Abstract
In this article, I propose a theory of the globalization of higher education as societal and cultural security problems for many regions of the world. The first section examines the field of security studies for theoretical frameworks appropriate to critiquing globalized higher education, including critical human, societal and cultural security critiques of the Copenhagen, Aberystwyth and Paris schools, and their relationship to the educational sector, with a focus on the university’s role in the security studies field. The second section examines the effect of globalization on education as societal and cultural security problems related to neoliberalism, colonization, internationalization of curriculum and cross-cultural management studies.
Introduction
This paper explores the critical relationship between two fields that have had little intersection to date: the critique of globalized education and societal and cultural security issues arising from the Copenhagen, Aberystwyth and Paris schools of security studies. It is argued here that such integration can provide a stronger critique of globalized education, particularly as it affects the developing world, which can also contribute to furthering the scope of these schools of security studies.
The idea for this paper came as a confluence of three influences. The first is my personal experience of coming to the United Arab Emirates and into a public university in the Emirate of Dubai with a doctoral student population that is predominantly Arab and Islamic, about half of whom are Emirati and the balance are mostly from the region, including Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Algeria, who are mid- to senior-level career professionals I am also privileged to be in a university with a highly ethnically diverse staff, predominantly from the Middle East. Together these provided me a quick immersion into the regional context – both the rich intellectual and cultural heritage and the challenges they face. Second, since my arrival in Dubai five years ago, I have worked to modify the educational administration and leadership curriculum from one that was initially imported from the UK and the US into a more diverse and inclusive one that is highly representative of Arab and Islamic scholars and that focuses on international, regional and national conditions.
The third influence is several years of reading intelligence and security literatures to construct an analytical model for examining the covert side of other organizations, including schools and universities, for a recent book. The first time I connected the securities literature to higher education was in a tutorial discussion I had with an Emirati doctoral student, as happens sometimes. Discussion can fire a line of thinking that suddenly veers obliquely into an association that produces an epiphany. It was so on that supervision day, when discussion of issues surrounding educational development in the United Arab Emirates carried out largely by imported staff and curriculum combined with the residue of earlier reading on security. These moments one can sometimes recall vividly. All I needed to ask was: ‘is this a security issue, a cultural security matter?’ My student smiled and said ‘yes, it is’. In those few words was embedded a new direction for critique.
I am diverging here into the anecdotal for a reason. Serving a developing country in the Middle East requires more than just an unadapted foreign curriculum and teaching practice. Unless such curricular development work is done, I believe, those of us who come from the West, the Anglo-West, are no more than intellectual imperialists, carrying with us what Giroux and Purpel (1983) would describe as a hidden curriculum through globalization, consisting of the values, aims and agendas of foreign countries. We are a new age and wave of colonizers. And colonization does not just occur through international and intergovernmental action, but on a societal level through individuals, their thoughts, their actions and their interactions. Moving to the UAE to serve national goals and policies through teaching has to be done with some level of critical awareness and reflection – drawing on the kind of self-analysis that comes from Habermas’ (1981) notion of the system colonizing lifeworld and Said’s (1979) critique of Orientalism – and requires what Collingwood (1994) called a sympathetic and imaginative reading similar to Weber’s (1968) empathetic requirement for interpretive sociology. Such critical self-reflection also requires hermeneutic intent: acquiring the knowledge and experience – intellectual, social and emotional – to understand in a verstehende sense what is meaningful and valuable. Teaching and mentoring require this empathetic understanding, and in the Middle East this means learning about its history, its ideal figures, its values, its religion, its cultural norms, its politics and pressures, but also its own intellectual traditions, achievements and ideals. Of course, the ability to acculturate depends on how one views teaching in another country such as the UAE as an expatriate: is it just a contract job or a covenant, a sacred trust, with students who need to engage in their own development and nation-building?
One also has to consider that higher education is also in a conservationist role, with the responsibility to ensure the integrity and continuity of culture, religion and social institutions as well as influence over the personality, character and identity of individuals. From a public service perspective, in my case this means constructing a United Arab Emirates-centric view while synthesizing it with regional and international scholarship in order to fulfil the mission of education and the vision of the country established by its leaders and citizens. This includes conceptions of leadership, administration, authority, etc. that are indigenous rather than imported through globalized education.
My interests in security studies for globalized education are four-fold. The first is an examination of the societal and cultural security from an institutional perspective: what social institutions both contribute to producing it and social institutions affected by it, especially higher education? My particular interest is in examining the potential cultural security impact on a small Arabian Gulf country of the predominantly Western curriculum that is taught in graduate management and leadership programmes, and its heavy importation by consultants and other expatriates, who often bring unadapted or unmodified practices when creating organizations or restructuring them in a country heavily dependent on expatriate labour. Globalized education can also affect policy development and other strategically sensitive areas since, as discussed below, higher education has been incorporated to a high degree in the military–industrial–intelligence complex, particularly in the US – or, in Habermas’ terms, the system of the surveillance and security state has colonized the cultural life world, including universities. Under neoliberalism and its globalization agenda, other social institutions play a strong role in the consideration of education, reflecting foreign policy and international trade policies, and, extending the critical theory approach, the politico-economic sector has colonized higher education. As Weber (1930) argues, higher education has been legal-rationalized as a commodity and strategic advantage in the political and economic sectors.
