2.1 Basic Dimensions of Decolonial Critique

Decolonial critiques analyze the systemic, historical, and ongoing colonial violence that sustains modern institutions through racialized, gendered, and human-centered processes of exploitation, expropriation, genocide, and ecocide (^{ANDREOTTI et al., 2018}; ^{BYRD, 2011}; ^{KING, 2019}). Alongside efforts to denaturalize this violence, decolonial critiques create space for fostering alternative modes of knowing, being, and relating, even as these alternatives are frequently pathologized and deemed unviable and even invisible from within the imaginaries and infrastructures of colonial systems. Decolonial critiques differ from more mainstream critical approaches because they refuse the notion that the primary violence of colonization is the exclusion of certain populations and communities from the supposedly universal promises offered by modern institutions. To name exclusion as the primary violence of this system is to: 1) invalidate other ways of knowing and being, by assuming that everyone desires access to the same promised futures and direction of social change; and, 2) invisibilize the fact that these modern institutions do not simply exclude ‘othered’ populations, but rather are made possible at the expense of violence against those populations (^{LEROY, 2016}; ^{SILVA, 2014}).

In other words, decolonial critiques understand colonial violence as the ‘condition of possibility’ for the modern global system (^{SILVA, 2014}). This means that colonization cannot be interrupted by including previously excluded populations into mainstream institutions; instead, decolonization requires the unravelling of those institutions. This analysis is summarized by the useful formulation of ‘modernity/coloniality’, which indicates that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin, and specifically, that colonial violence serves as the basis of the modern world system (^{GROSFOGUEL, 2013}; ^{MALDONADO-TORRES, 2007}). In other words, coloniality is the constitutive underside of modernity. Here, coloniality is used to refer not to specific instances or regimes of colonial rule, but rather “to longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production” (MALDONADO-TORRES, 2007, p. 243).

In addition to the literature reviewed here, our approach to decolonial critique is informed by our work as part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. Below we offer our first social cartography, which summarizes the interdependent relationship between modernity and coloniality that is theorized in decolonial critiques. Specifically, we identify the ‘promises’ associated with modern economic, political, epistemological, ecological, social, and relational systems, and the often-invisibilized ‘colonial processes’ that enable the fulfilment of these promises (for certain populations). We summarize this cartography in Table 1.

The capitalist economic system offers the promise of perpetual economic growth and wealth accumulation, while invisibilizing the true costs of that promise: that is, racialized and gendered expropriation and exploitation. Here, expropriation refers to the appropriation of the entire value of land, labour, or resources; meanwhile, exploitation refers to underpaying someone for their land, labour, or resources (^{COULTHARD, 2014}; ^{SILVA, 2014}). We also note that the capitalist economic system relies not only on the expropriation and exploitation of humans, but of other-than-human beings as well, which we address in more detail with regard to the ecological system. Ultimately, colonial processes of dispossession produce the wealth that is then claimed by the beneficiaries of the modern promise of accumulation.

The political system organized by nation-states promises security by pledging to protect both people and property. In fact, this promise is kept through colonial processes of state and state-sanctioned violence against ‘othered’ communities - especially communities that are predominantly racialized, Indigenous, immigrant, and/or low-income (^{BYRD, 2011}). This violence against marginalized communities and individuals includes removal, confinement, and incarceration (especially of Indigenous and Black populations), domestic policing as well as policing of nation-state borders, and the exporting of state violence abroad through global militarism. Through these colonial processes, the state protects only those it deems ‘worthy’ (generally, white/Euro-descended and wealthy), and the wealth that they have accumulated through exploitation and expropriation in the capitalist economic system.

The knowledge system premised on universal reason promises that a single way of knowing is universally valuable and relevant, and assures a totalizing form of knowledge that can be used to make predictions or engineer outcomes. Historically, it is European/Western knowledge that has claimed this position of ‘universality’ within the modern/colonial world system (^{MALDONADO-TORRES, 2007}; ^{SANTOS, 2007}). The colonial cost of this promise of universality is that it has been premised on denial of the value and even of the existence of other knowledge systems. In order to maintain the position of universality, these other knowledge systems have been devalued, repressed, and in some cases eradicated entirely.

