In many contemporary democracies, political conflict and polarisation have become defining features of the political culture.Similarly, drawing especially from Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and her more recent left populism, many philosophers of education have argued that political conflict and the attendant political emotions should be given a legitimate place in citizenship education. In this article, we challenge the agonistic model of citizenship education and the central role that political conflict plays in it. We argue that citizenship education that focusses on conflictual identity formations risks creating antagonism rather than dissolving it, this having problematic repercussions for the democratic culture in a broader sense. Deriving from Martha Nussbaum's understanding of democratic politics and her view of the role of emotions in political mobilisation, we suggest that citizenship education should take part in shaping the way students come to understand the nature of the political: as a collective striving towards shared goals, supported by constructive political emotions, rather than a conflictual relation between 'us' and 'them' . Finally, we discuss the educational potential associated with Fridays for Future and Black Lives Matter movements with the intention of demonstrating the significance of Nussbaum's thinking in relation to today's burning political issues.

In this article, we analyse a recent case of educational policymaking in the city of Oulu in Finland. The case concerns a ban on asylum seekers’ visits to local schools and day-care centres. Our primary aim is to study the role that negative political emotions play in the decision making process of our case. We primarily utilise Martha Nussbaum’s work on political emotions as our analytical framework. We propose that our case exemplifies a type of backlash politics, where policymaking is motivated by negative emotions and based on ethnic or racial group stigmatisation, with the result of abandoning collectively established democratic values and guidelines. Our case also illustrates how, by creating a culture of fear, the type of policymaking exemplified by our case can significantly diminish the possibilities of democratic institutions, such as the comprehensive school, to reinforce social cohesion and reduce social inequalities in society. Accordingly, we suggest that negative political emotions might have problematic consequences for democratic values and decision making processes. Finally, we propose an alternative course of action for addressing asylum seekers’ visits to Finnish schools: we particularly emphasise the importance of following established democratic procedures in political decision making and also argue for the reinforcement of positive political emotions as a long-term educational objective.

This paper argues that political compassion is a necessary disposition for engaging with human rights principles and combatting social injustices such as racial discrimination. Drawing from Martha Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions, the paper concentrates on the need to understand compassion as connected to cognition and practical reasoning. Moreover, the paper offers suggestions of how to educate towards political compassion in human rights education (HRE) through Nussbaum’s notion of narrative imagination. To capture the multiperspectival and partial dimensions of HRE, the paper further employs the work of critical HRE scholars and emphasises the importance of counter-narratives and reflective interpretation of narratives. Refined by critical considerations, Nussbaum’s work on compassion and narrative imagination provides a new and important perspective for understanding the relation between human rights, emotions and social justice in the context of contemporary HRE theory and practice.