.