The social system organized by hierarchy promises the opportunity to maintain and/or improve one’s status and social position. This promise is enabled by colonial processes that naturalize the unequal distribution of resources, and the conditionality of value as determined by one’s productivity. Although the promise is that resources are allocated depending on one’s hard work, talent, and perhaps a bit of luck, in general they tend to be distributed along existing racial, gender, economic, and other hierarchies. Ultimately, this modern promise of mobility comes at the cost of denying the inherent worth of all beings (^{ANDREOTTI et al., 2018}).

The ecological system is premised on a human-centered (anthropocentric) and extractive approach that not only maintains humans as separate from ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’, but also places the value of human life (especially white people) over and above other-than-human beings. This promise of human separation and supremacy is premised on a colonial process through which, rather than the entirety of living beings that includes humans, ‘the environment’/‘nature’ is reduced to a set of discrete ‘resources’ that are separate from humans and whose only purpose is to be put to human use. Through these colonial processes, not only are certain species reduced in numbers or even entirely extinct, but they are also treated as objects of consumption rather than as living entities.

Finally, the relational system is premised on a fantasy of separation that promises individualism, independence, and unrestricted autonomy, and that comes at the cost of denying one’s interdependence with, and responsibility to, all other beings (^{SILVA, 2014}). It is this denial of relationality that is the prerequisite for all of the other modern/colonial systems, as it is only once we deny our interdependence with all other beings that we can place them into social categories of difference (racial, gender, economic) and rank those differences into hierarchies that can then be used to rationalize exploitation, expropriation, and other forms of violence to ensure one’s own political and economic ‘security’, and epistemic certainty.

2.2 How Colonialism Shapes Internationalization

The dynamics of the modern/colonial global system significantly shape the internationalization of higher education, as they shape the global landscape of higher education in general. Western academic institutions have accumulated numerous advantages through centuries of colonial relations. As a result, the global higher education landscape is characterized by a highly uneven distribution of resources, unequal and extractive relationships between institutions and academics in wealthier and poorer nations, and an over-representation of Western knowledge systems in both teaching and research (^{GROSFOGUEL, 2013}; ^{STEIN, 2017}). The Western (especially English-speaking) academy is still generally understood to be the intellectual centre of the world, and Western knowledge is widely considered to be the most valid and valuable knowledge system, against which all other knowledge systems are measured (^{NANDY, 2000}; ^{SANTOS, 2007}). Even when individuals or institutions have a critique of how that epistemic and political economic Euro-supremacy shapes higher education contexts, they generally must still navigate these inherited colonial hierarchies in some way - including in the context of internationalization.

The coloniality of internationalization is evident in the directional flows of international students, predominantly from non-Western to Western nations (OECD, 2020). This directionality is both informed by and further reifies the notion that the West is the intellectual centre of the world. In the contemporary era of marketized internationalization in which many institutions charge a premium for international student tuition, as compared to domestic students, this also allows for a continuous flow of economic resources to the West through tuition and other spending (^{JOHNSTONE; LEE, 2014}).

Notably, while the previous, aid-based approach to internationalization in Western nations was less focused on income than today’s trade-based approach, the aid model was still dominated by colonial logics, particularly in the way it framed the education of international students from non-Western and poorer nations as a form of international aid or “charity” (^{STEIN; ANDREOTTI, 2016}). This approach reached its zenith during the Cold War. While aid may be preferable to trade, this approach was still premised on a paternalistic investment that presumed the West is not only the apex of education, but also the height of development and progress. In this framing, the greatest (and most benevolent) good is to transfer the West’s supposedly universal knowledge to the rest of the world. Apart from paternalism, this aid-based approach to internationalization was also premised on the desire to socialize international students as good capitalist subjects who would go on to become political and economic leaders in their home countries and would be sympathetic to the geopolitical and economic interests of their former host country (^{McCARTNEY, 2016}).