The second dimension of a security studies critique is theoretical: what particular theories, models and research approaches facilitate a societal and cultural security analysis as it applies to graduate teaching and scholarship? I believe that the greatest critical promise lies with social constructivism, critical security studies and post-colonial analysis. I would also argue that a Weberian analysis would be helpful, but not the truncated and misrepresentational bureaucratic model that is most frequently used. There is a larger and much more complex theory from Weber that is interpretive comparative world historical-sociological in character that is grounded in value orientations to social action that includes a construction of three authority or domination types and that allows for dealing with many levels of conflict issuing from these factors on the individual, interpersonal, organizational and social institutional levels (see Samier, 2002, 2005), which can be extended to regional and international differences.
Third, there are also a number of underlying philosophical and paradigmatic dimensions to consider: does one approach globalized education from a humanistic philosophical/paradigm perspective, a realist paradigm or a conflict paradigm? Which disciplines does one use? How does one define key concepts and the forms they take from multidisciplinary perspectives, for example ‘culture’, ‘society’ and even ‘higher education’, as curriculum and pedagogy? There are a number of approaches possible and, depending on the contexts of the countries one is looking at, they may vary considerably – for example, countries in the Arabian Gulf have a colonial past to consider that had a strong impact on shaping the current political system, which has produced a combined model of traditional Bedouin and Western monarchical features (see Rugh, 2007). And to what degree can one generate a relevant security theory from indigenous intellectual traditions, for example in the Middle East from an Islamic foundation?
Finally, the fourth dimension of a security analysis for the public and higher educational administration and leadership field is its suitability for comparative case studies in which contextual factors such as culture, political and economic systems and differing legal traditions are incorporated, as well as inter-institutional and internal organizational conditions. To a large extent, these critiques require the use of history as a foundational discipline in identifying the developmental trajectories that countries have taken and the role of external factors. From an Arabian Gulf perspective, one feature is looking at immigration differently from the dominant Western approach that frames its immigration security problem as mobility of people from developing countries into the West. I am looking through the looking glass into western intellectual immigration into the Arabian Gulf and other target ‘markets’ of globalization.
While the scope of this problematic is too large for a single journal article, this article provides a framework and review of central concepts and theories that can lead to a theory of globalized higher education as a security issue. The first section provides an overview of the evolving and broadening field of security studies, many developments of which have implicitly, if not explicitly, viewed intellectuals as security actors. This is a view that I would like to broaden to include the university more fully as a site of teaching and research. The second section examines important features of neoliberalism and globalization that lead to societal and cultural security threats. The article concludes with a number of initial implications for university administrators, faculty, their policies and their inter-institutional connections.
Evolution of societal and cultural security
The concept of security has not been a static one. It has evolved and shifted in meaning given contextual conditions, the nature of the security problem, differences between subjective and objective security and ‘levels of analysis’ referring to ‘security for whom’ (Wæver, 2004a: 55). Security is also an old concept, traceable in relatively similar terms to Roman discussion of the concept (e.g. Cicero, 1971). One of the main issues since the end of the Cold War is the degree to which the concept of ‘state’ is central to security, or whether other referents should take its place, such as the individual, social institutions, particular groups (e.g. ethnic minorities) or the international community. National security theory from the United States is a variant that took on a dominant international role during the Cold War and has re-emerged since 9/11, in which ‘the state in extreme situations had a right to call on necessity and raison d’état’ (Wæver, 2004a: 56). At issue as well is determining which social institutions should be included in security analyses. In this case, education as a social institution is included, with particular reference to higher education, where security professionals are trained and research is carried out along with higher education units in other social sectors such as government, the military, the intelligence sector and the private sector, which together can make up the higher education system of a country.
