Education is the central pillar of the colonial project—it’s try-or-die to unsettle colonial pedagogies of cruelty within academic spaces.

Drawing on Quijano's planetary framework and analytic of coloniality, I argue that the coloniality of curriculum is also accompanied by the geopolitics of curriculum, which aligns itself to a spatial or geographic turn in the social sciences (e.g. shifting the geographies of reason). The latter constitutes a geopolitically implicated colonial cartography positioning those dwelling on the other side of the abyssal line or zone of non-being as philosophically insignificant, worthy only of manual labour. There is an intimate relationship between the zone of non-being, coloniality and cartography that unveils how those dwelling in the zone of non-being are conceived as inferior while those in the zone of being of humanity are representative of the white ethnoclass (Wynter, 2003). This imperial mode of reasoning entails negating the coevalness or contemporaneity (Fabian, 1983) of those who are systematically made non-existence—that is, those who dwell in colonised, dehumanised and racialised zones of non-being (Fanon, 1963). This modern/colonial cartography is not only sustained through a legal cartography of exclusion (national and international law). It is also fortified epistemologically through education systems, which are entangled with a (material) political economic and legal cartography (education policy), as well as a (symbolic) epistemological cartography or curriculum, both of which are constitutive of modern/colonial education institutions. When conceived in geopolitical terms, the dominant curriculum reveals how educational experiences within and beyond formal education institutions transcend the nation-state and are implicated in transnational modern/colonial projects and imperial designs.

The geopolitics of curriculum is also entangled with a pedagogy of cruelty that sustains the intersubjective relations regulating and constituting coloniality beyond the nation-state (Segato, 2018). It is undergirded by a powerful colonial rhetoric that simultaneously meets the demands of settler colonial projects and imperial neocolonial designs. The recruitment of students from the Global South who become instrumental in maintaining coloniality is a clear case in point. The Chicago Boys, for instance, nicely illustrate what the geopolitical implications are when neoliberal knowledge or theory is instrumentalised and weaponised as it is put into practice to maintain coloniality through coups and military dictatorships linked to domestic and foreign interests alike.

The pedagogy of cruelty put into practice by the geopolitics of curriculum is hence a complex ensemble of social, pedagogic and intersubjective relations always already immersed in multiple fields of power. As Gramsci (1999) cogently expressed long ago, ‘hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilizations’ (p. 666). In a similar vein, the geopolitics of curriculum is entangled discursively at the global, societal, institutional and individual levels. It is the dominant discourse—an imperial/colonial doctrine—that maintains its hegemonic position through neoliberal higher education institutions, as well as through the pedagogical discourses and social practices they legitimate. It is critically urgent to historicise education institutions in order to unsettle their colonial foundations.

As Stein (2022) critiques, one major shortcoming of higher education research is that it is not frequently historicised within colonial contexts, which leads to the understanding of universities not only as developing linearly and uniformly but also void of contextual and geopolitical considerations. This methodological limitation also prevents one from unsettling the colonial foundations and ongoing violent projects of the university since the ‘real enemy’ is simply the neoliberal restructuring of the university, hence presenting the university as yet another victim rather than an active participant in upholding coloniality. The colonial historiography and the dominant narration of the university continue to silence the past (Trouillot, 2015) while also ignoring the violent and colonial technologies produced by the university in the present that are used by settler colonial states (Tabar & Desai, 2017; Turner, 2022). The university not only helps establish a colonial symbolic structure that legitimates physical violence beyond the walls of the ivory tower, but it also actively produces the colonial technologies used to displace Indigenous peoples. The recent grant given to Howard5 University by the secretary of defence seeking to ‘diversify’ national security paints a clear picture of the democratisation of domination where students of colour in the Global North can also participate in the production of knowledge and technologies of violence used against people of colour in the Global South (e.g. Palestine). The geopolitics of curriculum gestures towards the analysis and critique of these very real imperial projects in which higher education institutions form an integral part.