Although internationalization is not limited to issues of international student mobility, this has often been the predominant focus. Nonetheless, it is important to consider other dimensions of internationalization as well. For example, international research partnerships continue to favour partners from the Global North (^{MENEZES DE SOUZA, 2019}). Meanwhile, many service(-learning) abroad programs are still oriented by a paternalistic framework that invites Western students to imagine themselves in the role of helpers or even “saviours” in relation to their non-Western host community. The community is in turn rendered as lacking adequate skills and knowledge, and their structural disadvantages are understood to be a result of that ‘lack’ rather than a product of colonial relations in which Western students are complicit.

2.3 Complexities of Colonization in Relation to Internationalization

The above section briefly captures how broad colonial patterns shape internationalization. Yet it is also important to briefly address how the complexities and nuances of colonial relations in different contexts further complicate the possibilities for how we might respond to today’s challenges and crises. These colonial complexities contribute to “a cacophony of contradictorily hegemonic and horizontal struggles” for justice (^{BYRD, 2011}, p. 53) within a modern/colonial global system. Cacophony and contradiction make simplistic responses to colonization impossible, as a move toward justice in one context or on one front can have unintended consequences that further colonial dynamics elsewhere.

We note first the fact that coloniality has both local and global dimensions. For instance, the US is widely understood to hold a position of political and economic hegemony within the modern/colonial world system, particularly since World War II. Yet beyond its global position, the US also maintains a colonial system in its internal domestic context. The US has been identified as a “settler colonial” country, indicating that its existence is premised on the ongoing occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands by non-Indigenous peoples (^{BYRD, 2011}; ^{COULTHARD, 2014}). Rather than a single historical moment, settler colonialism is an ongoing mode of social, political, and economic organization. Alongside the structure of settler colonialism, the US is also organized by structural anti-Blackness shaped by slavery and its afterlife (^{KING, 2019}; ^{LEROY, 2016}). When this domestic colonial context is considered, it complicates critiques of colonization that only focus on inter-state global power relations. For instance, international students are marginalized and exploited as (often racialized) non-citizens; at the same time, they may be seeking access to the benefits of a system built on dispossession. In other words, we need to both interrupt patterns of harm against international students, and consider “the ongoing conditions of colonialism that continue to make the United States a desired state formation within which to be included” (BYRD, 2011, p. xvii).

Consideration of complexities also complicates narratives of colonization in Brazil, which is in a colonial position in relation to the Western world, having been colonized by Portugal for hundreds of years and being still marginalized within the global economic system, despite its BRIC status. However, the Brazilian state is also a colonial power internally. An incident related to recent Amazon fires illustrates this complexity. When the French president Emmanuel Macron critiqued Bolsonaro’s handling of the fires, Bolsonaro accused Macron of having a “colonialist-mindset”, in an attempt to deflect the fact that his own government was responsible for weakening environmental protections and Indigenous rights that contributed to the fires. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Ministry of Education hires the British Council to research, advise and plan the new national curriculum for basic education in teaching and learning English, rather than recognizing the highly capable Brazilian researchers and teachers who work in this area. Finally, Brazil has relationships with other “Global South” nations in the context of higher education, especially African and Latin American countries, for instance through the University for International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB). While not oriented by profit, these connections tend to be rooted in a developmentalist framework that risks reproducing colonial (racialized and paternalistic) patterns of engagement. In sum, attending to the complexities and contextual nuances of the modern/colonial global system will be important once we move to consider different possible approaches to internationalization in response to today’s unprecedented global challenges and crises. Before we do that, however, we consider the character of these challenges and crises in the section below.

3.1 Considering Global Challenges and Crises

While the challenges and crises that we currently face are difficult to disentangle, for the purposes of analytical clarity, in this section we consider the challenges and crises related to each of the discrete systems we addressed earlier and the modern promise/colonial process that characterizes each. From a decolonial analysis, these promises/processes are understood as the root causes of current challenges and crises, which are the more acute manifestations of the systemic, historical, and ongoing violence and unsustainability of the modern/colonial global system. In this way, these challenges and crises are the result of the breaking of modern promises that are no longer tenable and were only ever viable for a small minority of people.

