Review Essay
JonVan Til1,*Email: vantil39@gmail.com
1Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA
Rebecca Tiessen and Robert Huish, editors, Globetrotting or Global Citizenship? Perils and
Potential of International Experiential Learning, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014,
312 pp., paper $32.95, cloth $80.00, ebook $32.95.
Julie Fisher, Importing Democracy: The Role of NGOs in South Africa, Tajikistan, and
Argentina, Dayton, OH, Kettering Foundation Press, 2013. 404 pp., $24.95 (paperback).
Derick W. Brinkerhoff and Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff, Working for Change: Making a Career
in International Public Service,Bloomfield, CT, Kumarian Press, 2005, 2005,
xiii + 222 pp., $24.95.
The three books at hand give a full picture of international studies, starting with the initial visit
typically made in undergraduate schools (Globetrotting or Global Citizenship?), moving through
the search for a career in the field (Working for Change), and finally arriving at the wisdom to
make sense of the potential impact of it all (Importing democracy).
Those of us who conduct international learning experiences have long needed a good book about
the subject—one that deals with both what goes on in such ventures, how to assess their effects,
and how to make them more successful in their execution. Globetrotting or Global
Citizenship? provides some useful starting steps in that direction.
AQ1
To be sure, the title of the book is a bit inaccurate. Maybe better would be “Some Canadian
academics in a field they call“Development Studies” write about study tours some of their
students take to poorer countries where lots of residents are not white: In what days do, and
should, these students go to build their careers and resumes, or to become more sensitive to other
cultures and countries, or to empower themselves and those they visit to combat injustice and
inequality?”
Among the key concepts explored here are “experiential education,” “cosmopolitanism,” “global
citizenship,” “authentic alliance,” the “Global South,” and “decolonization.” The authors study
and, in many cases, direct or participate in programs based in Central America and Af rica. The
editors state that their book “is an effort to reach students, scholars, and practitioners who
subscribe to international experiential programs in diverse academic studies from engineering to
development studies to international social work (p. 4).”
The book provides a lot of discussion about what such programs should do, and presents some
evidence from practice that suggests that these prescriptions are not usually being met. John
Cameron, for example, argues in a lead chapter that such programs should be grounded in “thick”
conceptions of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism, and their students should engage in
debates on these subjects, lest they “face the very real danger of engaging in and promoting “soft”
forms of global citizenship that promote voluntaristic, charity-based, and neocolonial approaches”
(p. 37). These approaches, familiar to the readers of this journal, “do not,” Cameron asserts,
“recognize the complicity of citizens of the Global North in the perpetuation of injustice aroun d
the world and the moral obligations that follow from this complicity” (p. 38).
AQ2
To the distress of a number of authors whose work is represented in the volume, students do not
generally sign up for international experiential courses and programs in order to develop “thick”
notions of cosmopolitan global citizenship, much less to combat global injustice. Rather, as
Rebecca Tiessen demonstrates in her research, their motives more often are to (1) qualify for a
good job later on and (2) have a meaningful international experience. Cameron draws from this
disjunction between theory and reality by offering the suggestion that it might be bette r to direct
some student energies now poured into international travel experiences into “action closer to
home or closer to the centres of global political and economic power”(p. 36).
In a very useful article, two social workers, Lahoma Thomas (a black Canadian) and Uppala
Chandrasekera (an Asian Canadian), identify four ways students and others may look at
international experience. They may take on the role of (1) the Socially Innocent, (2) the Passive
Backlasher, (3) the Guilty, or (4) the Authentic Ally. While it is clear that the authors of the
volume are Type Four in belief and (possibly) in the programs they conduct, it is not all apparent
that their students are marching in tow to their tunes. But the typology is useful and their defining
tables on authentic alliance are clear and useful (pp. 107–108).
What I missed the most in this collection was some good down-to-earth discussion of what
actually happens among students, and between students and faculty, and between students,
faculty, and hosts, during an experiential international visit. I remember being in Derry, a favorite
Global North destination for many American programs, when one college came to town and its
students were required to endure lectures by their own faculty, upstairs in the guest house, day
after day. Maybe some experiential education went on there, but it could have been conducted as
easily back in their California location.
