Boomerangs and blind spots: Reconsidering Hannah Arendt’s imperialism thesis for decolonising education

Abstract

This paper revisits Hannah Arendt’s reflections on imperialism and colonial violence to explore their relevance for contemporary debates on decolonising education. While Arendt has been critiqued for her Eurocentric blind spots – particularly her neglect of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism – her ‘boomerang thesis’, which describes how imperial practices abroad return to haunt the metropole, offers a provocative entry point for considering how colonial logics persist within educational systems. Drawing on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, this paper situates her insights within broader decolonial debates, comparing them with key perspectives from Latin American, African, and Indigenous decolonial thought. Rather than discarding Arendt altogether, the paper argues for a critical appropriation of her work to reflect on how colonial violence and bureaucratic dehumanisation continue to structure postcolonial education systems. This approach offers conceptual tools to critique depoliticised or co-opted versions of decolonisation and to reassert its radical potential.

Introduction

In the current moment of intensifying authoritarianism, epistemic repression, and growing ethno-nationalisms, Hannah Arendt’s political thought has experienced a notable resurgence (e.g. Biesta, 2010, 2016; Dillabough, 2020; Lilja, 2018; Veck and Gunter, 2020; Zembylas, 2020, 2022, 2025b). Her analysis of totalitarianism, imperialism, and bureaucratic dehumanisation has been widely cited in response to contemporary crises – from the erosion of democratic norms to the rise of authoritarian and populist strongmen such as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán (Grenier, 2017; Williams, 2017). In educational theory and philosophy, Arendt has often been invoked to articulate the importance of cultivating judgement, plurality, and civic responsibility in the face of growing political and moral indifference (Biesta, 2010, 2016; Veck and Gunter, 2020). Arendt’s work thus continues to serve as a vital touchstone for thinking about politics and education today. Yet her resurgence takes place in a wider intellectual landscape that is itself shifting. Collective interventions such as Peters et al.’s (2022) ‘Public Intellectuals in the Age of Viral Modernity’ remind us that the contemporary role of educators, theorists, and intellectuals is inseparable from the viral circulation of ideas and the contested terrain of public discourse. Like Peters et al., who argue for a critical engagement with the conditions under which intellectual life is produced and mediated today, this paper seeks to interrogate how inherited political concepts can be re-worked to address urgent global questions.

In particular, this paper focuses on a central tension in Arendt’s intellectual oeuvre: while her work is frequently praised for its conceptual clarity and ethical force, especially in relation to totalitarianism, her treatment of racism and colonialism remains highly contested (e.g. Gines, 2014; Grosse, 2006; King and Stone, 2007; Lee, 2007, 2011; Mantena, 2010; Owens, 2017; Samnotra, 2018; Temin, 2022; Weinman, 2022). These limitations in turn raise pressing questions for scholars concerned with decolonising education, who have emphasised the need to confront colonial legacies, epistemic exclusions, and racial injustice in educational theory and practice (e.g. Andreotti et al., 2015; Mikulan and Zembylas, 2024; Stein, 2023; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Zembylas, 2023, 2024, 2025a). Some critics have long pointed to Arendt’s Eurocentric blind spots, especially her failure to grasp the structural dimensions of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism (Gines, 2014). Others, however, argue that certain aspects of her work – most notably her analysis of imperialism and her so-called ‘boomerang thesis’ – contain underdeveloped but valuable insights for understanding how colonial forms of violence migrate back to the heart of Western political systems (Temin, 2022). As Arendt (1951/1973) argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a return of imperialism to the homeland enables totalitarian rule by normalising practices of domination and dehumanisation abroad that later reappear in domestic policy. This claim, I argue, resonates with decolonial theorists who emphasise how colonial logics – such as racial hierarchies, extractivism, and technocratic control – continue to shape institutions like education in the postcolonial present (Mikulan and Zembylas, 2024; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Zembylas, 2024, 2025a).

Given the global proliferation of decolonisation as both a slogan and an academic imperative (Moosavi, 2020), revisiting Arendt’s imperialism thesis may offer both cautionary and constructive insights. On the one hand, her failure to engage with Indigenous and Black radical traditions limits her usefulness as a decolonial theorist. On the other hand, her emphasis on how political violence becomes routinised through bureaucratic and technocratic means resonates with contemporary concerns about how educational institutions, even those claiming to pursue decolonisation, may reproduce colonial logics through depoliticised procedures and market-driven frameworks. In this light, Arendt’s work prompts critical reflection on how decolonisation can be co-opted by managerial discourses that prioritise performative change over structural transformation, thereby neutralising its political potency.