The broadening of security studies has taken place over the past twenty or more years through significant theoretical changes. From its modern beginnings in classical realism, political liberalism is derived from Kant’s aim for international peace and economic liberalism. It has expanded to encompass structural neorealist and neoliberal institutionalism from international relations that focus on the state and often use economic analysis (see Katzenstein, 1996), most often assuming rational actors, and game theory used for deterrence theory (Zagare, 2013). While liberalism focused most intently on the nation-state, it did include other actors in states’ security affairs, such as NGOs, multinational corporations, government bureaucracies and a broad range of relevant interest groups, political parties and elites—a ‘commercial’ liberalism that operates within a free trade framework, assuming that greater trade will contribute to greater freedom and ultimately security (Morgan, 2010). Neoliberalism has brought a cultural–institutional view of state action based on the view of ‘regimes as particular combinations of principles, norms, rules, and procedures’, used to explain how regimes may begin when an international hegemonic state molds the ‘international order’ to its own interests, developing their own dynamics (Katzenstein, 1996: 19). Collective identity theory has also arisen as an approach in the field and affects security values, structures and practices such as the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Another approach – to some extent a continuation of Kantian work – is peace studies, for which Galtung’s (1980) work provided an innovative lexicon that includes two concepts that are important for this paper: structural and cultural violence and the shifting of referent from the state and military to individuals and cultural and social groups. The former is focused on structural conditions of inequality and injustice inhibiting human development as causal factors for violent conflict. The latter examines a form of politics of identity where predominantly Western modernist thinking, or the Western metanarrative, imposes a single intellectual and social practice narrative that excludes, creates hierarchies of value and can serve through the symbolic sphere as a justification or legitimization of violence (see Galtung, 1996).
Much of Cold War security studies was state-centric and focused mostly on direct violence and the military–intelligence sphere, with the exception of peace studies, which laid important conceptual foundations for later theoretical developments. From the peace perspective, intellectuals and educational systems were regarded as taking a vital role as intellectuals in both contributing to the problem and being part of the solution. Educational systems also play a dual role in reinforcing structural violence (similar to the reproductive role discussed by Bourdieu and Passeron, 2000) and in educating for peace (Bilgin, 2003: 204). The role of the university in Cold War security studies cannot be underestimated. It is generally omitted from educational administration and leadership studies and is largely absent from the security studies literature, with the exception of Neocleous (2008), who devotes a chapter to the interrelationships of the security industry and university in providing scientific and social science research of security value and, in turn, how the security sector affected the development of many disciplines. However, there is a large body of literature on the Cold War University, primarily in the US, that contains a long history of the academy’s participation in and contributions to the security sector (discussed in some detail below).
More recent theories that have developed primarily after the Cold War emphasize identity, culture, values and the social structures that privilege some groups over others. Constructivist security studies eschews a universalist approach to definitions, criteria, structures and practices for a more historical particularist view of societies in which social and historical contexts combine with styles of social interaction to produce structures and dynamics of power, identity and norms. This approach enables one to view how security is given meaning and serves as a ‘site of negotiation’ and contestation (McDonald, 2013: 67). Other important concepts in constructivist security theory are the relationships among agents, structures and change, and – for critical constructivists, drawing on Althusser’s (2008) notions of ideology and interpellation and Foucault’s (2002) concept of discursive power – the language games that create communication frameworks through which political action is formed. Constructivist institutionalism ‘conceptualizes institutions as a collection of norms, rules and routines, rather than a formal structure’ (Navari, 2013: 43).
The university is implicated in all of these processes. It serves as a site for the intellectualization of security threats and as a contributing actor in the way we think about security and in legitimizing security regimes. It also instils in students – whether domestic or foreign, in the case of globalized education – the values, views, roles and structures that constitute security, as well as providing research support for the security sector. A more radical position would regard the university as part of the military–industrial–intelligence complex, as it has since 9/11 become intertwined administratively, financially and ideologically, particularly in the US (see Giroux, 2007; Neocleous, 2008, and others).
One other recent form of security studies that directly relates to higher education is that of human security – a field that is still in formation, with many of its concepts and theories contested, in part due to its multidisciplinary nature and the unevenness of research (Hampson, 2013: 280–281). Two conceptions that dominate the research to date, as Hampson explains, are those of natural rights and rule of law aimed at the protection of life and liberty, where the humanitarian takes the form of strengthening international law regarding genocide, war crimes, weapons that target civilian populations and care for refugees. The third conception, and the most contested, is that human security in the social justice tradition should apply to ‘economic, environmental, social, and other forms of harm to the overall livelihood and wellbeing of individuals’ (Hampson, 2013: 281). Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy’s (2007: 3) view is that ‘protection of individuals from risks to the physical or psychological safety, dignity and well-being’ can be applied to the cultural sphere, including cultural values and mores, cultural institutions, religion and the educational systems that provide support and continuity for a society. While human security studies has examined the impact of globalization in both spreading wealth on the positive side and increasing inequalities and health risks on the negative (Hampson, 2013), the impact of globalized education in terms of negative impacts on ethno-religious and ethno-linguistic terms has not yet been developed.
The cultural dimension of security studies, sometimes regarded as a dimension of human security (see Friedman and Randeria, 2004), has mostly focused on those cultural values and attitudes that influence national security and national positions in relation to the geopolitical level, such as war-making, strategy, military doctrine and peace-keeping (Barnett, 2013); the role of higher education as a cultural institution in security constructions has not yet been adequately developed. If one uses the two most common definitions of culture in international relations and security studies for conventional purposes, I believe that it is obvious what a strong role higher education, particularly a globalized and foreign curriculum and teaching cadre, can have in the security of the culture, religion and social values of international recipients. The first definition is Geertz’s: ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (1973: 89), in which the role of higher education as the shaper, inculcator and transmitter of meaning is critical. Berger and Luckmann (1967) are also frequently used to demonstrate how society shapes the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world (see Barnett, 2013), a perspective in which the educational system would be a major force.
