Politics, power & partnerships: the imperial past and present of international education and development (BAICE presidential address 2022)

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the complex relationship between academic researchers working in the area of ‘International Development and Education’ and foreign intervention in the Global South. I make the case for stronger definitional links between ‘colonialism’ and ‘development’. In this, I pay attention to how ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sides of colonial strategy operated symbiotically and evidence parallel occurrences in Post 9/11 Western-led military/development activities. Drawing on ‘education’ examples, I reflect on our fields entanglements in the messy politics, partnerships and funding regimes of our unequal global order and the ways that we, as both researchers and practitioners, become ‘implicated’. I also explore sites of counter-hegemony that span similar timeframes, including my engagements with popular education in social movements in Colombia, and make the case for a radical educational internationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• Conflict
• Social Movements
• Imperialism
• Partnerships

Introduction

It is a great honour to become President of the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE), an association and its related journal COMPARE, that I have long engaged with. This paper speaks to some of the debates that have resurfaced since the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, USA, in 25 May 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement globally, which has sparked a broader reflection around our institutional relationships and connections with racial oppression and empire in both the past and the present. My paper is also reflective: looking back over the last two decades since 9/11 and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; reflecting on two decades of my own work and engagement in this field of inquiry; and also two decades of work and partnerships with social movements in Colombia, where I did my initial doctoral research on social movements, popular education and resistance to privatisation, and where I continue to engage with many of the same communities and organisations. As I hope befits a Presidential address, I mix together the academic and the personal, to reflect back and think forward to hopefully more egalitarian and socially just futures in and through education.

In the first part of the paper, I draw upon the work of Rothberg (2019) and others to explore the way education actors and academics become ‘implicated subjects’ in the field of International Education and Development and provide examples from both our imperial past and present. In the second part of the paper, I then explore alternative ways of being and acting through the framing of ‘connected sociologies’, developed by Bhambra (2014). I then explore my own intellectual formation, and my experiences of working with Freirean popular education and social movements in Colombia. Finally, in the conclusions, I draw together some reflections on the challenges of the field, and the possibilities for a more radical and engaged educational internationalism.

The imperial entanglements of comparative education

Alongside many other sectors of our societies, I think we as a community, our practices and processes, have been really challenged over recent years over our complicity in human rights violations in both near and distant places. From the ‘Me Too’ movement on issues of sexism, gender-based violence and patriarchy; the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ protests that began in South Africa, and the Black Lives Matter Movement, many countries, institutions, and individuals have begun to revisit difficult issues that link the present to the past in relation to colonialism, patriarchy, slavery, imperialism and racism (Andrews 2021). A recent UK parliamentary committee report from the International Development Committee (IDC 2022) was particularly scathing of these relationships in the contemporary international development sector, which is the field of practice for many of us who research and teach in this area. They found strong continuity between the colonial period and contemporary international development practices, including ongoing power imbalances between North and South, racial hierarchies that manifest themselves in a lack of diversity in development institutions; unequal pay structures between northern and southern-based staff members; unequal partnerships between institutions in the global north and south, and ongoing epistemic privileging of northern-based ideas and innovations to the detriment of those in the global south. All of these things I think give us pause to reflect and interrogate our own research practices, policies, institutions and relationships. Whilst any academic discipline is a product of individual activities, it is also more than the sum of these individuals and builds on knowledges, traditions, histories, structures that link the past to the present.

In his Presidential address to the BAICE conference in 2014, Professor Roger Dale explored the ‘conjunctions of power and comparative education’ and called upon us to reflect on the way knowledge production processes within Comparative Education are shaped by power in different ways. As Dale (2015, 342) noted, his

starting point is that the complexity and significance of the relationships between fields of study as distinct and collective academic endeavours, with that which they seek to explore, comment on, understand and explain, are relatively rarely addressed. Exponents of such fields often seem to proceed on the assumption that they are purely driven by the sets of methods, theories, concepts, approaches and so on that have been developed in the name of CE.

At the heart of Dale’s reflections was that research and practice in Comparative Education is shaped by the practices and interests of the actors and players involved, and the power relations therein. Research foci, research funding and research programmes are not simply a product of rational scientific inquiry and curiosity but involve complex relationships between actors, agencies, researchers and contexts. Furthermore, he suggested, our task as critical scholars and practitioners must be to explore, and reveal, how these economic, political and social contexts within which we research, and the actors that fund us, shape what we ask and what we do. These broader factors can be understood as ‘the conditions for the production of knowledge and practice’.

