Public Oral PhD Defense: Oliver R. Keels

The production of the American university: Securitization, nationalism, and internationalization in Iraqi Kurdistan

Advisor: Roozbeh Shirazi

Abstract: 

In the Western media, pundits, scholars, and critics have interrogated the role of international education outside of the Global North as either a force for good or ill. This question has been debated between scholars who see the progressive capacity of international education (Ergin et al., 2019; Rizvi, 2009; B. Streitwieser et al., 2019; B. T. Streitwieser, 2019) and those who see it as a tool of capitalist and imperialistic domination (Mok, 2007; Yang, 2003). Yet research has overlooked the possibility of competing rationales existing together at sites of internationalization. The aim of my study is to see how international education is adopted in Iraqi Kurdistan, a post-conflict region, with a focus on how nationalist discourses shape its meaning and practice.

This research will focus on two American universities in the Kurdistan region as sites of internationalization. American universities in the region, with a blend of foreign and Kurdish leadership, serve as an ideal space to examine how internationalization is adopted as institutions that rely on international academic curriculum and standards, foreign language acquisition, international faculty, and attractive partners for other institutions and governments outside of Iraq to work with in the country. This dissertation seeks to understand the role competing rationales of internationalization, particularly nationalism, play in informing the understandings of the role and meaning of American universities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Through the utilization of a comparative case study, this dissertation explores the intersection of American foreign policy, Kurdish national prerogatives, and international norms on capacity building and securitization shape the mission, function, and practice of American universities in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Emerging from a critical discourse analysis of participant interviews at one institution, US Department of State grants to American-style universities in Iraq, documents from two American universities in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as documentaries on one institution are competing understandings of Americanization as internationalization and capacity building through these institutions. US-based actors such as the Department of State and American higher education institutions approach partnerships as a solution to the threat of violent extremism while reifying an existing division of the world in terms of safe vs. unsafe places for Americans. Kurdish institutional actors continue to perpetuate this dichotomy as a means to Otherize the rest of Iraq, complicating US foreign policy priorities in the Middle East. At the university level, the understandings of what an Americanized institution should mean for Kurdistan present an ongoing contestation of discourses of inclusivity, economic development, and international mobility as presented by both the universities and their international partners. In particular, the language of American-style liberal arts is instrumentalized to push for the inclusion or exclusion of members of the broader Iraqi community while questioning the role private American-style private higher education may play in reshaping the social and economic contours of Iraqi Kurdistan.

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