The Onto-Epistemic Foundations of Global Governance and Global Education Policies: A Decolonial Analysis of Global Citizenship Education in Hawai‘i

Abstract

This theoretical article not only applies a decolonial critique to the Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist foundations of global governance and global education policies but also suggests an alternative approach to constructing globality that respects and learns from onto-epistemic difference, rather than furthering the epistemicide of non-Western and Indigenous worldviews by forcing them to assimilate to Western modernity. This article seeks to make an intervention in the literature on global governance, global education policy, and global citizenship education, where decolonial lenses are scantly employed. We argue that public school teachers are using frameworks rooted in the matrix of coloniality to teach a multicultural population in an occupied land about concepts of Global Citizenship Education that not only divert attention away from other ways of being, acting, and knowing but which, by their nature, cannot even recognize those other ways of being—at least not without contradicting its own Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist onto-epistemic foundations.