This article shares the rationale and outcomes of a research project, titled ‘Going Global’, which was funded by the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations fund resourced by Irish Aid. The project held two regional workshops with personnel in the development and global citizenship education (GCE) fields, one in Belfast and one in Dublin. The workshops had three objectives: to gather views from participants on the meaning and content of global citizenship; to provide theoretical input to inform these discussions; and to enable participants to envisage more practice-grounded means to construct global citizenship in their work. The main finding from the project is that workshop participant attitudes to global citizenship range from the pragmatic, through the agnostic to the sceptical, but that none of these positions are mutually exclusive. Rather, it is recommended that global citizenship be treated as a provisional rather than a materially realised conceptual placeholder, enabling greater discussion and debate on the concept. Such debate should be around some key paradoxes identified by participants in this project including: the lack of a global state to guarantee rights; the perceived Eurocentricity of the concept; and depoliticised, technocratic and individualised biases in dominant conceptualisations of it. Greater conceptual exploration around such paradoxes in the sector could help tease out these positions further for professionals in the field, facilitating a deeper connection with the concept among them.