This paper asks, then: Can Arendt’s critique of imperialism and totalitarianism inform decolonial approaches to education despite her Eurocentrism? In particular, how might the boomerang thesis help illuminate the enduring traces of empire in the everyday practices of schools and universities? Rather than offering either a wholesale endorsement or dismissal of Arendt, this paper takes up the challenge posed by Feldman (2024: 21), who suggests that ‘we can use Arendt against Arendt’ to confront the limitations of her worldview while salvaging insights that remain politically generative. Through this lens, then, I examine whether a critical engagement with Arendt can contribute to the project of decolonising education.

The paper is divided into four sections. The first section revisits Arendt’s analysis of imperialism, particularly her boomerang thesis, to explore its educational resonances in relation to the normalisation of violence and the bureaucratisation of oppression. The second examines the colonial blind spots and racial silences in Arendt’s work, highlighting the limitations these pose for decolonial thinking. In the third section, I turn to contemporary debates on decolonising education, outlining the contested meanings and political tensions that underlie its institutional uptake. Finally, the fourth section engages in a critical appropriation of Arendt’s ideas to consider how her insights into violence, authority, and political responsibility can inform, and also complicate, educational efforts toward decolonisation. Together, these sections aim to offer a nuanced reading that neither dismisses Arendt’s relevance nor overlooks the ethical and epistemic challenges of drawing on her work in decolonial contexts.

Arendt’s boomerang thesis and its educational resonances

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1973) remains one of her most enduring contributions to political thought (Lee, 2007, 2011). In particular, her ‘boomerang thesis’ suggests that imperial violence and domination, once deployed in colonial contexts, do not remain confined to distant geographies but inevitably return to the imperial centre, reshaping its political culture, institutions, and moral fabric (Dahl, 2018). As Arendt (1951/1973) shows through her analysis, the lessons of colonial administration were first learned in the colonies and then applied at home – an unsettling indication that the techniques of control and dehumanisation tested in the colonies became templates for authoritarianism and bureaucratic tyranny in Europe (Temin, 2022).

A close reading of Arendt’s (1951/1973) argumentation reveals the importance of this insight. She contends that the imperial ventures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created a new political figure: the ‘imperialist character’, shaped by the routine exercise of arbitrary power over colonised populations (Benhabib, 1996). This figure, in turn, fostered a political culture that normalised the suspension of rights, the instrumentalisation of human beings, and the valorisation of expansion over accountability. As she writes, the creation of permanent overseas colonial administration could ‘imperialise the whole nation […] to combine domestic and foreign policy in such a way as to organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples’ (Arendt, 1973: 155). What was once perceived as suitable only for managing ‘uncivilised’ peoples eventually infiltrated domestic politics, laying the groundwork for the rise of totalitarian regimes. In this respect, Arendt identifies imperialism not merely as a historical episode but as a formative logic that erodes the boundary between rule abroad and governance at home (Temin, 2022).

I argue that Arendt’s boomerang thesis offers a compelling framework for examining the lingering effects of imperialism on contemporary educational systems. Much like how colonial governance normalised surveillance, classification, and discipline in imperial contexts, modern education systems frequently reproduce these logics under the guise of meritocracy, inclusion, and progress (Pashby, 2016; Williams, 2016). Bureaucratic structures, standardised curricula, and managerial approaches to schools and universities may appear benign, but when viewed through Arendt’s lens, they echo the imperial technologies of control that were once directed at colonial subjects (Ball, 1984; Sutoris, 2022). As Arendt (1963/2006) warns, the real danger lies not only in overt violence but also in the banal, slow, systemic erosion of plurality, critical thought, and genuine political agency. Similarly, in educational institutions, the routinised enforcement of standardised testing, exclusionary curricula, and managerialism can sustain epistemic and social forms of violence that depoliticise students and teachers alike (Connell, 2013; Lissovoy and McLaren, 2003; Wheeldon, 2022). This dynamic is particularly salient in postcolonial and settler-colonial contexts, where education has historically been a vehicle for assimilation and erasure (Ball, 1984; Stein, 2023; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Arendt’s boomerang thesis, then, helps illuminate how the very tools developed to subjugate colonised peoples – hierarchical knowledge regimes, disciplinary surveillance, and bureaucratic rule – have become embedded in the educational apparatus of the global North as well. These structures do not merely reflect administrative convenience; they constitute a political legacy of imperial domination that continues to shape the moral and epistemic horizons of education (Wheeldon, 2022).

One of the clearest contemporary illustrations of imperial logics in education lies in the rise of surveillance and datafication. In colonial contexts, governance was premised on monitoring populations – tracking movements, classifying groups, and recording behaviours – in order to secure control. These practices were justified through the rhetoric of ‘civilising missions’ and the production of statistical knowledge that ranked colonised subjects along racial and cultural hierarchies. Today, similar dynamics are evident in the pervasive use of digital technologies in schools. Learning management systems, biometric attendance trackers, and algorithmic monitoring tools generate vast datasets about students’ behaviour, participation, and even emotions. While these technologies are often framed as promoting efficiency or personalisation, they also reduce learners to data points to be measured, classified, and compared (Daliri-Ngametua and Hardy, 2022; Humphreys, 2017). In this way, the imperial logic of surveillance – the conversion of human life into quantifiable units for the purposes of governance – persists in educational data infrastructures. As Shahjahan (2016) argues, the global push for metrics-driven reforms promoted by the OECD or other international organisations reflects a technocratic mode of control that echoes the colonial rationality of managing populations.