Security interests, as Katzenstein (1996: 2, 6) demonstrates, are ‘defined by actors who respond to cultural factors’ that shape national security policy. These security interests reflect norms and identities and the political and material conditions that nations face, where ‘identity’ is ‘a shorthand label for varying constructions of nation- and statehood’ and ‘culture’ is a term ‘that denotes collective models of nation-state authority or identity, carried by custom or law’. These factors shape the national security cultures that ‘provide the lens through which national authorities refract the structural position of the state’ and produce ‘the subjective understanding of objective threats to national security, the instruments relied upon to meet those threats, and the preference for unilateral or multilateral action’ (Sperling, 2010: 11), which results in highly divergent national security cultures internationally.
Cultural security studies also focuses on cultural and symbolic forms of power. It covers a range of positions: using culture as an instrument of power to pursue other interests; as an ideological rationalization for power dynamics; and, as Williams (2007) argues, as an approach to defining security as a form of culture and culture as a strategy, derived from Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice in order to overcome the social constructivist limitations of other approaches that do not incorporate concepts of power and strategy. It is from this last perspective that one can critique the cultural and symbolic power wielded by Western states who appeal to culture in the form of ‘liberal ideals, values and institutions, and even the end of history’ (Williams, 2007: 3). Williams also uses Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital that resides in security organizations that confer identity with symbolic power. However, this view, I would argue, needs to be expanded to include the university, which provides both training and credentialing for security organizations and equips individuals with the intellectual capital necessary in legitimizing symbolic capital of this kind. From a Bourdieusian perspective, cultural security as performed by education inculcates and manages the symbolic formation of national, cultural and religious identity, and the structures and processes that flow from this.
Many of the books on cultural security look at countries experiencing immigration from the developing world, including the Middle East (see van der Veer, 2004), and their impact on Western countries, producing notions of ‘fortress Europe’ and the ‘immigrant problem’ or the suppression of minorities in many countries around the world. This includes examining the roles that ethnicity, language and culture play in forming national identities and nation states (see Friedman and Randeria, 2004) as well as the impact on citizenship and national and cultural identity. This article suggests a ‘decentring’ of the discussion to look at the many types and flows of immigration, including that of the West into developing countries such as the UAE, and the potential impact this can have on society, culture and critical institutions such as education. In much the same way that Acharya (1997) argues for the shifting of the ethnocentric view of security studies that long dominated the field by focusing on what security is for the US and other Western countries, toward what security is for what was known as the Third, and now Developing, World, the university as an instrument of exported symbolic power needs analysis.
It is important to keep in mind that this shift does not argue for a universal ‘third’ perspective, but instead for a pluralistic view that is intended to represent those countries normally excluded from the dominant discourse. This form of pluralism illustrates another dimension of security studies that has to be kept in mind when working in the field of societal and cultural security on an international and comparative level. All countries have ‘unique particularities’ and historical experiences that shape their conceptions of security, including, as Al-Rodha (2008) argues, the stability of the region in which they are located and their natural resources. Other considerations that need to be added are post-colonial status, the need for cyber-security (as in the case of Estonia), the degree of immigration and whether this occurs through refugees or imported labour or as a major migration destination such as Canada, access to citizenship, the nature of the local population and its own ability to protect its culture and religion and, in a developing context, the degree of acquisition of higher education and necessary specializations.
Critical security theory, in pursuing its emancipationist interests, draws on three main sources: Gramsci’s definition of critical theory as standing ‘apart from the prevailing order and ask[ing] how that order came about’; Horkheimer’s critique of traditional theory as reifying ‘ideas into institutions which are then represented as immutable ‘facts of life’’; and critical theory that ‘rejects such rigid distinctions between subject and object, observer and observed, and lays bare the role played by theories and theorists through the role of reification’ (Bilgin, 2013: 96, 97). The Aberystwyth school of critical security studies, for example, represented by Booth (1997) and Alker (2005), examines the politics behind ‘scholarly concepts and policy agendas’, as well as decentring the state and military as ‘referent objects’ to consider a broader range of actors and objects in order to explore experiences of threat (see Bilgin, 2013: 102), from a predominantly overt normative approach (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010). In other words, they politicize security, including security intellectuals, in ethical terms.
