‘It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship

ABSTRACT

The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Global citizenship
• big society
• international volunteering
• resistance
• development
• postcolonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Perhaps the most prominent of many examples here is Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) assertion that academics should ‘unlearn’ privilege – ‘learning to learn from below’ – and though her critique focuses on subalternity, it is a clear articulation of the recurrent problematic in postcolonial literatures of the critic’s assumed position of authority. See also Dirlik (2002) on ‘self-aversion’ and Robinson (2003) for commentary.

2. While this may have been skewed by the fact that much of the data comes from fieldwork in India, it must also be noted that of the 24 countries that host ICS volunteers, 19 are former British territories.

3. Achebe’s essay has become synonymous with the book, accompanying it on both undergraduate reading lists and new editions of the text.

4. Towards the close of his ranging and sophisticated deconstruction of Heart of Darkness, Achebe writes ‘the point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely, that Conrad was a bloody racist’ (1977, 788). For responses to Achebe, see Hawkins (1979) and Watts (1983). Brantlinger (1985) provides an overview.