The Geopolitics of Aid to Education: From Post 9/11 realities to the New Cold Wars

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Rethinking Education in Emergencies: Critical Reflections on the Sector

Proposal

Since the mid 1990s, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks on New York in 2001, international development assistance to education in conflict affected states has become increasingly enmeshed with the strategic security concerns of the major western powers in the face of new post-Cold War geopolitical challenges. International Development assistance, which during the immediate post-cold-war period crystallized around marshalling resources towards the most marginalized and under-resourced parts and populations of the world, and towards a set of basic wellbeing indicators concretised in the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, began to shift towards the prioritization of ‘fragile’ and ‘conflict affected’ states. This geographic and policy shift was justified through arguments highlighting that these states were in turn development ‘black spots’, a threat to their own populations, and a potential breeding ground for organizations intent on attacking the West. Security abroad and security at home became discursively linked through international development policy. In this paper I will chart the complex ways that education has become entangled, deployed, evoked, and operationalized during that period to serve Western military and security objectives in multiple locations in the global south. Drawing on a series of examples from research over the last two decades I will highlight the way education programmes and systems, textbooks and curriculum interventions, have been utilised for military and strategic purposes, drawn into counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism practices and reflect on the effects therein on world politics and global social change. I will also explore evidence of, and reflect upon, the emergence of a New Cold War and its potential effects on the global governance of education in conflict affected contexts, the contours of which are already emerging.

Author

• Mario Novelli, University of Sussex