It is in this tradition that the Copenhagen school of security studies lies – introducing concepts of security sectors (military, societal, political, economic, environmental), facilitating conditions involving speech acts and historical conditions that legitimize securitization, securitization as a process of constructing an issue or actor as an ‘existential threat’, regional security including a geographical area of security processes and dynamics and desecuritization as the process by which issues or actors are removed from the security realm to normal politics (McDonald, 2013: 73). Societal and cultural security as forms of critical security theory are usually dated from the beginning of what is generally called the ‘Copenhagen school’ with Buzan’s publication, People, States and Fear (1991), followed by Buzan and Wæver’s seminal Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (1993) and Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde’s Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), where the societal sector is examined for ‘patterns of identity and the desire to maintain cultural independence’ (p. 8). Some of these ideas are further developed in Buzan and Wæver’s Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (2003), which traces regional security dynamics that were created in part by decolonization after the Second World War, globalization and differing nation-state dynamics, emphasizing local perspectives and viewing external powers as ‘penetrative’ or ‘overlaid’.
In pursuing a theorizing purpose, the Copenhagen School shifted the focus from a traditional narrow definition of security based on the ‘material capabilities and the use and control of military force by states’ that ‘contrasts with the distinctions among military, political, economic, social and environmental security threats that affect not only states but also groups and individuals, as well as other nonstate actors’ (Katzenstein, 1996: 9). These conceptions now characterize the field of security studies, including the transnational levels of security and sub-national levels that one can observe in many of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ states, consisting of what Bilgin (2003) describes as part of human security where the state constitutes the major threat to citizens. One also has to regard the university as more extensive – it is part of an interconnected network of security intellectuals who also work on government contract, in thinktanks, as research personnel in political parties and in security agencies and branches (Neocleous, 2008). Security and surveillance have qualitatively grown, not only in the private sector (see Javers, 2010), but also in the educational environment as a recruiting site (e.g. see Zwerling, 2011).
Among the new concepts introduced by the Copenhagen school are securitization and desecuritization. ‘Securitization’ is defined by Wæver (2004a: 56) as follows, using broadened security theory in such a way that education and intellectuals can be seen as actors: Internationally (and increasingly in other contexts), the meaning of ‘security’ is what it does: someone (a securitising actor) points to a development or potentiality claiming that something or somebody (the referent object) with an inherent right to survive is existentially threatened and therefore extraordinary measures (most likely to be wielded by the securitising actor himself) are justified.
Critical security theory remains, though, a predominantly European and, to some extent, Canadian set of approaches that seems to have made less impact on a field that is arguably dominated by the US, which, according to Wæver (2004b), has remained staunchly offensively and defensively realist. This state of affairs remained so as late as 2010 (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010). Related critiques that also have relevance for higher education include feminist security theories that examine not only the impact of conflict on women but also the gendered manner in which war-planning and foreign policy-making are conducted, remaining imperialist security processes that impose identities (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010; Whitworth, 2013).
Post-colonial security perspectives, such as those of Ayoob, are aimed at critiquing literature grounded in a ‘Western/Eurocentric’ bias (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010), although I find in most critiques of the Western-Eurocentric a mostly US or UK perspective – rarely do I see the perspectives of Italy, Estonia or Poland portrayed in this overgeneralization. However, there are legitimate complaints for those in regions regularly excluded, whose role has been that of pawn or object in international power politics and who are now are targets of globalized markets. Ayoob, though, is generally criticized for his largely realist focus on the state; the extended logic of his argument can however be applied to a broader security theory encompassing the socio-cultural and the critical, grounded in the perspectives of those voices not normally engaged. For full legitimation, security studies in Islamic countries have to be grounded in Islamic principles in addition to non-Islamic scholarship. The Islamic intellectual tradition should, through its humanistic, hermeneutic, social science and related schools of shari’a, find a strong articulation.
Clearly one can see here the role that higher education plays in shaping and creating perspectives and justifications for security practices through the symbolic worlds created by intellectual fashion in which we think and work by providing the language, concepts, theories, models and ideologies that condition what we regard as important or unimportant and the forms they take. They also have the potential to critique prevailing ways of thinking and, for the critically oriented, the obligation to challenge hegemonic forces and provide alternatives that serve a greater human good. Booth and Vale (1997) see an important role for intellectuals in posing new security conceptions—ones, they argue, that have to come from within the peoples of a region. However, there are also limitations to even the emancipatory security approach advocated by, for example, Booth (1991). Ayoob (1995) has questioned this importation of Western theories into contexts from which they did not derive, such as that of the Middle East, where an indigenous security theory reflecting socio-cultural and political realities needs to be integrated. In these cases, globalized education originating in the UK, US or Australia can be seen as an impediment in the research and training of scholars seeking to produce a meaningful and pragmatic security theory to serve the perspectives and experiences of other regions.