For instance, with regard to the epistemological system, no single mode of knowledge is adequate to the task of accounting for and responding to the complexity of the present moment. This means that the modern promise of achieving consensus through reasoned debate can no longer be maintained (^{BAUMAN, 2000}). While the rupture of the lie of universal reason has generative potential for challenging centuries of European epistemic hegemony and pluralizing knowledge, it has largely led instead to a cacophony of competing perspectives, many within echo chambers, as well as an amplification of the loudest, most sensationalized voices (^{ANDREOTTI et al., 2018}). To take another example, the promise of wealth accumulation through the capitalist economic system has always been unevenly available and has always come at the cost of exploitation and expropriation. However, today its precarities, impoverishments, and debts are increasingly generalized to a wider portion of the population (FUTURE EARTH, 2020). Due to space limitations, it is not possible to review each of these issues in detail. Instead, we offer a summary of this social cartography in Table 2, below.

We note that current crises may be only the beginning winds of a larger “storm” that is brewing. We also note that when we describe these challenges in relation to different systems, we are focusing on the effects for those who had previously had access to modern promises. Those who have always been on the receiving end of the underlying colonial processes generally experience these crises in more intense ways - as an amplification of existing patterns of violence and unsustainability. Thus, for instance, while many communities in the US are experiencing extreme weather as a result of crises of the extractive ecological system, only a few, highly marginalized communities experience difficulty in accessing clean water. Meanwhile, in poorer nations, precarious access to potable water is more generalized due to higher levels of pollution and desertification, and lower levels of state services, both of which are ultimately linked (although not exclusively attributable) to higher levels of consumption and carbon usage by wealthier nations (^{FOSTER; HOLLEMAN; CLARK, 2019}). Similarly, while the declining promise of social mobility has resulted in arrested prosperity in wealthier nations, for instance, children being worse off than their parents, in poorer countries the result is more intense, potentially resulting in a loss of peoples’ jobs/livelihoods altogether. We therefore emphasize an important distinction between the ways that communities of high-intensity and low-intensity struggle experience current challenges and crises.

Finally, we reiterate that while we have placed these crises and challenges into distinct categories, many of them are deeply intertwined. In particular, we want to bring attention to the close but underexamined relationship between ecological destruction and systemic, historical, and ongoing violence against marginalized communities. For instance, the Trump administration’s efforts to expand and fortify the existing US border wall as a means to reinforce nation-state sovereignty and block potential migrants and refugees from Latin America have led them to blow up the land of a sacred, legally protected area (^{McNAMARA, 2020}). This site houses both rare species and Indigenous burial sites. Meanwhile, the 2019 fires in the Amazon were fed not just by rising temperatures and drier conditions, but also by the intensified deforestation that was enabled through the weakening of environmental protections and Indigenous rights by President Bolsonaro’s administration in Brazil (SYMONDS, 2019). Even as it is increasingly hard to deny the reality of these converging crises, there is no consensus about how to respond to them. In the following section we consider some of these possible responses.

3.2 Possible Responses to Global Challenges and Crises

^{Altbach and de Wit (2017}) predict the coming of a ‘new world order’ of internationalization, which we understand as deeply linked to the wider developments reviewed above. Below we review a social cartography of different possible responses to contemporary challenges and crises, and in Table 3 we consider how each response relates to different elements of the modern/colonial global system. Ultimately, we draw on this cartography to consider how each response fosters different futures of internationalization.

The system restoration response is rooted in reactionary analyses that identify the root cause of today’s challenges and crises as a betrayal of the true values of the modern/colonial system, and thus seeks to return to a romanticized earlier era - generally, one in which no or fewer rights and opportunities were available to racialized and Indigenous people, women, and low-income communities. These communities in turn may become targets for scapegoating, that is, they are blamed for causing the current crises, and, thus, their exclusion, expulsion or even extermination become viewed as viable modes of responding to the crises.

The system adaptation response is rooted in liberal analyses of emerging crises. This response views the contemporary moment as one in which a recalibration is needed, one that stays true to the underlying values, ideals, and promises of the modern/colonial system, but that recognizes the need to adapt the way they are achieved in a new context. The emphasis here is not on enacting deep structural changes, but rather on making individual choices (e.g. to reduce, reuse, recycle), revising government policies, supporting new market mechanisms (e.g. carbon trading), and developing technological innovations that can ensure the continued relevance and sustainability of the underlying system in the context of changing times.