Situated historically, formal education institutions are understood as the central pillars upon which imperial/colonial projects are articulated at a global scale. They are geopolitically entangled whereby the curriculum and governance structures correspond to the broader political economic and sociocultural designs of the colonial matrix of power revolving around the central organising principle of race. By interrogating the historicity, coloniality and materiality of the university, one can avoid the tendency to critique the university merely as a symbolic or cultural institution (Turner, 2022). The university is responsible for much more when we make more visible and take more seriously its linkages to power and its geopolitical–economic implications within and beyond national boundaries.

Examining the university's past and present colonial projects uncovers the master narrative upholding the so-called civilising, modernising, democratising and diversifying mission of higher education. Whether we take a close look at distinct higher education models used by previous colonial projects, we find that, although their political, cultural and economic aims varied, they nonetheless became instrumental to colonial domination and capitalist exploitation. I contend that the university continues to serve as the cornerstone of coloniality as it not only legitimates dominant ways of knowing (symbolic structure) but also actively assists in the production of the material technologies needed to effectively dispossess communities. Making the university more inclusive is not what is at stake but rather the need to radically transform, if not dismantle the very colonial foundations of this institution. In other words, diversifying the content (symbolic or curriculum) will not change the geopolitical terms of the conversation (material power) within and beyond the university.

As Stein (2022) makes evident, it is necessary to counter the idealisation of universities whereby they are conceived as fundamentally good institutions yet increasingly destabilised by neoliberal higher education reforms—victims of rather than complicit in domination and exploitation. The colonial foundations are hardly ever addressed when higher education curriculum is only seen through contemporary lenses drawing on critiques of neoliberalism since the 1970s. By historicising higher education curriculum against the backdrop of colonialism and coloniality, a different picture is painted of its ‘structural complicity in racial, colonial, and ecological violence’ (p. 4). I argue that the geopolitics of curriculum has perpetuated the modern/colonial capitalist world system since the 16th century. Without seriously interrogating the geopolitics of curriculum, it would be difficult to understand, for instance, the effectiveness of Spain's political, economic and religious institutions in maintaining the colonial order intact throughout a region as vast as Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, it would be difficult to examine the neoliberal economic restructuring of the region without also interrogating the role of the curriculum. Sidelining the geopolitical colonial project of the curriculum will only naturalise colonial domination and capitalist exploitation. In other words, it would erase the dialectical relationship between knowledge and power and the dominant subjectivities reproduced through the pedagogies of domination constitutive of educational institutions. Understood as a canonising and homogenising geopolitical instrument of power, the curriculum thus reproduces the dominant subjectivity necessitated to effectively maintain neocolonial and settler colonial social arrangements.

The university curriculum continues to be complicit in reproducing colonial power and hence is responsible for sustaining asymmetrical social relations of power. Its aim is the systematic canonisation of knowledge and thus the erasure of Indigenous systems of knowledge, images of the world, collective memories and aesthetics. The coloniality of curriculum upholds an epistemology of ignorance (Mills, 1997) that systematically prescribes absence whereby nothing else could exist outside of the Eurocentric canon, narrative and teleology; no ‘counter-voice’ could be allowed to speak (Wynter, 2003, p. 269). The curriculum instead continues to produce ‘administrators, educators, professionals, … and other wielders of pen and paper’ (Rama, 1996, p. 18). Neocolonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in other continents, is contingent upon learned individuals, usually from the dominant ethnoclass, who effectively wield their power from the lettered cities (universities) of the region. The university curriculum plays a central role in creating the subjectivities that would enable other institutions to run smoothly according to colonial designs and racialised social arrangements. Without the complicity of the university and its geopolitically implicated curriculum and pedagogy of cruelty, the enduring domination of Latin America and the Caribbean would be inconceivable. Therefore, the curriculum is intimately linked to the geopolitical economic project of modernity/coloniality, and it positions the Eurocentric subject as the only subject worthy of speaking, thinking, knowing and existing. Other histories, knowledges and experiences are ontologically insignificant.