Global citizenship education (GCE) suffers from a local problem, or its tendency to avoid particular people and problems nearby while privileging the situations of more distant others. This tendency, which I call global deflection, is one reason why GCE is too often ignored by educators and educational systems. The current qualitative study of two cases in Ontario, Canada and Mumbai, India, suggest that the complicated terrain of local, civic engagement engaged in light of global circumstances, can be undertaken meaningfully to support a both/and way of thinking about global citizenship while enunciating Arjun Appadurai's conception of cosmopolitanism from below.