Standardised testing provides another illustration of how imperial legacies endure in contemporary education (Au, 2009). In colonial settings, examinations were deployed to enforce hierarchies, separating those deemed capable of assimilating into colonial bureaucracies from those relegated to subordinate positions. These assessments were not only tools of evaluation but also mechanisms of selection and exclusion, reinforcing the superiority of Western knowledge while disqualifying Indigenous epistemologies. Today, standardised testing continues to function as a gatekeeping mechanism in education. Examinations such as the SAT, A-levels, or national curricula assessments purport to measure ‘merit’ but often reproduce socio-economic and racial inequalities. Connell (2013) and Lissovoy and McLaren (2003) have shown that such systems disproportionately disadvantage working-class and racialised students, embedding systemic bias under the guise of objectivity. From an Arendtian perspective, this routinisation of inequality exemplifies the banality of systemic violence: bureaucrats and educators may simply be ‘following procedures’, yet the procedures themselves sustain deep injustices.

Managerialism in education further illustrates the boomerang effect. The proliferation of quality assurance mechanisms, audit cultures, and performance indicators in universities and schools transforms education into a technocratic exercise (Shore and Wright, 2015). Teachers and academics become implementers of policy rather than independent agents of judgement, while students are framed as customers or outputs in a competitive system. This echoes Arendt’s warning that imperial bureaucracies corrode political responsibility by embedding individuals in rule-bound systems that absolve them of accountability. Humphreys (2017) notes that in such contexts, educators are encouraged to prioritise compliance with targets over the cultivation of critical thought. For example, Younes and Nadler Gomez (2023) show how UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development policies risk reproducing colonial logics by framing educators as agents of technocratic implementation rather than participants in political transformation. As with colonial bureaucracies, the danger is not only the imposition of control but the internalisation of its logic, whereby educators come to see themselves primarily as accountable to metrics rather than to communities of learning.

In particular, Arendt’s concern that imperialism ‘produced moral and psychological patterns of racism’ (1973: 207) resonates with critiques of Eurocentric curricula that privilege Western epistemologies while marginalising Indigenous, Black, and other subaltern knowledge systems (Andreotti et al., 2015). The implicit assumption of universality in such curricula reflects the imperial logic of ‘civilising missions’, in which Western norms are presented as objective and superior. This perpetuates what decolonial scholars, after Fricker (2007), identify as epistemic injustice: the systematic devaluation of non-Western ways of knowing and being (Pitts, 2017; Santos, 2014). Recent controversies around history curricula illustrate this point. In Britain, the debates over including colonial history in the GCSE syllabus show how curricula often sanitise empire, presenting it as a story of progress rather than domination (e.g. see Swartz, 2022). Similarly, in Canada, Indigenous scholars have critiqued provincial curricula for relegating Indigenous histories and epistemologies to optional modules (e.g. see Battiste, 2013). These exclusions sustain the imperial narrative of Western superiority and reproduce epistemic hierarchies.

At the same time, as Temin (2022) points out, Arendt’s framing of imperialism remains too focused on its corrosive effects on the metropole, with insufficient attention paid to the violence experienced by the colonised themselves. While Arendt recognises that imperialism deforms the political character of the imperial centre, she tends to treat colonial subjects as instruments or victims rather than agents of resistance. This omission constrains the emancipatory potential of her critique when applied to decolonising education, where attention to Indigenous and anti-colonial epistemologies is crucial. Moreover, Arendt’s distinction between empire, imperialism, and colonisation – in which she casts colonisation as a benign transplant of political institutions rather than a system of dispossession – demonstrates a Eurocentric bias that weakens her credibility among decolonial scholars (Temin, 2022). For example, suggests Temin, her tendency to romanticise Roman and British forms of empire as more orderly and lawful than modern imperialism overlooks the deep violences embedded in those regimes.

Nevertheless, by reading Arendt critically and contextually, I argue that we can salvage elements of her thought to interrogate how education remains entangled in imperial legacies. In doing so, we might confront Arendt’s blind spots while drawing on her insights to imagine educational futures oriented toward justice, plurality, and epistemic dignity. For example, her boomerang thesis provides a productive conceptual tool for tracing the imperial origins of bureaucratic dehumanisation in education and other spheres of social and political life. By linking surveillance, datafication, standardised testing, and managerialism directly to imperial logics, we can see how education is not only shaped by colonial afterlives but actively reproduces them. Arendt compels us to reflect on how the tools of domination persist through the structures we inhabit – and to ask what kind of world our educational practices continue to make possible. While her framework requires supplementation by decolonial and anti-racist perspectives, its resonance in our current moment of political polarisation is undeniable.

