Governmentality, postcolonialism and hybrid subjectivities - stories from international schools

This chapter examines international schools as a neglected topic in International Relations (IR). International schools - defined as schools composed of international students and/or with a philosophy of internationalism - have been examined primarily in the education literature, which highlights how these schools shape transnational political and economic elites. This argument requires further elaboration through the everyday experiences of students attending international schools I order to challenge some of the generalising tendencies in the education literature. Studying these experiences helps us to further understand how these schools shape international ideas and subjects that constitute the ‘international’ in ways that are far more complex and unpredictable that suggested by the education literature. This chapter contends that such a study requires a combined governmentality and postcolonial approach because it accounts for the process of reproducing neoliberal international subjects, while acknowledging the colonial dynamics involved in shaping subjectivities – or the socially constructed subject positions reproduced by subjects – in unequal, racialised and often hybrid ways. This intervention deploys a postcolonial governmentalities framework to study the authors’ experiences at international schools, arguing that international schools can ultimately shape and exclusionary ‘international’ and corresponding neoliberal subjects that are not unified and homogeneous – as some governmentality approaches suggest – but complex and diverse. This chapter therefore contributes to our understanding not only of the role of international schools in IR but also the processes whereby the ‘international’ and its subjects are reproduced