This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

This article seeks to show that both the conceptualization and practice of international human rights education within the mainstream human rights community has been shaped and framed, with mostly negative consequences, by at least three constitutive orthodoxies: a heaven-hell binary distinction between an all but “perfect” West and an all but “hellish” Third World; a consequent unidirectional traffic of human rights teaching from the West to the rest; and a reliance on the abolitionist paradigm of human rights education. It starts by mapping these orthodoxies, and proceeds thereafter to challenge them as fundamentally problematic and as capable of frustrating the project of progressive human rights education. The article ends by offering an insight into the ways in which international human rights education might be re-imagined if it is to have a better chance of achieving its ordinarily laudable mission.