This article extends and expands a nuanced unpacking of conceptualisations of critical global citizenship education (GCE) in typologies of GCE (Pashby, K., M. da Costa, S. Stein, and V. Andreotti. [2020]. "A meta-review of typologies of global citizenship education." "Comparative Education" 56 (2): 144-164.). It finds approaches to critical GCE can be described in broad terms that conflate quite distinct agendas; critiqued as unpragmatic, idealistic, and morally-relativistic; and fail to engage substantively with their complicity within the systems they seek to transform. It then explores what a selection of empirical research on secondary schools in 'global North' contexts that draws on critical GCE analyses contributes to illustrating the possibilities and tensions of critical GCE in practice.