A number of authors have begun to explore the role of education in security studies. For example, Mitin and Bolotin (1998) examine education’s role in national security, identifying a number of ways in which higher education can compromise state security. One case is the declining condition of the Russian higher education system – an institution which Mitin and Bolotin argue is essential in providing a secure foundation for the state in a number of ways, such as providing a highly qualified cadre for the economic and military/security sectors, adequate scientists to produce the technology they need and as a necessary foundation for the culture of a society to produce a shared system of values. There is a lesson here for countries that withdraw funding to higher education – without the mobilization of intellectual potential, all sectors of society suffer, particularly in periods of ‘economic slump’: Under such circumstances, first of all, higher education needs to form cadres for a future state of the economy with all its structural, technological, social and other innovations; in the second place, it has to serve as a kind of shock absorber for mounting unemployment among young people; and, third, it has to perform the function of preserving the nation’s cultural-educational and scientific potential. (Mitin and Bolotin, 1998: 64)
In examining the roles of institutional actors, Bigo (2008), from the Paris school of security studies, discusses the role of education in postcolonial states, where imperialist states now use paternalism, education and training as forms of colonization. An additional consideration, discussed by Tsuda (1999) in relation to the hegemonic role of English in what he regards as neo-colonialism and globalism that pervades international communication, is inequality at international conferences; the construction of social inequalities. He draws on Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986), which explores the undervaluation (or even exclusion) of a people’s culture while elevating the colonizers’ language and knowledge, producing ‘mental control’.
In all of these approaches and theories, the intellectual security elite play a number of roles: defining and establishing conceptions of security; determining what is included and referenced; establishing who is protected, victimized, marginalized or used instrumentally; deciding which systems of values are idealized and which demonized. They can also provide justifications, legitimation and apology for political agendas. The intellectual security elite conduct research into the technology and hardware of security, including psychological and social techniques drawn from the social sciences. Education can also be a site of security threat where systems exclude or marginalize populations from access to education, future livelihood and a decent standard of living, with implications for more fundamental levels of welfare such as access to food, shelter and healthcare. The administration of higher education plays a critical role in shaping the structure and policy of universities and securing resources for security-related research. The administrative role has increased and changed significantly since the rapid rise of the security industry in 2001 due to what Neocleous (2008: 184) calls the ‘commodification’ of security, aided by a ‘principle of venality’ in many disciplines vying for research and contract monies from the security state. It is also the site that credentials and trains the security intellectual in producing the speech acts that are necessary to the economics and politics of security (see Buzan et al., 1998; McDonald, 2008) and, from the perspective of a Foucaultian (1980; Aradau, 2010) analysis of power and knowledge, legitimizes globalized education. However, the critical role of higher education has played a very small role to date in the security studies field.
Globalized education as a socio-cultural threat
The purpose of this section is to review definitions of globalization and how the globalization of education may be understood as it relates to societal and cultural security. Prior to this we raise the issue of how educational administration is defined in institutional terms. The critique of neoliberal impacts on the university emphasizes downsizing and market-oriented pressures that have a negative impact on teaching and research, and the erosion of fundamental concepts of academic freedom, peer review, and the ‘scholarly community’ (see Schrecker, 2010). But most of this literature has stopped short of exploring the relationship between the educational sector and security studies. A critique of this relationship would have to include all forms of education – formal, informal and non-formal (Belle, 1982; Colardyn and Bjornavold, 2004) – in order to capture specialized training and degrees in the private sector (partially recognized in Germany as the ‘dual system’) and in areas of the public sector not conventionally included, such as programmes run by public service commissions, the military, the foreign service and the intelligence community. Through increased privatization, much of this work is also done through private companies with connections to university teaching and research programmes that serve security interests often through funding and personnel policies that shape their work.
In the Copenhagen school’s definition of securitization lies a model of societal functional differentiation into sectors that include the conventional social institutions of military, political, economic, societal or socio-cultural and environmental (Albert and Buzan, 2011: 418). While education on the surface would seem to fit into the societal or socio-cultural, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate education from other sectors under neoliberalism, as Albert and Buzan note with arts and religion that ‘cut across functional differentiation’ (p. 419) playing a critical role in each sector. These categories also conform to the many dimensions of globalization proposed, for example, by Ripsman and Paul (2010).
Examining the university in relation to security requires the integration of intelligence literature on higher education, a discussion that has been underway for some time. This transformation of the university is very well documented, particularly for the US (e.g. Chomsky et al., 1997; Cline, 1976; Diamond, 1992; Lewis, 1996; Lowen, 1997; Winks, 1987), including studies on various disciplines such as the social sciences (Robin, 2001; Simpson, 1998; Solovey and Cravens, 2012), history (Mitter and Major, 2004; Schrecker, 2004), anthropology (Wax, 2008), the natural sciences (Leslie, 1993; O’Mara, 2005; Reisch, 2005), the arts (Caute, 2003), leadership and management studies (Abella, 2009) and academic journal publishing and conferences (Saunders, 1999a), as well as research funding foundations (Saunders, 1999b) and related organizations such as the Rand Corporation that heavily influenced the methodological developments of the social sciences (Abella, 2009). A number of studies have been conducted on Soviet use of university research for military intelligence purposes (e.g. Birstein, 2001) and its use of psychiatry (Van Voren, 2010). Universities have always been a site of intelligence resources; however, after the Second World War, the intelligence community’s impact on university structure and governance created a qualitatively different organization (e.g. Sanders, 1979; Schrecker, 1986). In other words, security considerations, particularly in the US, have shaped not only the development of university administration and structure, but also many of its disciplines. The ‘hidden curriculum’ of American higher education has not solely been that of a capitalist agenda but also a political and foreign policy one, conducted in a variety of ways that integrate the entire security sector into the fabric of the educational sector. This is a topic that has been largely overlooked in educational administration, with the exception of Giroux (2007).