Colonial blind spots and racial silences in Arendt’s work

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of imperialism and totalitarianism has been rightly lauded for its depth and insight, yet her work also contains troubling omissions and silences, particularly around issues of race, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. These blind spots have generated significant critiques across Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial scholarship (e.g. see Gines, 2014; Owens, 2017; Smith, 2022; Temin, 2022). In this section, I engage with these critiques and reflect on why Arendt’s limited engagement with race and colonial violence matters for education today, especially in contexts where there are growing demands for decolonising education. Crucially, I argue that Arendt’s silences should not lead to wholesale dismissal. Instead, by situating her work in dialogue with decolonial thinkers, we can develop a more nuanced perspective that both confronts her exclusions and reorients her insights toward more emancipatory ends.

Central to these critiques is the claim that Arendt, while recognising the corrosive effects of imperialism on European political life, failed to adequately acknowledge the lived realities of racialised and colonised peoples. As Gines (2014) demonstrates in Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, Arendt’s analyses of race and racism are marred by Eurocentric assumptions and occasional essentialism. She not only reproduced harmful stereotypes about African peoples but also failed to grasp white supremacy as a structuring force in American political life (see also, Owens, 2017). For example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt referred to Africans as savages and treated African societies as politically undeveloped, a framing that implicitly justified colonial paternalism (Gines, 2014: 92; see also, Bernasconi, 2007).

A particularly notorious example that raised considerable critiques is her 1959 essay ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, where she opposed the use of federal power to enforce school desegregation in the American South (Arendt, 1959, 1968). Arendt argued that desegregation, particularly involving children, represented an improper politicisation of education. She claimed that Black children were being instrumentalised as symbols rather than protected as minors. Critics, however, have pointed out that this argument ignored the structural realities of segregation and white supremacy in the U.S. context (Gines, 2014; Owens, 2017; Smith, 2022). Arendt’s insistence – shaped by her experiences in Nazi Germany – on a rigid boundary between the political and the social led her to overlook the extent to which education has always been a site of struggle for marginalised communities.

Arent’s discomfort with Black political movements extended even further. As Gines (2014) and King (2015) observe, Arendt dismissed demands for Black Studies and African languages as culturally regressive, and opposed open admissions policies designed to address racial exclusion in higher education. In doing so, she disregarded what we now call epistemic injustice: the ways in which knowledge production itself is racialised and exclusionary. Arendt’s neglect of race and colonial violence extended beyond the U.S. context. She consistently refused to recognise the political significance of the ‘Third World’. In critiquing global student movements, she disparaged Third World solidarity as an ideological illusion (Owens, 2017). Yet, for activists and scholars from the Global South, such solidarity was a vital political horizon – an attempt to forge connections across diverse geographies of oppression. Arendt’s inability to grasp this reveals her Eurocentric orientation and her tendency to treat non-Western actors as peripheral to political modernity (Temin, 2022).

Contrasting Arendt with decolonial thinkers highlights what her framework lacks and what can be gained by engaging her critically. Fanon (1963) emphasised the psychic and material violence of colonisation, arguing that decolonisation requires not just institutional reform but also a profound reconstitution of the colonised psyche. Wynter (2003) extended this analysis by demonstrating how colonialism shaped epistemologies, challenging the universality of the Western category of ‘Man’ and calling for new modes of being and knowing. Simpson (2014) has similarly insisted that education cannot be decolonised without centring Indigenous epistemologies and contesting settler-state authority (see also, Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2006). Taken together, these thinkers foreground dimensions that Arendt neglected: the role of colonialism in shaping subjectivities, knowledge systems, and ontologies. In this sense, they emphasise that decolonisation is not merely about restoring democratic plurality but also about dismantling the epistemic and material hierarchies that structure education.

At first glance, Arendt’s blind spots might suggest that her work offers little to decolonising education. Yet the value of engaging Arendt’s work lies precisely in holding together her insights and her limitations. As noted earlier, Arendt’s critique of bureaucratic dehumanisation and the erosion of judgement resonate powerfully in today’s educational landscape, where technocratic reforms and managerial logics often depoliticise learning (Zembylas, 2025a). But these insights must be supplemented with the recognition, articulated by decolonial and Indigenous thinkers such as Fanon, Wynter, and Simpson, that colonialism operates not only through bureaucracies but also through racial hierarchies and epistemic exclusions. For example, an illustration can be found in debates about student protests and racial justice in universities. Arendt’s dismissal of Black activism as irrational resonates uncomfortably with contemporary attempts to criminalise or delegitimise student protests and movements. However, drawing on decolonial, feminist and Indigenous thinkers, we can reinterpret such activism not as threats to order but as expressions of alternative political and epistemological worlds. In this way, ‘using Arendt against Arendt’ (Feldman, 2024: 21) means reclaiming her insights into the dangers of bureaucratic conformity while resisting her own inclination to pathologise non-Western forms of resistance.