Students graduate, and some do decide to pursue international careers, despite the concerns of
Prof. Cameron and his associates.Working for Change provides them a highly useful handbook in
defining these efforts. Using a “service-choice spiral,” the Brinkerhoffs guide the reader through
the pathways that require exploration by entrants to international careers: self-awareness, serving
in communities, skills and knowledge, and job choices. A wide variety of personal and
professional issues are discussed in this very useful volume.
As international careers are secured, there will be some who will be able to reflect productively
on their work and advance research that illuminates its meaning and impact. Julie Fisher is pre eminent among such scholars, and her long career with the Kettering Foundation culminates
in Importing Democracy, a book that draws on research she conducted in South Africa,
Tajikistan, and Argentina.
Fisher does those interested in the impact of international work the immense favor of maintaining
an excellent website,importingdemocracy.org, in which she continues to advance the central
lessons of her work. I find two of her contributions to be enormously useful in my own
international work in Hungary. Let me offer a bit of detail.
Fisher provides advice in the form of a dozen concluding points of empirically validated research
findings for use by international foundations, staffers, and consultants. These points address such
issues as how to collaborate, develop research commitments, support exchanges, develop
nonpartisan training, expand civil society influence, and “walk the walk” (by being alert to the
ways in which development work involves foreign policy savvy and concerns).
Secondly, Fisher develops an enormously valuable tool she calls the “democratization triangle,”
the three points of which are popular protests, civil society, and a loyal opposition. In her blog,
she observes that “democratization NGOs need to overcome their fear of being labeled partisan.
NGOs could strengthen their efforts to build a loyal opposition by, for example, hosting
multiparty workshops with a focus on constituency building. Strategic networking among NGOs
could help strengthen this most difficult corner of the democratization triangle - loyal oppositionand also strengthen ties with protest movements and the larger civil society.”
The present reviewer has confronted international development travel on all three levels: leading
study tours, working abroad as a Fulbright Specialist, and now trying to import democracy as a
volunteer part-year resident in Hungary.
As a Fulbrighter, I faced the issues the Brinkerhoffs so clearly identify, even ending up with the
happy acquisition of a Hungarian spouse. As a volunteer democracy importer, I engage in
numerous conversations in the world’s most welcoming coffee houses with dedicated activists
and thoughtful intellectuals, and find writing and editing books and papers on oppositional
movements, some of which appear in a language I do not begin to understand.
And, as a study tour director, I chose not to require my students to provide service to those we
visited overseas, nor did we seek to persuade our hosts to throw off such chains they might have
been wearing in the name of some vision of peace, truth, justice, or social change. Rather, my
groups basked in the joy and gratitude from the ways in which the good folks we visited were
willing to share their lives and struggles and triumphs with us. From all of them and their
accomplishments—John Hume and his Nobel Peace Prize; Paddy Doherty and his Free Derry;
Eamonn Deane and his vision of the holy well; Celia Ferguson and her passion to keep the history
of Sion Mills alive; Roy Arbuckle training us on how to play the different drums of Ireland;
Arthur Williamson meeting us at the Belfast airport, shaking each of our hands and telling us
“You’re very welcome”; and Brian Smyth driving our bus and sharing with us so much of what
life can be about—I draw my strongest lesson about experiential international education: The one
who benefits the most from international study is the one privileged to organize the whole event ,
and then to tell the tale. I defined it as my job to try to make sure that the participants also found
meaning in the experience, and that no harm, and maybe even a bit of good, came to those who
open their lives and their lands to their visitors.
Perhaps the editors of Globetrotting or Global Citizenship? will someday provide a sequel, and
tell us why it is not either globetrottingor global citizenship but rather some of both, and also tell
us more about what happens when students head abroad, and how different people organize and
administer programs, and why so many people—students, faculty, and hosts—seem to end up
with the sense that they have benefited from these ventures—even if the revolution does not erupt
the night the group flies home. But those are outcomes familiar to career developers like the
Brinkerhoffs and academic observers of the acumen of Julie Fisher. It is good to see academics
treating international development with the intellectual respect and concern it requires and
deserves.