Ubuntu, Indigeneity, and an Ethic for Decolonizing Global Citizenship

Educating citizens of ‘the global’: Mapping textual constructs of UNESCO’s global citizenship education 2012–2015

“…A growing number of transformative strategies call for a deeply decolonizing practice of global citizenship education that can be informed and strengthened by insights and experience in indigenous populations, cultural practices and from teachings and concepts from the global South, among others. For example, the relational process of Ubuntu from South African traditions that recognize the responsibilities and obligations of individuals towards collective well-being (Swanson, 2015); conceptions of ‘suffering’ and ‘no-self’ from Buddhist philosophy that challenge prevalent Western conceptions of self-supremacy of the individual citizen (Nguyen, 2015); and insights from pre-colonial African education that is considered as a societal affair to involve learners to serve the needs of their communities, reshaping the responsibilities of citizens to the self, the community and the world (Masemula, 2015). The Bahá’í-inspired conception of education advancing a twofold moral purpose – ‘to pursue one’s own intellectual and spiritual growth and to contribute at the same time to the transformation of society’ as ‘two interwoven aspects of one necessary and inevitable movement’ (Farid-Arbab, 2012) – further reinforces the inseparable relationality of self and social dimensions of citizenship in education.…”

Refugee Policy Amidst Global Shocks: Encampment, Resettlement Barriers and the Search for ‘Durable Solutions’

“…Pandemics and climate disasters will no doubt proliferate in the years to come, exacerbating the need for new approaches to refugees and asylum‐seekers – and for embracing efforts to decolonise this field, critically, and with an intent to challenge imperial power with alternative epistemologies (Arat‐Koc, 2020; Swanson, 2015). This article, in drawing attention to the lived experiences of curtailing resettlement flows in the face of social and ecological disasters, argues for rethinking policy measures to better incentivize concrete commitments that embrace the values of Ubuntu and the Global Compact on Refugees.…”

“…We discuss a case study that extends concerns about colonial orientations to refugee policies and the prevailing ‘ontology of containment’ (Benhabib, 2020) that constricts mobilities in circumstances of protracted displacement and confinement. Our approach challenges policy discourses that obscure the underlying political economy of ‘localization’ and containment (Brankamp, 2022; Brankamp & Daley, 2020; Brumat et al, 2021; Landau, 2019; Weima & Hyndman, 2019), calling attention to the suppressing of local and Indigenous philosophies of collective responsibility and care (Arat‐Koc, 2020; Swanson, 2015) in global refugee policy discourse. In addition to analysis of policy documents and recent literatures, we provide reflections that draw on articulated experiences of refugees and former refugees in Eastern Zimbabwe, where the first author has been conducting research on displacement since 2005 and where the second author serves as Tongogara Refugee Camp Administrator.…”

Rethinking Global Citizenship Education: A Critical Perspective

“…Accordingly, the critical approach to global citizenship is often constructed through a postcolonial or decolonial perspective that emphasizes justice and social transformation (Andreotti 2011;Torres 2017;Swanson 2015). Unlike neo-liberal approaches, which promote progressivism and capitalism, the postcolonial perspective on GCE seeks to:…”