In educational contexts, Arendt’s omissions have significant consequences. Her insistence on the separation of education from politics risks reinforcing dominant ideologies that present schooling as neutral and meritocratic (Veck and Gunter, 2020; Zembylas, 2020, 2025b). This framing obscures how curricula, assessment practices, and institutional structures are shaped by colonial logics. Standardised testing regimes disproportionately disadvantage racialised students, while Eurocentric curricula continue to marginalise Indigenous and Black histories (Cunningham, 2018). Moreover, her portrayal of Black political actors as motivated by rage delegitimises righteous indignation, framing it as disorder rather than as a demand for justice – a framing that continues to echo in educational policies and discourses that suppress dissent. At the same time, Arendt’s attention to how imperial practices corrode political judgement can still be productively mobilised. For example, her critique of bureaucratic dehumanisation helps illuminate how global education reforms driven by international organisations such as the OECD and UNESCO depoliticise education through performance metrics and managerial frameworks (Shahjahan, 2016; Younes and Nadler Gomez, 2023). By combining this with decolonial critiques of epistemic injustice, we gain a fuller account of how both technocratic procedures and racial hierarchies perpetuate colonial logics in education.

In summary, Arendt’s failure to engage substantively with anti-Black racism and settler colonialism reveals profound limitations in her political thought. Yet, as this discussion has suggested, her work need not be discarded. Rather, it can be read as a terrain of struggle – a site where insights and blind spots collide, and where decolonial thinkers help redirect her concepts toward more emancipatory purposes. Arendt’s analysis of imperialism and totalitarianism exposes the dangers of bureaucratic domination, while decolonial and Indigenous thinkers remind us that such domination cannot be understood apart from the racial and epistemic violence of colonialism. Thus, engaging Arendt critically allows us to salvage her warnings about the erosion of plurality and political agency, while simultaneously acknowledging that her silences risk reinforcing the very exclusions that decolonisation seeks to undo. In this sense, Arendt’s work is not a ready-made template but a provocation: it invites educators and scholars to interrogate the contradictions of using Eurocentric frameworks for decolonial purposes and to imagine how her tools might be turned back on her own exclusions. This critical synthesis highlights both the risks and the possibilities of engaging Arendt in projects of decolonising education.

Decolonising education: Contested meanings and divergent standpoints

The call to decolonise education has gained remarkable traction in recent years, appearing in institutional mission statements, student demands, activist platforms, and academic discourse across the globe (Moosavi, 2020). Yet this apparent consensus belies a deeply contested and divergent field of meaning. What does it mean to decolonise education? Who defines its goals and methods? And what happens when this concept is taken up by institutions or actors that may undermine its radical political intent? This section explores the multiple genealogies and meanings of decolonising education, engaging with key insights from Latin American, African, and Indigenous perspectives. My analysis also considers how Hannah Arendt, despite her limitations, might offer conceptual tools for critiquing the bureaucratisation or co-optation of decoloniality in education.

At its most radical, decolonising education demands a profound rethinking of the foundations of knowledge, pedagogy, and institutional structure (Andreotti et al., 2015). It involves not only addressing the historical legacies of colonialism but also dismantling the ongoing forms of epistemic, cultural, and political domination that shape educational systems today. Scholars such as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) argue that decoloniality is not simply about including more diverse content but about delinking from the colonial matrix of power that continues to organise what counts as valid knowledge, who is authorised to teach, and how learning is valued. In the Latin American context, Mignolo (2009) and Quijano (2000) theorise coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism – an enduring structure of power that operates through Eurocentric epistemologies and capitalist modernity. Education, from this perspective, has historically functioned as a site for the reproduction of these logics, marginalising Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other non-Western forms of knowledge (Mikulan and Zembylas, 2024; Stein, 2023; Zembylas, 2025a). Walsh (2018) deepens this critique by highlighting the need for a decolonial praxis that is situated, relational, and accountable to the struggles of historically excluded communities. For her, decolonising education would mean creating spaces where alternative epistemologies can flourish – not merely coexist, but challenge and reshape dominant paradigms (see also Santos, 2014).

African scholars have offered parallel critiques. Mbembe (2016), writing in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa, argues that universities must confront the colonial foundations of their institutional culture, curricula, and modes of governance. For Mbembe, the decolonisation of knowledge requires not only the dismantling of Eurocentric epistemologies but also a serious engagement with African intellectual traditions and ways of knowing. He views the university as a global site of power whose decolonisation demands a rethinking of its ontological and epistemological assumptions, as well as its spatial and symbolic architectures. Similarly, Jansen (2023; Jansen et al., 2025) critiques the instrumentalisation of decolonisation discourse, warning that the term is often reduced to symbolic gestures or identity-based politics that leave underlying structures intact. Jansen calls for a rigorous focus on systemic change, urging educators to distinguish between performative declarations of decolonisation and substantive, often uncomfortable, forms of institutional transformation (see also Zembylas, 2024, 2025a).

