Mobilizing Citizenship Education in the Arab World: Toward a Pedagogy for Democracy

Democracy is often mistaken as a Promethean gift that could be graciously bestowed upon nations; it is, rather, the final product of a well-planned actualization of active citizenship education as opposed to being enforced by foreign intervention or by regimes to legitimize political gains. This chapter explores the sociopolitical aspects that had impeded the incorporation of citizenship education in most parts of the Arab world. It promotes the decency to denounce a self-deceiving rhetoric, which claims that uprooting dictatorship ensures an inevitable ascendancy of democracy as a natural outcome. This chapter illustrates how democracy in the Arab world can only flourish in a sociopolitical landscape that is geared toward the deconstruction of nationalism as the narrative of the nation through reenvisioning citizenship as both a constitutional and an educational necessity within the milieu of the Arab culture.