Critical perspectives on internationalization in higher education: Commercialization, global citizenship, or postcolonial imperialism?

• In Event: Decolonizing, critiquing, and reimagining higher education

Proposal

Internationalization, particularly through student mobility, has a long history in higher education (HE). This practice gained prominence during the Cold War, when schemes like Fulbright were used by the rival powers to promote their respective political ideologies (Rizvi, 2011). However, in the post-Cold War era, internationalization has grown exponentially, and has assumed a pivotal role within universities. Consequently, it has emerged as a key thematic area of study within the field of HE (de Wit, 2002; Tight, 2022). For much of this contemporary history, which has been defined by its increasingly commercial nature (Rizvi, 2022), internationalization has paradoxically been portrayed as a broadly positive intervention, with humanitarian and cosmopolitan associations (Bamberger et al., 2019). While recent reviews indicate that those associations persist, the field is becoming more critically oriented with greater emphasis on power relations, inequalities, and social responsibility (George Mwangi et al., 2018; Mittelmeier & Yang, 2022). This shift towards greater criticality is linked to calls for change by those disillusioned with the dominance of neoliberal and commercialized approaches – and by critical scholars employing postcolonial theories. With few notable exceptions (e.g., Mulvey, 2022), little research has investigated this critical turn. We analyze that turn to understand its development, core tenets, major concerns, and to assess its usefulness for analyzing the shifting nature of and multiple motives for internationalization across the globe. We further consider its ability to provide a corrective to critiques of the foundational literature of the 1990s-2010s.

We adopt Mulvey’s (2022) distinction between two major strands of critical scholarship: 1) ‘mainstream’ approaches, and 2), ‘radical’ approaches. We argue that both strands have, for different reasons, significant limitations. Specifically, the mainstream strand aims to steer internationalization away from its commercial orientation but does not represent a significant departure from the tenets of previous scholarship. The radical strand of scholarship comprises a diverse range of perspectives that employ various philosophical viewpoints (e.g., Brooks & Waters, 2011; Larsen, 2016; Lomer, 2017; Rizvi, 2007; Shields, 2019). We focus specifically on the growing and influential genre of postcolonial scholarship that is constructed around a ‘modern/colonial imaginary.’ While we acknowledge the significant contributions made by this scholarship, particularly in understanding the legacies of European colonialism, we also identify inherent limitations in its framing. Specifically, it tends to reflect an occidental form of Western bias and exceptionalism (Buruma & Margalit, 2004), take liberal political values for granted, obscure agency, deny the increasingly complex and multi-polar nature of contemporary international higher education (see Glass & Cruz, 2022) and be ahistorically and selectively applied. This selective application has resulted in a dearth of critical scholarship on internationalization in authoritarian states, who have become major host countries of international students. This dearth of critical scholarship on internationalization in authoritarian regimes is partly due to the severe restrictions on academic freedom in such states, where critique – and protest - is often suppressed or illegal, combined with postcolonial scholarship's inclination to primarily target the Western world for its critiques.

The limitations of the postcolonial approach are especially evident in scholarship on HE. Scholars in other fields that have long been critical of Western hegemony (e.g., Callahan 2008; Mignolo 2011; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Perkins, 2016) have increasingly recognized the imperial ambitions of non-Western nations. Mignolo (2011) analyses what he terms ‘the hegemonic struggle for the control of the colonial matrix of power (p. 180)’ and identifies five possible future trajectories: re-Westernization, de-Westernization, the reorientation of the left, the decolonial option, and the spiritual option. Building on Mignolo's (2011) perspective, we contend that postcolonial scholarship, when examining internationalization in HE, tends to emphasize decolonization and re-Westernization, thereby neglecting the following crucial aspects: the dynamic nature of geopolitics, the importance of de-Westernization, and a comprehensive understanding of colonialism across diverse contexts.

Following Mignolo (2011) and Perkins (2016) we suggest that postcolonial analyses of HE need to avoid a near exclusive focus on the West and recognize the changing nature of geopolitics, including the rise of China, and the consequent acceleration of colonial trajectories other than re-Westernization, most notably de-Westernization. Following Frenkel and Shenhav (2006), we also suggest that the limitations of Orientalism and Occidentalism should be acknowledged and supplemented with approaches which recognize nuance, local agency, politics, power relations, history, and the reciprocal effects of interactions between various local/global actors. Such approaches may provide greater scope for understanding both the trajectories of contemporary colonization and their impact on internationalization globally. With renewed calls for change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing populisms-nationalisms, the urgency of climate change, and predictions for new forms of internationalization on the horizon (e.g., Beck, 2021; de Wit & Altbach, 2021) we may be on the cusp of a new direction in scholarship and practice.

Authors

• Annette Bamberger, Bar Ilan University

• Paul Morris, IOE, UCL