Indigenous scholars such as Smith (2021), Simpson (2014), and Tuck and Yang (2012) have further expanded the decolonial horizon by situating education within the settler-colonial context. For them, decolonisation is not a metaphor but a call for the repatriation of land, the revitalisation of Indigenous languages and epistemologies, and the dismantling of settler-colonial institutions. Tuck and Yang (2012) famously caution against the metaphorisation of decolonisation, arguing that when decoloniality becomes a vague stand-in for inclusion or diversity, it risks masking the material and political demands of Indigenous sovereignty. These scholars insist that educational institutions must reckon not only with historical injustices but also with the ongoing structures of occupation, extraction, and erasure that define settler-colonial states. Decolonising education, in this view, is inseparable from land politics and requires a shift in pedagogical paradigms to honour relationality, reciprocity, and Indigenous governance structures. Their work challenges educators to go beyond symbolic recognition toward material transformation and ethical responsibility.

Taken together, these diverse strands of decolonial thought challenge the idea that education can be reformed simply by adding content or adjusting pedagogical technique. They call instead for structural transformation of what counts as knowledge, who gets to produce it, and how educational institutions operate. Yet the growing popularity of the term decolonisation has also led to its appropriation by institutions, corporations, and even authoritarian regimes. As decolonisation becomes institutionalised, its radical edge often becomes blunted. Universities may establish decolonial task forces, rebrand curricula, or hire diversity consultants while continuing to uphold the same structures of exclusion and marketisation that have long defined higher education (Stein, 2023). In some cases, right-wing movements have also appropriated the rhetoric of decolonisation to critique globalisation, multiculturalism, or perceived liberal elites (Zembylas, 2025a). For example, nationalist leaders in parts of Europe and South Asia have invoked anti-colonial language to promote ethno-nationalist agendas (Lewis and Lall, 2024).

This instrumentalisation of decolonial discourse raises urgent questions. What happens when decoloniality is reduced to institutional branding? When it becomes a checkbox in accreditation processes or a slogan in university marketing campaigns? And how might we resist these tendencies without abandoning the term altogether? It is here that Arendt’s insights – particularly her critique of bureaucratic dehumanisation and her boomerang thesis – can be usefully re-engaged. Although Arendt did not write about decolonisation per se, her concern with how political action is hollowed out by administrative rationality remains strikingly relevant. In The Human Condition (1958) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), Arendt warns of the danger of reducing politics to procedure, action to compliance, and judgement to technocratic metrics. Applied to the context of decolonising education, Arendt’s critique helps illuminate how decoloniality can be stripped of its political and ethical force when absorbed into institutional frameworks that prioritise efficiency, audit culture, and managerial consensus over dissensus, disruption, and structural change. Her emphasis on plurality, political action, and the public realm reminds us that genuine educational transformation cannot be achieved through prescribed templates or technocratic solutions. Instead, it must preserve open spaces for contestation, critical judgement, and the rearticulation of shared worlds – spaces in which the very meaning, stakes, and purposes of decolonisation remain open to dispute and redefinition, rather than being settled by institutional decree or policy fiat.

Ultimately, the contested nature of decolonising education is not a weakness but a sign of its vitality. Rather than seeking a unified definition, we might embrace its multiplicity as a space of political and epistemic experimentation. But doing so requires clarity about what decolonisation is not: it is not mere inclusion, it is not institutional window dressing, and it is not compatible with the continued dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies. In this spirit, decolonising education becomes a horizon of struggle rather than a policy goal – a continuous effort to unsettle inherited categories, reimagine collective futures, and build educational policies and practices that are accountable to histories of violence and possibilities for repair.

What might Arendt have said about the populist or bureaucratic co-option of decolonisation? Given her suspicion of ideological movements and her defense of republican principles, she may have been wary of how decolonial discourse is used to mask new forms of domination or to consolidate institutional power under the guise of progress. Her critique of totalitarianism and concern with the erosion of genuine political action suggest she would likely have been critical of decolonisation becoming a depoliticised slogan or a technocratic tool. Yet her failure to engage with Indigenous sovereignty, Black radical thought, or Third World solidarities limits her capacity to fully grasp the stakes of decolonial struggles. Arendt’s thought, in this sense, must itself be decolonised – its insights extracted and repurposed in dialogue with the very traditions it neglects. This requires not only a critical interrogation of her silences but also a creative reworking of her concepts in the service of anti-colonial pedagogical projects.