Applying this thinking to the broader debates around the racist/colonial/patriarchal nature of our research and practice field often leads to really uncomfortable discussions. These debates, while fundamentally important and necessary, can quickly become polarised, divisive and alienating: the language binaries of oppressor and oppressed, innocent and guilty, victim and perpetrator often fail to capture the complexities of identities, relationships and degrees of responsibility and complicity for both past and present atrocities, and often close down possibilities for both dialogue and reconciliation. In a companion piece to this paper (see Novelli and Kutan 2023 forthcoming) we explore more deeply the writing and thinking of Michael Rothberg (2019), a professor of holocaust studies and a scholar who has engaged intensively with issues of violence, atrocities, genocide, and its drivers and effects. He developed the concept of the ‘implicated subject’ as a means to explore the complex ways that we are all connected to injustices both past and present. Rothberg’s ‘implicated subject’ emphasises the way that responsibility for violence and injustice cannot just be understood in legal and binary ways, and that people are often ‘implicated’ in violent events without even being conscious of their own involvement. For Rothberg these ‘implicated subjects’ ‘play essential roles in producing and reproducing violence and inequality’ (2019, 202), and ‘are morally compromised and most definitely attached – often without their conscious knowledge and in the absence of evil intent – to consequential political and economic dynamics’ (2019, 33) such that the violence could often not have taken place without their involvement.

In his book ‘The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators’ (Rothberg 2019) he provides examples of the different dimensions of implication, from those that benefit in the present from past atrocities such as slavery, to those whose activities in the present are unconsciously contributing to human rights violations. For him, recognising implication and reflecting on it, is not a blame game, but a way of both addressing responsibility and facilitating solidarity. He argues that:

it both draws attention to responsibilities for violence and injustice greater than most of us want to embrace and shifts questions of accountability from a discourse of guilt to a less legally and emotionally charged terrain of historical and political responsibility.

(Rothberg 2019, 20)

In this sense, Rothberg suggests that the concept of the ‘implicated subject’ can both expand understanding of networks of responsibility for injustices, and empower action through the recognition of political responsibility, rather than induce guilt, which often leads to disempowerment and passivity. Importantly, not all ‘subjects’ are equally ‘implicated’ and types of implication are varied. Similarly, very few of us can claim not to be ‘implicated’ in some way to human rights violations in their varied forms.

Crucially, the concept of the ‘implicated subject’ moves us away from legalistic definitions of the direct perpetrators of violence and instead opens up a pathway for reflecting on how our silence, acquiescence, complicity, and embeddedness in networks of power and privilege might contribute to, and benefit from, processes of violence. It also allows us to reflect on the way institutions, including fields of research and practice, might connect to these systems of oppression in complex and often unintended ways. Ultimately, it also seeks to find a pathway whereby ‘political and social responsibility’ leads us to collective action to redress injustices and move the struggle for social justice forward.

From colonialism to development in comparative and international education

The above reflections on the roles and nature of ‘implicated subjects’ have led me to explore the extent to which my own field of research and practice in ‘International Development and Education’ is itself embedded in both past and present human rights violations and the nature of those relationships. Back in 2005, Uma Khotari led some really important research exploring ongoing relationships between colonialism and development (c.f Kothari 2005a, 2005b, 2006). In this, she noted that when international development studies is taught in Universities around the world, we often begin with the then US President Truman’s famous Point 4 (1947), where he extolled the US’s emergent role as leader of the ‘free world’, and its distinction between the ‘imperialism’ of old (France, UK etc.), and the US’s new ‘fair dealing’ leadership that would support ‘development’. Khotari challenges this framing, and instead argues that we should see ‘development’ as being born not at the end of WWII but in the midst of anti-colonial struggles in the 1930s, as an imperial development ‘carrot’ to reinforce the imperial military ‘stick’.

Understanding ‘development’ in this way both forces us to reach back into the colonial past in order to understand our imperial present, and to reflect on the continuities between colonialism and international development as modes of imperial control. As ‘dependency’ theorists have long pointed out, the transition from colonialism to national independence was often a transition from formal ‘political imperialism’ to ‘economic imperialism’. For Nkrumah (1965, ix):

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and its political polícy is directed from outside.

