Chapter 4: Pedagogies of Refusal in International Development and Education

Fanon’s (1963) Wretched of the Earth lends itself to engagement with this moment’s many maladies. A moment of intensifying and accelerating genocide, fascism, ecological catastrophe, endless wars, ramifications of late-stage capitalism, tech bros’ seizure of democratic governance and communication, and attacks on education, among other afflictions. Heeding Fanon’s (1963) call within the current state of affairs, our aim, as two scholars of international studies, is to bring to the fold pedagogies of refusal as imperatives in the decolonizing of international development. To do this, we build from the works of Rashid (2024), Tuck and Yang (2012), and Rodríguez (2019) on refusal as a decolonial approach to teaching and research. Decolonial approaches as deployed in this chapter attempt to refuse “the logics of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the rhetoric of modernity” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 46) within the international development architecture. Decolonial approaches rupture and destabilize the feel-good practices of international development while exploring new ways to engage in the field – that is, turning toward and deploying new concepts (Fanon, 1963).