The system transformation response is rooted in more critical analyses that suggest a much deeper, more structural reform of the current system is required. Some of these responses prioritize enabling previously marginalized populations to not only participate in, but also lead political action, economic alternatives, and social change. From this approach, the goal is to radically reimagine the existing system, or perhaps even replace it with an alternative existing system (e.g. in the case of the economic system, replacing capitalism with socialism).

Finally, the system hospicing response is rooted in decolonial analyses that suggest the current global system is inherently harmful and unsustainable, and current crises are the most recent manifestations of a longue durée of social and ecological violence (^{ANDREOTTI et al., 2015}). In this sense, rather than prioritizing system reform, emphasis is on learning from the repeated mistakes of the current system, inviting disinvestment from its promises, and creating space for other possibilities to emerge, especially those that are viable but unimaginable from within dominant imaginaries of justice, responsibility, and change. The term hospicing indicates recognition of the inevitable decline of the system, but a commitment to enabling it to die with dignity rather than hastening its demise or keeping it on life support; the other side of hospicing is welcoming the birth of what comes after it, without smothering it with projections.

3.3 Different Futures of Internationalization in Response to Global Challenges and Crises

We now use the above cartography of responses to current and emerging crises to briefly review some of the possible futures of the internationalization of higher education, and relate these futures to some important questions that emerge from each analysis.

A future of internationalization rooted in system restoration reiterates knowledge as a commodity to be sold and consumed, prioritizes economic growth, frames Western knowledge as universal, and positions (Western-led) human progress and development as the ultimate goal. The primary role of higher education is to ensure both individual and national economic success and global competitiveness. Efforts to democratize access or redistribute resources (e.g. through institutions like UNILAB) are deemed irrelevant and even harmful and unjust, as they are seen to divert resources away from more deserving populations. Questions that orient this approach are: How can we ensure that Western knowledge is not further compromised by critical or decolonial knowledges and critiques? How can we reclaim the higher education resources that are currently being directed to ‘othered’ communities in ways that threaten the entitlements and continued success of mainstream/dominant communities?

A future for internationalization rooted in system adaptation would critique neoliberal approaches to internationalization (e.g. the “export”/“trade” model of student mobility). Because there is no question of whether Western/Westernized higher education is the only or ideal form of education, or whether it supports healthy, sustainable forms of existence, the focus is on expanding access to this education, in an effort to support (global) social mobility. Questions that orient this approach are: How can we responsibly manage/redirect/conserve institutional resources so that we can avert or mitigate current crises and return to a path that will ensure we can widely share the benefits of human progress? How can our institutions produce knowledge that can help lead us out of current crises to ensure system continuity?

A system transformation approach to internationalization futures seeks to remove all economic barriers to access (e.g. free education) and to enact epistemological change by centering othered voices, knowledges, people, and frames of reference. Different from system adaptation, system transformation questions the dominant modern/colonial system. Having identified these harmful structures, this approach seeks to either (radically) reform or replace the existing system with a predetermined alternative that can offer the same promise of certainty and security that are offered by the currently dominant system (^{STEIN, 2017}). Questions that orient this approach are: How can we support the leadership of marginalized (including international) faculty, staff, and students so that they can guide us out of current crises and toward more equitable futures? How can we restructure internationalization efforts to enable the free movement of people and the decommodification of (diverse) knowledge?

Finally, system hospicing challenges the very meaning and purpose of internationalization, and of higher education as we know it. This approach views today’s crises as indications that the still-dominant modern/colonial system cannot be indefinitely sustained, and comes at great cost. Rather than simply supporting students and faculty to accumulate knowledge “about the world”, it invites them into ongoing and critical self-reflexivity that seeks to support the identification and interruption of investments in harmful and unsustainable modes of engaging “in/with the world”. That said, system hospicing considers both short- and long-term possibilities for the future. It does not demand we quit our jobs, research, and studies to do something potentially different right away. Rather, it asks us to mourn, disinvest, and learn from the false and harmful promises offered by a modern/colonial system, and to consider the possibility of alternatives that are viable but unfathomable from within that system. We discuss this approach further in the following section, and offer orienting questions of the system hospicing approach to internationalization in the conclusion.