Furthermore, many also argued that the chains that bound these processes together in post-colonial contexts were even more difficult to break, as the mechanisms, strategies and actors that exert control on ex-colonial states are less visible to the eye, and therefore potentially harder to remove (Frank 1971; Kay 2005; Rodney [1973] 2018). Khotari, further notes that the often-binary ways we understand ‘colonialism’ as ‘military’ project and therefore ‘bad’ and international development as ‘humanitarian’ and at worst benign, is fatally flawed.

If we accept Khotari’s reflections on the need to both explore and analyse continuities between colonialism and development, then International Development and Education is an interesting site of inquiry. In the months following the killing of George Floyd in the US, Unterhalter and Oketch (2020) urged for such a reflection within their own workplace, the Institute of Education (IOE), one of the UK’s foremost education institutes and a thought-leader in the field of International Education and Development. They noted that:

The early links with colonialism at the Institution of Education (IoE) are clear … . IoE was initially founded in 1902 as the London Day Training College for teachers. In 1927 the Director accepted appointment to a body with clear links with a number of colonial projects, the British Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa. As part of the work for this committee, he was invited by the Colonial Office to establish a course at IoE to prepare students for work as education officers in Africa, and to support missionaries preparing to work in teacher training colleges in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania). A Colonial Department was established at IoE in 1934, with a lecturer appointed to specialize in the comparative education of ‘primitive peoples’. Thus institutionally the teaching and research of IoE were clearly bound in with colonial education projects. In the 1950s there was a change of name, when the Colonial Department at IoE became the Department of Education in Tropical Areas (ETA). Only in 1973 was some distance from colonialism signalled in a new name, the Department of Education in Developing Countries (EDC). In 1995 this became the Department of education and International Development (EID).

Reaching back into the period of colonialism, we can see how research on education, and educational practice, in colonial contexts was tied up with both missionary logics of morality and western, white, Christian superiority, and modernist beliefs in developed/underdeveloped, primitive/advanced societies and peoples. Many researchers and practitioners no doubt felt that that they were ‘helping’ local populations, and would separate themselves out from the military power and economic processes that linked together the colonial project. In a not so dissimilar way, today the field of international development and education appears equally entangled, imbued with beliefs of ‘doing good’ and ‘helping’, yet as the post-development theorists (e.g. Escobar 1995; Sachs 1992) remind us, that ‘help’ often had terrible consequences, in education and beyond: from epistemicide (Sousa Santos de 2014) to linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992). While the critique of the couplet of the bible and the gun is well established, there are many similarities between that and current research, NGO, military relationships: directly and indirectly. Similarly, ‘big D development’ (Lewis 2019) continues to be something we in the North do to people in the South, and in engaging in that process (in the Global North) we benefit from the legacies of colonial conquest and domination and its cognitive as well as material base. For the purposes of this paper, I guess the question we might ask is what difference does a name make? Are we still training for empire, even if we are not anymore directly signed up for it?

Education and international development and colonial continuities

Over the last two decades, I have worked a great deal on research exploring the relationship between education and violent conflict. It’s a field of research very closely linked to practice, with much of the funding coming from major international bi-lateral donor agencies, United Nations organisations and international NGOs. Back in 2014 myself and colleagues published a rigorous literature review in this area, which found that much of the research was technical and decontextualised, disciplinary parochial, methodologically nationalist, orientalist in orientation, ethnocentric, a-historical and highly geopolitical in focus (Novelli et al. 2014). In reflecting on these findings, we tried to locate the field, as Roger Dale had suggested, within its particular historical, political economy context, in order to explain why this was so.

What became clear was that the sub-field emerged out of policy led concerns in the mid-1990s with increasing evidence that most of the world’s out of school children were located in conflict affected contexts. As a result, and in order to meet the Education For All commitments, and later the MDG and SDGs, the issue of education provision in conflict affected contexts became crucial. From that point onwards, we see a sharp upsurge in funding from the international community, with a particular focus from several major international bi-lateral agencies. Much of the research related to this new agenda was driven by field-level practitioner demands, with short timelines and problem-solving intentions. While understandable, there was often a lack of critical research that sought to go deeper into the root causes of these education/conflict relationships.

