Tracing diplomatic tutelage: (post)colonial pedagogies and the training of African diplomats

TY - JOUR

T1 - Tracing diplomatic tutelage

T2 - (post)colonial pedagogies and the training of African diplomats

AU - McConnell, Fiona M.

AU - Harris, Jonathan

AU - Craggs, Ruth

PY - 2024/7/31

Y1 - 2024/7/31

N2 - Throughout the twentieth-century, colonies emerged from the so-called tutelage of European imperial powers to represent themselves as sovereign states. One consequence of this change was an expansion in overseas diplomatic training, aimed at inducting into international life the hundreds of diplomats required to staff new foreign services. This paper interrogates the pedagogical and (geo)political practice of tutelage – where guardianship and instruction are held in tension – in order to shine a critical spotlight on programs training African diplomats, hosted in Britain, France and Switzerland, and later Cameroon and Kenya. In exploring practices of tutelage both within the classroom, and at the international scale we bring to the fore hitherto overlooked relational and temporal dimensions of tutelage that provide new insights into enduring paternalistic power relations as well as possibilities for agency and resistance. We trace the legacies of colonialism within these training programs but are also attentive to the ways trainers problematized the generalizability of their knowledge and pedagogy, and how African diplomats-in-training resisted relations of tutelage. In dialogue with scholarship on socialization and international education, we develop an enhanced conceptualization of tutelage that provides analytical purchase on inter-scalar relationships in world politics during and beyond formal decolonization.

AB - Throughout the twentieth-century, colonies emerged from the so-called tutelage of European imperial powers to represent themselves as sovereign states. One consequence of this change was an expansion in overseas diplomatic training, aimed at inducting into international life the hundreds of diplomats required to staff new foreign services. This paper interrogates the pedagogical and (geo)political practice of tutelage – where guardianship and instruction are held in tension – in order to shine a critical spotlight on programs training African diplomats, hosted in Britain, France and Switzerland, and later Cameroon and Kenya. In exploring practices of tutelage both within the classroom, and at the international scale we bring to the fore hitherto overlooked relational and temporal dimensions of tutelage that provide new insights into enduring paternalistic power relations as well as possibilities for agency and resistance. We trace the legacies of colonialism within these training programs but are also attentive to the ways trainers problematized the generalizability of their knowledge and pedagogy, and how African diplomats-in-training resisted relations of tutelage. In dialogue with scholarship on socialization and international education, we develop an enhanced conceptualization of tutelage that provides analytical purchase on inter-scalar relationships in world politics during and beyond formal decolonization.

KW - diplomacy, diplomatic theory, diplomatic practice

KW - tutelage

KW - post-colonial africa

KW - pedagogy

KW - training

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85197519078&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/ips/olae030

DO - 10.1093/ips/olae030

M3 - Article

SN - 1749-5679

VL - 18

SP - 1

EP - 24

JO - International Political Sociology

JF - International Political Sociology

IS - 3

M1 - olae030

ER -