Using Arendt against Arendt: Critical appropriation for educational praxis on decolonisation

Having traced both the contributions and limitations of Hannah Arendt’s thought regarding imperialism, racism, and colonialism, this final section turns to the possibility of critically appropriating her work for contemporary efforts toward the decolonisation of education. The question at the heart of this discussion is not simply whether Arendt can be used productively, but how such use can be responsibly pursued. A methodology of critical appropriation requires that we be explicit about the conditions under which Arendt’s insights can be salvaged, and equally clear about the dangers of reinscribing the Eurocentrism that decolonial scholarship seeks to challenge. What makes appropriation possible, then, is not the wholesale adoption of her categories but their careful re-contextualisation in light of decolonial and anti-racist critiques. This means that the appropriation of Arendt is always partial and provisional: one can salvage certain insights if they can illuminate the political stakes of education while at the same time acknowledging – and, where necessary, correcting – their limits. In the discussion below, I offer some provisional criteria that may guide the decision about which Arendtian insights can be salvaged and how these are positioned in relation to decolonial and Indigenous epistemologies without reinscribing Eurocentrism.

One of the criteria can be diagnostic power. Arendt’s analyses of judgement, plurality, and the banality of evil retain a striking ability to reveal how domination operates through seemingly ordinary practices. These concepts are useful insofar as they help us see how standardised testing, audit regimes, or technocratic curricula erode the conditions of political judgement and reproduce inequality under the guise of neutrality (Ball, 2012; Biesta, 2010). They help us diagnose the ways in which the violence of empire is not only spectacular but banal – embedded in the everyday routines of schooling and higher education.

A second criterion is what might be called transformability. Some Arendtian concepts can only be useful if they are reinterpreted and stretched beyond their original horizons. For example, her idea of plurality was developed with a Eurocentric frame of reference and excluded Indigenous and non-Western ontologies. Yet, if reworked, plurality can serve as a reminder that decolonisation requires not just the inclusion of diverse voices but the recognition of different onto-epistemologies and ways of being. Similarly, her notion of judgement – understood as an ‘enlarged mentality’ (Arendt, 1982) that considers the perspectives of others – can be mobilised to encourage educators to resist the homogenising pressures of managerial reform. But such appropriation is possible only if judgement is redefined in dialogue with decolonial thought, where ‘the other’ is not an abstract interlocutor but a situated voice, rooted in histories of colonisation and resistance.

A third criterion concerns accountability. Any use of Arendt must remain accountable to Indigenous, Black, and decolonial scholarship, rather than allowing her work to displace these traditions. Appropriation needs to acknowledge the positionality of Arendt’s insights and situate them within a wider intellectual field in which decolonial thinkers hold epistemic priority. This means, for example, that Arendt’s analysis of bureaucratic domination can be placed in conversation with Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence or Wynter’s critique of the category of Man – but not in a way that subsumes or erases the latter. To appropriate Arendt responsibly is to accept that she cannot speak where she chose to remain silent, and to foreground the traditions that supply what she omitted.

Taken together, these criteria suggest that the methodology of critical appropriation is not about rehabilitating Arendt as a decolonial theorist but about positioning her as a limited, situated interlocutor. This involves a double movement: using her concepts to critique the bureaucratic erosion of politics in education, while simultaneously turning those same concepts back against her Eurocentric exclusions. For example, her warning about the bureaucratisation of education can sharpen our critique of how institutional decolonisation is often reduced to box-ticking exercises or the superficial diversification of curricula (Moosavi, 2020). Yet, if left unmodified, her insistence on separating politics from education risks reproducing the very depoliticisation that decolonial projects resist. A critical appropriation thus entails salvaging the diagnostic force of her critique of bureaucracy while rejecting the apolitical implications she herself drew (see also Birmingham, 2006; Stonebridge, 2017).

This methodological orientation also requires vigilance about the politics of citation. To invoke Arendt in debates on decolonisation without simultaneously engaging decolonial or Indigenous scholars such as Fanon, Wynter, Simpson, Tuck and Yang, or Smith would be to recentre European thought at the expense of decolonial traditions. Appropriation here means citation with tension: Arendt needs to be read alongside and against thinkers whose work arises from the lived histories of colonialism and racial violence. In teaching, this could translate into pairing Arendt with Indigenous and decolonial texts – not to create a harmonised synthesis, but to foreground the dissonance between frameworks. Such dissonance is not a problem to be solved but a resource for cultivating what Arendt (2018) herself called ‘thinking without a banister’: the capacity to inhabit and navigate irreducible plurality.