This period of research and practice growth (1995–2020) was also a period of neoliberal economic expansion, which saw the rise of consultancy firms providing research, moving the centre of research production away from the University. As a knock-on effect, it also saw Universities, who wished to remain in the game, turning themselves into consultancy-like entities that were able to compete (Boden and Epstein 2006). All of these factors combined together to produce a body of research that was compliant to the policy needs of powerful western-led agencies, largely uncritical, and that both the topic and geographical focus were more often than not pre-determined by the agendas and priorities of these entities. The stage, in so many ways, was pre-conditioned for the field of research and practice to become ‘implicated’ in the power games and interests of a complex period of human history. A period that is marked by the fallout from the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the subsequent US-led response around the world, but particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Building on the above, I now want to drill down into one case – that of Afghanistan, to illustrate the way education actors became ‘implicated subjects’ in the overthrow, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In doing so, I want to shed some light on how this happens, and the processes that are involved. Twenty years after 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, and one year after the US-led Western withdrawal, this seems to me to be a timely moment to reflect. Surprisingly, perhaps, this was facilitated, at least partially, by a focus on gender and girls education, which provided moral cover for military activity in similar ways that the missionary provided for earlier colonial interventions.

From the initial occupation, to the withdrawal two decades later, education and gender equity therein, were used as an important mechanism for justifying intervention by Western led forces. As the influential US magazine TIME noted:

The plight of Afghan women and girls occupied much of the Western rhetoric around the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, accompanying the stated aim of eradicating al-Qaeda for its role in staging the 9/11 attacks. Educating Afghan girls, a rallying cry of former first lady Laura Bush, in particular, became a U.S. focal point in Afghanistan. Soon after the U.S. invasion, tens of thousands of schoolgirls garbed in black uniforms and flowing white headscarves began attending schools across the country, symbols of tangible progress that are still touted by the international community today. (Alizada and Ferris-Rotman 2021)

In the aftermath of the initial invasion, the then first lady Laura Bush stated:

Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity – a commitment shared by people of good will on every continent. Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries. And they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women. (Bush 2001)

As a result of these discursive justifications, and the resources that flowed from them, the International Development and Education community entered in on the scene, to support girls education, to research issues related to its delivery, and to improve its efficiency and quality. By virtue of operating in Afghanistan on promoting education and schooling, with and often alongside occupying forces, our field became caught up and implicated in these processes. Education and Social Services provision and policy, and issues of gender equity contributed discursively to the idea that the US led NATO forces were primarily there to bring modernity, equality, gender equity etc. Whilst comparisons with the colonial era can sometimes be unhelpful, there is something uncannily familiar about the parallels between missionaries and their armies of Empire and the role played by some NGOs, Aid agencies and their relationships with occupying NATO forces, and while this time not ‘saving souls’ they were often constructed as saving schools, women, children and the general population.

While many noted that the invasion of Afghanistan had little to do with female emancipation and girls education, and much more about punishing the Taliban, and de-facto the whole nation, for harbouring Osama Bin laden after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, education and gender equity became powerful justifications (Afzal and Kennedy-Pipe 2022; Shepherd 2006; Stabile and Kumar 2005). Furthermore, by politicising gender and education, the education community, became seen as part of that broader NGO ‘combat team’ infamously noted by Powell (2001), then Secretary of State, in the aftermath of 9/11, when he said:

As I speak, just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom … . I am serious about making sure we have the best relationship with the NGOs who are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team. (US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Remarks to the National Foreign Policy Conference for Leaders of Nongovernmental Organizations, at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5762.html.)

While the rhetoric of ‘social’ justification continued throughout the long two decades of occupation, the US and its allies’ real priorities were laid bare in the balance of resources allocated to diverse mission activities. As Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted:

According to a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the US invested roughly $946 billion between 2001 and 2021. Yet almost $1 trillion in outlays won the US few hearts and minds. Here’s why. Of that $946 billion, fully $816 billion, or 86%, went to military outlays for US troops. And the Afghan people saw little of the remaining $130 billion, with $83 billion going to the Afghan Security Forces. Another $10 billion or so was spent on drug interdiction operations, while $15 billion was for US agencies operating in Afghanistan. That left a meager $21 billion in ‘economic support’ funding. Yet even much of this spending left little if any development on the ground, because the programs actually ‘support counterterrorism; bolster national economies; and assist in the development of effective, accessible, and independent legal systems’. (Sachs 2021)

