This chapter provides a critical overview of the complex relationship between citizenship education and state security. Drawing on some major sources from the historical literature of totalitarianism, the chapter provides necessary reminders that these current concerns over security are far from new, but argues that bearing them constantly in mind is essential since citizenship education and the universal human rights values it espouses arose in the modern, post-Second World War era precisely as a response to the global trauma of autocracy, dictatorship, and totalitarianism. Critically demonstrating, though, that risk and threat to societal and geopolitical order – the security of nations – are transnational, it highlights the 2020 pandemic as a primary exemplar of such threat to the security of nations. Delineating this part of a now well-documented context of securitization, these new contexts do not easily fit, it is argued, traditional models of national citizenship education nor too optimistic models of global collaborative cosmopolitanism. In examining the present-day transnational notions of intensified threats as a reconfiguration of the traditional correlation of citizenship education and state security, the chapter argues for both a forward-looking urgency and a simultaneous turning not to political diktat but to the imaginative configurations of societal and geopolitical problematics. Taking dystopian literature as an exemplar, here, it is argued that amidst the fictionally threatened security of nations, the securitized citizen and the state itself may conjointly find both reflective freedom and creative solution to very real non-fiction problems. Such problematics are, however, it is argued, as existential as they are practical or political. These are the lessons from dystopia.