Needless to say, there are considerable risks in the methodology of appropriation. For example, there is always the danger that Arendt’s voice, given her canonical status, will overshadow others, or that her concepts will be taken as universal rather than situated. But I would argue that these risks can be mitigated by making explicit the criteria and limits of appropriation, as discussed earlier. Arendt’s concepts are valuable insofar as they clarify how domination becomes banal, how judgement is eroded, and how plurality is threatened, but they cannot, on their own, account for the racial and colonial structures that shape education. Only by anchoring her insights within decolonial epistemologies can we prevent appropriation from sliding into a reinscription of Eurocentrism. In practice, then, the methodology of critical appropriation means reading Arendt neither as a hero nor as a foil, but as a thinker whose categories can be refashioned to illuminate certain dynamics of educational domination while being constantly checked against their colonial blind spots. Her critique of bureaucracy can help explain the hollowing out of decolonisation into managerial procedures, but it must be supplemented by decolonial accounts of epistemic injustice. Her notion of plurality can help expose the dangers of tokenistic inclusion, but it must be transformed by Indigenous notions of relationality and land-based knowledges. Her emphasis on judgement can help resist standardisation, but it must be situated within contexts where judgement is bound up with historical responsibility to colonised communities.

In conclusion, the methodology of critical appropriation entails holding Arendt’s work in a space of tension; using her concepts to sharpen critique, while refusing to overlook or excuse their exclusions. The criteria of diagnostic power, transformability, and accountability provide a way of determining what can be salvaged and how. This approach acknowledges Arendt’s limits, avoids reinscribing Eurocentrism, and foregrounds decolonial epistemologies as the primary horizon against which any appropriation must be measured. In this way, to ‘use Arendt against Arendt’ is to practise both critique and responsibility: critique of her Eurocentrism, and responsibility to those intellectual traditions that she ignored but without which decolonising education cannot be imagined.

Concluding remarks

This paper has explored the productive yet fraught intersection between Hannah Arendt’s political thought and contemporary debates on the decolonisation of education. By critically engaging Arendt’s work – particularly her analyses of imperialism, totalitarianism, and bureaucratic violence – I have traced both the insights and omissions that make her an ambivalent interlocutor for decolonial educational theory, policy, and praxis. The guiding question has been not whether Arendt offers a complete or sufficient framework for decolonising education, but whether her conceptual tools can be repurposed, transformed, or strategically redeployed in service of that project. The central tension running through my analysis is the attempt to mobilise Arendt’s insights while exposing and challenging the Eurocentric and racialised exclusions embedded in her work. On the one hand, Arendt’s critique of imperial expansion and bureaucratic dehumanisation offers valuable perspectives on the political and moral consequences of colonialism and how these legacies have been institutionalised in modern education. Her boomerang thesis, in particular, provides a powerful concept for understanding how imperial forms of control – surveillance, standardisation, hierarchy – have migrated from colonial contexts into mainstream educational systems. On the other hand, Arendt’s blind spots – her refusal to acknowledge anti-Black and Indigenous struggles as central to political freedom, her dismissals of Black student activism and Third World solidarities, and her essentialist framings of African peoples – significantly undermine the decolonial potential of her work.

The strategy of critical appropriation that I proposed here does not advocate for the wholesale rejection or romanticisation of Arendt. Instead, it insists on attending to the conditions under which we engage inherited political thought. To cite Arendt today, in the context of calls to decolonise education, is to do so under the shadow of her exclusions. But it is also to recognise the possibility of conceptual reuse – of extracting and rearticulating insights in ways that open rather than foreclose political imaginaries. This requires a pluralising mode of theorising, one that refuses the authority of any single framework and instead foregrounds agonism, difference, and historical specificity.

What does this mean for educational practice and policy? First, Arendt’s warnings about bureaucratisation can sharpen our understanding of how decolonisation initiatives risk being reduced to compliance exercises. Policymakers and university leaders, for example, might take this as a caution against turning decolonisation into metrics, audits, or representational checklists. Decolonisation requires not only curricular reform but also institutional courage to resist managerial capture. Second, Arendt’s emphasis on plurality can inspire educators to create pedagogical spaces that take seriously epistemic injustice and its consequences. This does not mean tokenistic inclusion of marginalised knowledges but cultivating classrooms where divergent epistemologies – Indigenous, Black, Western – are placed in dialogue without collapsing their differences. Teachers and curriculum designers might, for example, pair canonical texts with Indigenous or decolonial ones, not to synthesise them, but to allow students to grapple with dissonance as a political and ethical resource.

Ultimately, the effort to use Arendt against Arendt is more than a theoretical provocation; it is a call for pedagogical and political responsibility. It reminds us that the task of decolonising education is not just about dismantling structures of domination but about cultivating the capacity to imagine and enact more just and inclusive worlds. For policymakers, this means resisting the temptation to bureaucratise decolonisation. For educators, it means creating spaces where plurality is lived and epistemic justice is enacted. For curriculum designers, it means refusing tokenism and instead building curricula that confront historical exclusions while enabling new forms of world-building. The broader challenge is to rethink the categories of authority, violence, and knowledge that we have inherited – and to ask how, through decolonising education, we might begin again.