Globalization has a number of definitions depending on the discipline and critical approach taken; all are valuable in conceptualizing educational globalization and the many sectors that impinge on universities. One category is the economic. In Beck’s (1999) definition of the ‘risk society’, insecurities are produced by modernization – that is, the excesses of modern industrial society produced by neoliberal economies wedded to a ‘free market ideology’ that has not only adversely affected the environment but produced a six-fold multiplication of consumption in the richest countries, to the detriment of others. As Bilgin (2003: 217) points out, uncontrollable factors are treated as ‘threats that need to be met through emergency measures’, sometimes referred to in securitization studies as ‘extraordinary measures’ deemed necessary in going beyond the political process (Collins, 2002). A consequence of this ideology is that any territory, region or group that threatens this kind of hyper-capitalism can be designated a security threat, and any potential market or source of materials in the developing world as a legitimate target regardless of the negative consequences to their own security, whether related to state, society, culture or religion. Under this kind of economic regime, ‘industrial competitiveness and success in the international marketplace’ are considered to be prime security issues (Mandel, 1994: 37), legitimizing political and conventional security action in what was previously a non-security sector. The global promotion of ‘democratic’ governments and a market economy, by any necessary means (including educating the market ‘favourably’), can be seen to create contiguous institutions to benefit the home ‘market’ and create a more conducive body of key individuals who are more likely, I would argue, to be willing to pursue international trade and contracts with globalizing entrepreneurs from Western countries.
Al-Rodhan (2008) identifies a number of other features of globalization that have potential security and higher education implications. First, globalization creates economic interdependency at a high level, accompanied by increased cross-border activity and highly increased global communications technology that places pressure on states to maintain sovereign responsibility and protection of their internal social institutions. This is often accompanied by the impact of externally originating environmental degradation. In educational terms, there is increased foreign influence from expatriate staff, heightened cyber-security risk and protection from external economic decline, all of which can demand greater indigenous training and education. Al-Rodhan also draws on Ullman’s (1983: 133) broadened definition of national security that presages globalization effects, particularly in the policy field, a major responsibility for leadership and administration studies: An action or sequence of events that (1) threatens drastically and over a relatively brief span of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a state, or (2) threatens significantly to narrow the range of policy choices available to the government of a state or to private, nongovernmental entities (persons, groups, corporations) within the state.
There are two features that can be applied to globalized education as socio-cultural threats for recipient countries. First, an unmodified foreign curriculum can degrade indigenous culture, social relations, values and religion. Second, foreign curricula, teaching, administration and consultancy can directly affect the conceptual terms in which institutional and nation-building are conducted. A number of authors in the leadership, management and administration fields have reported dissatisfaction with Western literature and models, for example in the Middle East, with negative impacts of ‘corruption, abuse of power, weakening family ties, and increasing materialistic orientation’ (Abdalla and Al-Homoud, 2001: 507; Sharfuddin, 1987). Foreign models have two effects that create cultural security risks: first, they are not fully suitable to placement in another context, often disrupting indigenous structures and practices; second, they prevent the development of a locally or regionally appropriate model that preserves important values and relationships that define individual societies, including religious values, conceptions of authority and leadership and relevant economic and political practices. It is important from this perspective to place the integrity and coherence of a society at the centre of leadership, management and administration.
A wholly imported globalized curriculum can be a destructive instrument, particularly in the sensitive areas of leadership, management and administration, where vision, organizational missions, goals and structures are created; where senior authority can heavily influence the organizational culture and the impact of organizations on each other, especially regulative agencies. Research, teaching and consulting that does not integrate socio-cultural and political norms and structures can violate the requirements for societal security as defined by Wæver: [The] ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats … [consisting of] the sustainability, within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity and custom. (1993: 23)
The field of educational globalization is large and expanding rapidly, including researchers focused on the school system (e.g. Lee and Caldwell, 2011; Lauder et al., 2006; Lipman, 2004; Wiggan, 2011) and on higher education (Donn and Al Manthri, 2010; Maringe and Foskett, 2010; Wildavsky, 2010). Much of this critique is aimed at the globalization process as a commodification of the university, through packaging and branding its programmes, turning students into consumers and transforming faculty into industrial-style workers (de Bary, 2010; Molesworth et al., 2011). These changes enable education to participate on the international commodities market but truncate its value in human and moral terms as a contributor to the common good (see Altbach, 2002). The literature on the changing nature of the university examines how globalization affects all aspects of its nature and purpose – its administration, teaching and curriculum, roles, and the character of knowledge and knowing, and styles and topics of research – ultimately affecting the delineation of disciplines. What requires more critical development is the colonizing impact of the globalized university and its interconnections with other social institutions – particularly with the security sector, which is expanding rapidly and defining new roles for other sectors.
