‘Citizen of nowhere’: Troubling the counterterrorism role of global citizenship education

• In Event: Educational approaches to preventing violent extremism

Proposal

Given the intensified urgency to combat homegrown terrorism, education has gained prominence as a key mechanism to minimize the factors believed to “push and pull” youth toward violent extremism, like strong cultural ties and social alienation. In 2015, for example, UNESCO affirmed that “education is a tool for addressing the worldwide challenge of increased recruitment and radicalization to violent extremism of youth on social media, in communities, and in schools” (1). Seeking a more complex response to terrorism, UNESCO (2015) committed to delivering global citizenship education programs “designed to contribute to the prevention of violent extremism, and genocide and other atrocities” (3). Fifteen years into the global war on terror, global citizenship education has emerged as a viable solution to the perceived problem of homegrown terrorism, despite an intensification of nationalist fervor evident in President Trump’s “Make American Great Again” slogan.
Drawing from and contributing to critical/decolonial global citizenship education studies, I argue that citizenship education initiatives applied to antiterrorism agendas risk imposing a curricular framework that can denigrate difference, erase local knowledges, and require youth to subordinate their cultural, religious, and ethnic differences to an identification with the national or global. Education scholars, for example, argue that dominant interpretations of “fundamental British values” in UK schools has assumed “a consensus with a political model of Britishness that is rooted in values that exclude, and identify difference as problematic” (Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017, 32). This mandate narrows, rather than broadens, how Britishness is conceptualized such that teachers have come to view “students’ affiliation with minority culture [as] divisive and contribut[ing] to social conflict” (Keddie 2014, 552). When organized around antiterrorism goals, the concepts of “fundamental British values” and “global citizenship” can undermine the drive to increase mutual respect, cultural sensitivity, and peace through education.
Building on the empirical and theoretical studies of the UK’s antiterrorism agenda and imposition of “fundamental British values,” this paper analyzes how US-based global citizenship education” programs activate similar logics to “induce a transformative process in students,” ultimately “socially engineering a more integrated identity like the global citizen” that “surpasses national identities, surpasses any of these smaller pieces of clearly identified identities” (participant observation, October 8, 2016). Drawing from a two-year interpretive qualitative research study of US-based antiterrorism programs from the perspectives of national security practitioners and policymakers, I consider how this approach can treat difference as a national security threat and therefore criminalize Muslim, Black, and other non-dominant students as incipient terrorists. As Deepa Kumar (2012) warns, “When the United States goes to war against a foreign enemy, it inevitably makes war on the perceived enemy within” (158).
As the field of international and comparative education continues to study and implement “soft power” initiatives to combat terrorism, scholars must guard against the use of terrorism to justify education programs that degrade local knowledges, cultures, and youth.

Author

• Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois-Chicago