For those who cared to look, the evidence of the past willingness of the US and its allies to use education as a political/ideological tool, regardless of the human cost, was there from the beginning. Back in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, and Cold War doctrine enshrined a ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ approach to international relations, the US armed, trained and funded jihadists from around the world, through Pakistan, to fight against the Soviets. While a small part of the overall approach, education research and practice was part of that process. A famous example was a team recruited by the University of Nebraska, and funded by USAID, that developed and produced textbooks in the 1980s for refugees in camps at the border with Pakistan, where primary school maths lessons were taught asking questions such as:

The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead. (Craig 2002, 92–93)

This war curriculum was aimed at providing young Afghan recruits to fill the ranks of the US funded and supported Mujahideen. Those Afghan recruits, and their international allies that survived, would eventually defeat the Russian occupation and move on to other things.

Moving forward to the 2002 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, education proved to be a central justification. Firstly, it was mobilised to allege that religious ‘madrasas’ were the breeding grounds for ‘Islamic terrorists’, and later it was the support for ‘girls education’ (Chishti 2010; Khalid 2011). As occupations in both Afghanistan and Iraq began to falter militarily, a switch to a counterinsurgency strategy brought ‘hearts and minds’ into the military strategy and education was again a key pillar (Dyvik 2014; Novelli 2010, 2011, 2013, 2017). This led to the creation of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, where military and development workers worked together building schools and hospitals by day and hunting militants by night.¹ But just as in the counterinsurgency war in Algeria, which inspired the US approach under the leadership of General Petraeus, the balance between hearts and minds and violent force, was often tilted heavily towards the latter. This militarisation of aid more generally, and to education specifically, has been well documented, but too rapidly dismissed as troublemaking and divisive by education actors and international donors.

Thinking of Afghanistan and the two decades of occupation, could that have been sustained without the discursive justification that the West was there to help girls get access to education? Could it have been sustained without reference to the West’s mission to support progressive, secular education in resistance to the theological dogma of the Taliban? Maybe it could have, but it would definitely have looked different, less acceptable and less legitimate. In that sense, the education sector, its actors and supporters, were integral parts of the system of violence and oppression that was the US led occupation of Afghanistan, and just as we claim responsibility for increases in attendance and gender parity in education, we also have to recognise our implication in the corresponding death toll.

Returning to Rothberg’s (2019) ‘implicated subject’, we can see how education actors contributed to the discursive legitimation of the US led occupation, failed to challenge the militarisation of the education work, allowed co-option, weaponised education and provided photo opportunities to sustain a military mission that was both flawed and failing. While much may well have been unintentional, our field and its practitioners and academics, must carry a degree of political and social responsibility for the systems of violence and oppression that were enacted during this period.

Fast forward to 2022, and while much of that critique still holds, there has been a flourishing of critical research exploring distinct dimensions of the field and that have picked up on some of these issues and taken them forward (see, for example, Shuayb and Brun (2021) (agendas/refugees); Pherali (2021) (peacebuilding), Abu Moghli (2020) (Decolonisation/Human Rights), Kadiwal (2022) (authoritarianism), da Silva and Oliveira (2021) (Africa & education policy), Higgins and Novelli (2020) (peace education, teachers), Paulson (2017) (historical memory) to name just a few). These more critical voices have joined a broader debate both within International Education and Development and the broader International Development scape (both research and practice), that is responding to rising concern about the effectiveness, morals and ethics of the field of international development: from the predatory sexual behaviour of some aid workers – and the subsequent cover-up by major institutions that ensued; to issues around the ‘white gaze’ of the field, ‘white saviour’ complexes, and the growing calls for decolonising our ethnocentric and westo-centric practices and approaches (c.f Sriprakash, Tikly, and Walker 2019). It is to the question of alternatives that I now turn.

