This paper presents a multi-voiced response to the question: how might conflict and difference be conceptualised in global citizenship education (GCE) imaginaries in Canada? It offers responses from six educators engaged with GCE research and practice in higher education institutions in Canada. The responses address different angles and issues related to difference and GCE, such as multiculturalism, (neo) colonialism, paternalism, indigeneity, internationalism, neoliberalism, benevolence and national identity building in Canada.

This article explores how benevolence, as a discourse informing the rhetoric of global citizenship, seems to articulate a post-racial politics. By critically analyzing the construction of James Orbinski and Stephen Lewis as models of global citizenship in documentary film as well as the Aga Khan Foundation Canada’s travelling development education exhibition, Bridges that Unite, the essay argues that global citizenship presupposes, or seems to enact, an end to race. The performance of benevolence is not bound by race, but is indebted to, and rearticulates, race thinking in a way that belies the ongoing dynamics of colonial racism.

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