There is large research scope in connecting these bodies of literature: from the security sector, from the ‘intelligence’ use of the university and from the globalization of higher education literature. I see two other bodies of literature that are relevant to producing a theory of globalized higher education as representing societal and cultural security threats for educational administration. The first is the rapidly developing cross-cultural management literature that has expanded and decentred its scope since the early work of Hofstede, taking on a more international perspective; authors include Branine (2011) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2012), who take into consideration values and cultures in the non-Western world. Another body of literature that requires substantial development is the field of internationalization of curriculum, which too often is based on attracting foreign students to Western universities. For example, Galligan (2008), Jones and Killick (2013) and Whalley (1997), even though oriented toward introducing global perspectives, are still based in a Western higher education paradigm, and use primarily a Western foundation of theory and disciplinary structures.
Conclusion
Approaching issues in higher education is not a new approach, although it has yet to be developed in sufficient detail in the security studies literature as well as higher educational administration through theoretical and empirical studies. However, the approach is implicit in several bodies of literature, from concerns in the globalization literature to those raised in some of the comparative and international administration literature examining negative impacts on social institutions and culture (e.g. Dimmock and Walker, 2000). What is new here is the formal integration of forms of security studies critique and more explicit connection of the educational system to other social institutions that, while distinguishable and distinct, are interconnected in a web-like fashion with each other. The political, economic and security sectors are closely intertwined and increasingly becoming more so, financially, administratively, programmatically and in national policy. At the same time they are influenced by and influence the socio-cultural parts of society, at national, regional and global levels. They exist in a network of interdependent relationships and configurations.
One implication, particularly from a critical security perspective, is the status of ‘social, cultural and political discourses and practices’ as part of critical infrastructure in preserving societal cohesion and national identity, including social and cultural practices and values of meaning, human relations, governance and administration. This constitutes a shift from the conventional security approach to material critical infrastructure towards a linguistic and social constructivist perspective (Aradau, 2010: 492), for which education, including higher education, is a major institutional foundation. The relationship between ‘soft’ critical infrastructure and neoliberal capitalism and imperialism in producing insecurities has been explored by a number of authors. For example, Agathangelou and Ling’s (2004) postcolonial feminist critique has examined how the imperialist and colonizing character of the neoliberal world economy shapes the social relations of power affecting identities through includes discourse, mental frameworks, the agendas of international financial institutions, and, as Neocleous (2008) argues, more explicitly the university as an instrument of neoliberal security capitalism.
There are five major implications of socio-cultural threat: the denigration of knowledge and its creation, as well as the learning, teaching and research process aimed at humanistic ends; a homogenization of social values, attitudes, practices and cultural and religious systems into a secularized and commodified global system (see Lingard and Rizvi, 1998; Yang, 2003); the loss of human heritage along with the devaluing of many fields and creative constructions; the loss of reflection, critique and interpretation and many causal models for addressing the full range of scholarly disciplines and questions; and a potential backlash from those societies and cultures whose most closely held traditions and cultures are excluded.
From a leadership and administrative perspective, the state of education in a society is a national concern. It is in the professional preparation of those credentialed to serve in leading and policy-making positions whose conceptions relating to the most fundamental values of a society that influence their thoughts and actions, including how they construct the role of leadership, of authority and professionalism appropriate to the character of the society they serve. In other words, the continuity of the state and its society are security issues and all organizations and theoretical frameworks that shape or influence it are security factors.
The main argument here is that higher education and its administrators, teaching faculty, researchers, and sometimes consultants need to be regarded as security actors through the policies they craft and the manner in which they carry out their professional responsibilities, including their inter-institutional connections. Higher education is implicated in all forms and levels of security, from teaching children their own tradition and culture or faculty, to teaching graduate professional students leadership and administrative ethics and good organizational design, to expert trainers in special forces and researchers of the military–industrial–intelligence–academic complex. As such teachers and students are objects of security analysis, in their motivations, their political orientations, their moral disposition and the consequences of their work. Whether conscious of it or not, university intellectuals may serve the securitization agenda. As Neocleous argues (2008: 162): The constant reshaping of society, the project of security colonised the minds of the intelligentsia – shaping disciplinary knowledge by forging the very disciplines themselves and thus, in the process, generating a guardian class of social scientists for the security of the bourgeois order … [and playing] a key role in establishing certain forms of discourse as the ‘common sense’ of politics.