Citizenship education in multicultural societies

Abstract

The events of the last three years in the Arab world, what used to be called rather optimistically the ‘Arab spring’, have focused on diverse issues in different countries but one of the common elements to them all has been the struggle to define some form of collective belonging to a nation, oft en expressed in the term muwatana. This Arabic word is most oft en translated into English as ‘citizenship’, an idea which had been thought to have become the defining dimension of the new nations arising out of the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the first world war.