Re-connecting alternatives in international development and education

Those green shoots of hope in our field mentioned above, reflect of course, that critique is always there, its just that sometimes its hard to find. Not all voices get heard at the same volume, and not all ways of knowing break through the noise in order to make themselves heard. Gurminder Bhambra, the prominent sociologist and postcolonial scholar, argues for the need for research to both critique and reconstruct, in order to facilitate social transformation. She argues that to do this we need to not only think sociology differently, but also do sociology differently. For Bhambra (2014, 141):

This process involves undoing hierarchies and provincializing knowledges, but this is not enough if those knowledges are seen to have been separately constituted and, further, not themselves constituted through connections. Without reconstruction, the radical moment, or movement, of deconstruction will always remain illusory. As Dubois (1935) and Fanon (1963) had recognized previously, it is necessary to build up alternative histories and to establish connections across what has previously been presented as separate. In our present context, it is necessary to create conceptual frameworks that would enable us not just to think sociology (and other social sciences) differently, but also to do it (and them) differently. To think sociology differently is to take connections as the basis of the histories which we acknowledge; to do sociology differently is to act on the basis of having recognized those connections.

In my own journey in International Development and Education over the last two decades, those connections and connectors have often been linked to a strong political commitment to social change and to an attitude that sees intellectual critique as part of that process of change. Formative in this process has been the thought and action of Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, Neville Alexander and his pioneering work on racial capitalism and education, the dependency theories that emerged out of Latin America and spread across the Global South, the life and writings of Walter Rodney on How Europe Under-Developed Africa; the work of the revolutionary Colombian Priest/Guerrilla fighter Camilo Torres; the writings and actions of the academic Arturo Escobar (2020); the feminist thinker and activist Judith Butler (c.f Butler 2016), the philosopher Nancy Fraser, and the radical Colombia lawyer and political educator Eduardo Umana Lluna, who was brutally murdered in his own home by right wing paramilitaries in Colombia in 1998. Their humanity, dignity and commitment connect the threads of thought and action of what Antonio Gramsci, the Italian thinker and communist, would call Praxis.

For me, no-one expresses these qualities and commitments better in our field than the educator, activist, and philosopher Paolo Freire (1921–1997). Freire paved the way for many of us to connect our work in education to radical social change, and push back against the deep conservativism of the discipline. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, a tide of commemorative work has recognised his role and influence in different parts of the world. In one piece exploring his influence in South Africa, Sefatsa (2020, 13) cited an interview with veteran South African activist Barney Pityana, reflecting on how the black consciousness movement drew on Freire’s work:

Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.

Barney picks up on what I believe was a really unique characteristic of Freire’s work and spirit, that it was able to connect to people across borders, languages, ideas and in doing so inspire action: precisely in the way that Gurminder Bhambra was suggesting in her ‘connecting sociologies’. His ideas and approach also have a timeless character to them, with Freire remaining influential in worker and social movements that carry on the grassroots traditions of the anti-apartheid civic movement in South Africa and across many continents today.

Central to Freire’s approach were a number of embodied commitments. First was the commitment to partnerships with movements of the oppressed. Second, and linked to the first was a strong recognition of the knowledge & wisdom of oppressed communities. Third was a strong political commitment to and solidarity with the oppressed, his was not to sit objectively on the sidelines and observe. Fourth, was a strong focus on situated political analysis and critique of imperialism/capitalism. Fifth, was the centrality of focus on the importance of research for social action.

I was fortunate in the late 1990s to arrive in Cali, Colombia and encounter all of those embodied commitments, inspired by Freire and his subsequent collaborators, in the social movements that were organising in a context of civil war, authoritarianism and state-led political violence. I had arrived in Cali initially as a teacher, but after some fortuitous street encounters with trade unionists and protesters I slowly found my home in the social and political resistance movement in Colombia. My engagement in popular education in trade unions and community organisations eventually led me to do a PHD researching how a public service trade union: SINTRAEMCALI, managed to resist the privatisation of water, electricity and telecommunications in Colombia’s second biggest city, and the role of popular education therein (see Novelli 2005). Through engaged ethnography (Novelli and Mathers 2007) I traced the way SINTRAEMCALI built a trade union/community alliance in opposition to privatisation, and the role of popular education in that struggle. A victory made all the more remarkable because it took place in a context where political assassinations of social movement leaders and activists was an almost daily occurrence.

