Beyond the Local–Global Binaries of Higher Education Internationalization in Post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The article critiques the tendency in the field of international education to theorize internationalization around the impacts of and policy responses to globalization in local contexts. The central argument of the article is that South Africa’s history and development prospects are so intricately bound up with those of its neighbors in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region that it would be misleading for the country to be talked about in just national/local and global terms. To develop this argument on South Africa’s roles and situation in a regionally interconnected context, I draw on insights from an institutional ethnography of a top-rated, historically White South African public university. While local–global discourses were institutionalized nationally and institutionally through policies for transformation and internationalization, the conspicuous absence of formal institutional structures for regionalization shows the limitations of local–global or global north–south dichotomies in analyzing structures that operate both above and below the level of the nation-state.