In 2024, the Global Citizenship Observatory launched the GLOBALCIT– Rainer Bauböck Essay Award on the Global State of Citizenship.
The Award aims to encourage and highlight original thinking by early-career scholars on a topic related to present and future challenges for citizenship from a global perspective. The Award is generously sponsored by the funds of the City of Vienna 2023 Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences, which was awarded to Rainer Bauböck for his work on citizenship and democratic theory.
Rainer Bauböck is a former professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute (EUI) and founding GLOBALCIT Co-Director. He is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
This year GLOBALCIT launched the third call for the essay award. The 2024 call asked how the climate crisis is impacting citizenship; in 2025 the question was about the impact of adversarial geopolitics. The topic for this year’s call was: “How will Artificial Intelligence transform membership, rights and practices of citizenship?”
The impact of AI on society is of course among the most discussed topics of our times. It also emerges in academic literature in migration and citizenship studies, but is still mostly perceived as a new stage in the evolution of communication technologies rather than as a fundamental transformation of the very substance of citizenship. This is why the call specified the question and asked about AI’s impact on the core dimensions of citizenship as membership, rights and practices.
In 2026, 24 essays were submitted – 9 more than in 2025. The composition of authors shows a good gender balance, a remarkable rise in submissions from the global South and a broadening of academic disciplines beyond those traditionally involved in citizenship studies.
This year we asked participants to include a declaration specifying their use of AI tools in research for and in composing or editing their essays.
The jury was composed of the four GLOBALCIT co-directors Rainer Bauböck, Jelena Dzankic, Jo Shaw and Maarten Vink. The process was managed by GLOBALCIT coordinator Ashley Mantha-Hollands.
The jury evaluated all submissions on three criteria: How well the authors succeed in linking the topics of citizenship and geopolitics? How original and innovative were the ideas outlined in the essay? Did the authors express their ideas clearly and in a well-structured way to a broader non-specialist audience?
At a first stage the jury members awarded scores on these three dimensions to all essays, which led to a shortlist of four candidates: Shubangi Ashish, Carlos Andres Oliviero Caballero, Ivan Josipovic and Bárbara Maria Farias Mota. In an online meeting the jury discussed extensively each of the shortlisted essays and took a vote from which Bárbara Mota emerged as the winner.
Bárbara Mota is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, where she also was awarded an MA, after completing her studies in Brazil with a Master in Sociology at Pernambuco University in Brazil.
Her essays is on “AI and Citizenship in Democratic Governance: Mediation, Power, and Accountability”. It raises the question “what happens when citizen agency becomes mediated by inscrutable systems controlled by corporations lacking electoral mandates?” and concludes with recommendations on transparency, control over AI infrastructure, preserving human agency, and the distribution of power.
Bárbara Mota travelled to Florence to participate at the MPC-GLOBALCIT conference on Architectures of Global Mobility. In a ceremony on 14 May she was handed over the award certificate and presented her essay. She will receive a prize money of € 1000. Stay tuned for the published essay of Bárbara Mota, and the runners up, open-access on CADMUS.
The jury warmly congratulates Bárbara Mota.
Rainer Bauböck, Jelena Dzankic, Jo Shaw, Maarten Vink