That research led me to two decades of ongoing connections with human rights leaders and popular educators in the city, and particularly an organisation called NOMADESC, which I engaged with, volunteered for, and participated in a range of research, pedagogic and fund raising activities. One such activity led, in the early 2000s, to the creation of a 3-year programme to run a Diploma in Human Rights for social movement activists in the South West of Colombia. The programme was initially funded through the UK-based solidarity NGO – War on Want. The Diploma in Human Rights intentionally brought together trade unionists, women’s movements, black movements, peasant organisations and students, to explore the context of human rights in Colombia and strategies for their defence. From these early origins, this eventually developed into the Inter-Cultural University of the Peoples (UIP), an organisation that today works with social movements across the South West of Colombia. The UIP provides human rights support, runs workshops and supports social movements to carry out grassroots research into issues affecting their livelihoods and wellbeing. I am proud to be part of its academic board and to have accompanied and supported some of its activities over the last two decades.

One of its first graduates, back in 2008, was Francia Marquez, a young, poor, black, Colombian, single mother, who enrolled on the Diploma in Human Rights as a delegate of the Process of Black Communities (PCN). Project forward to the summer of 2022, and Francia Marquez, was elected as the first black Vice-President of Colombia. Francia, now a leader of the Process of Black Communities (PCN), is a key figure in the ‘Pacto Historico’, an electoral coalition, that brought together movements and supporters of a wide range of social movements and progressive political organisations across Colombia. This victory was a huge milestone and constituted the first time in the history of Colombia that the political left had won a general election. What was amazing was not just that a poor, black, single mother had been elected to one of the most important positions in the state, but that she was there as a representative of the PCN – a grassroots movement of Afro-Colombians that had emerged out of the struggles of afro-Colombian communities in the 1990s, and one of the most marginalised and exploited population groups in the country. It is my strong contention that we cannot understand the rise of these social movements, and the rise of Francia Marquez and others like her, without understanding the role of Freire inspired ‘popular education’ in that process. Those education processes transformed her and many others like her from objects to subjects of history – evidence of what Freire so insightfully noted when he said: ‘Education does not change the world, it changes the people who will change the world’.

Conclusions

In ending these reflections, I guess my key points are the following: Firstly, academics, policy-makers, practitioners have agency – even if that is conditioned, constrained and facilitated by a range of factors and actors. These constraints often push us towards compliance, policy service for the powerful, and work against the pursuit of social justice – in and through education. We can choose to become ‘implicated’ in these processes, or we can resist, challenge and forge alternative paths. The case of Afghanistan, highlights the way our field was ‘implicated’ not only in trying to salvage some humanitarian gains from the occupation, but also in gross human rights violations, committed by NATO/ISAF forces and under cover of our collaboration, discursive subterfuge and failure to stand up and critique the way education was being placed at the service of imperialism and military intervention. While the case of Afghanistan is both an extreme case and an example from recent times, we have also seen how our field was historically entwined with colonial and neo-colonial projects from the outset, and we all must both recognise and assume some responsibility for this historical collusion. A collusion that manifested itself in the reproduction of colonial, racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Education is not a peripheral afterthought, but a central process and societal institution that effects the distribution and circulation of opportunity, of life chances, of futures, that is to say our field really matters.

For that reason, we need to recognise the agency we have in the work that we do, and struggle for an alternative ‘implicated subject’ – a subject centrally implicated in supporting the transformation of societies in the interests of the marginalised. We need to build an anti-imperialist international education and development tradition that doesn’t shirk away from taking sides, standing with the oppressed, and using our ‘sociological imaginations’ and our bodies, when necessary, to struggle for social justice. In taking that path, as Freire reminded us, we are not there to lead, but more so to listen, to understand, to translate, to constructively critique, to connect the lifeworld of the marginalised to the global social processes going on around them and the role of education and knowledge-making therein. This requires different types of partnerships, co-production of knowledge, economic and political solidarity – the rewards of which may be distinct and very different from the orthodox and traditional path. This also requires a toughness and strength of resolve, and a willingness to speak out, and on occasions be extremely unpopular.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank BAICE for supporting me in my role as President, and to Dr Birgul Kutan who provided background research on some of the evidence presented here, and collaborated on a companion piece to this address to be published in the journal of Globalisation Societies and Education, Novelli & Kutan (2023 forthcoming). I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their suggestions and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Hunting militants by night’ is not a metaphor, as recent court cases in Australia and BBC Panorama research have revealed that NATO special forces soldiers were routinely catching and executing suspected militants. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62083196.