Universal Aspirations vs. Geopolitical Divides: Imagining the World as a “Post-Millennial” in the SDG Era

Young people from all over the world are today confronted with challenges such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic that cut across national boundaries. These challenges are often referred to as global and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suggest that they must be solved through global partnerships. In line with this global imaginary, youth across the world have already jointly mobilized to combat climate change and participated in coordinated collective actions, such as school strikes. Yet, contrary to imaginaries of equal global partnerships, these young people face very diverse local life circumstances shaped by social and economic inequalities. This project focuses on young people who are concerned with finding solutions to global challenges but live in disparate parts of the world under very different conditions, specifically in Tanzania and Denmark – two countries that have been in an unequal donor-recipient partnership for almost 60 years. The project will investigate how these young people reconcile the tension between universal aspirations, characterized by global solutions and equal partnerships, and geopolitical divides, comprising hierarchies and unequal power relations.