global STUDENT COOPERATIOn Prospects for increased cooperation
Author: Viktor Grønne Published: September 2017 Photo: Paul Saad, Francisco Osorio, UCT Rhodes Must Fall, Katie Brinn, ESU - European Students’ Union, UNE - União Nacional dos Estudantes. Coverphoto: Marcos Bruno Funded by the Education Support Programme of the Open Society Foundations Copyright: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 You’re free to: • Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. • Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material. Under the following terms: • Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. • Non-commercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes. • Share alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
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Students in Pretoria, South Africa take to the streets during the nationwide #FeesMustFall protests in 2015. Credit: Paul Saad
Abstract This paper argues that there are opportunities to revitalize the global cooperation of student movements in defence of the right to free education and open societies. It does so first by analysing the historic contribution that student organising has made at different levels of governance. Here, it is clear that students have long played important roles at national level in bringing about democracy and improving the education systems. At the same time, however, students have also been prone to coercion, either through violence or more subtle mechanisms such as scholarships to go abroad. While students have dominated the national scene, they have struggled to organise themselves at global level, causing loss of influence, and ultimately weakening their own positions nationally. These insights are used as underpinning for a consultative process with current student leaders that provide their perspectives on global organising based around the cost of education, students in governance, and equality. From the consultation it is clear that there is a genuine wish to work towards increased global cooperation, but several challenges such as lack of trust among different regions, finances, and the risk of factionalism continue to make up major obstacles.
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content list Glossary 6 Introduction 8 Literature review 9 Global level 9 Regional level 10 Europe 10 Sub-Saharan Africa 10 Latin-America 11 National level 12 Chile 12 Nepal 13 Russia 13 Canada/Quebec 14 Summary 14 Student movements’ historic impact 16 Evaluation criteria 16 Africa 16 All-African Student Union 16 Senegal 17 South Africa 19 Europe 20 Denmark 20 European Students’ Union 21 OBESSU 21 Slovenia 21 Asia 22 Burma 22 Hong Kong 22 Latin America 24 Colombia and Chile 24 OCLAE 24 Egypt 24 United States 25 Other noteworthy movements 26 Summary 26 Analysing student documents 28 Clustering of topics 29 Cost of education 29 Governance of education 29 Democracy 30 Education quality 30 Student welfare 30 Academic freedom 30 Sustainability 31 Equality 31 International cooperation 31 National economy 31 Student mobility 31 Labour market influence/policies 32
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Order of relevance 32 Rhetoric 33 Drafting process 34 Durability 35 Regional differences 36 Recommendations 36 Cultivating space for global student action 37 Identifying the challenges 37 Potential components of global cooperation 39 Information sharing 39 Global council 40 Global umbrella organisation 40 Activist exchange network 41 Online platform 41 A charter process 41 Moving forward 42 Summary 42 Conclusions 44 Bibliography 45 Appendix 48
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glossary ABBREVIATION
NAME
TRANSLATED
AREA
AASU
All-Africa Students’ Union
African continent
ABFSU
All-Burma Federation of Student Unions
Burma
ACES
Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios
Coordinating Assembly of School Students
Chile
ACEU
Asociacion Colombiana de Estudiantes Universitarios
Association of Colombian University Students
Colombia
AEGEE
Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de l’Europe
European Students’ Forum
Europe
AKS
Aktion kritischer Schüler_innen
Movement of Critical School Students
Austria
ANOSR
Alianței Naționale a Organizațiilor Studențești din România
National Alliance of Student Organizations in Romania
Romania
ASA
Asian Student and Youth Association
CED
Coordination des Etudiants
Coordination of Students
Senegal
CES
Coordination des Eléves du Sénégal
Coordination of Senegalese School Students
Senegal
CF
Corda Fratres
Brothers
Globally
CFS
Canadian Federation of Students
CGC
Comité de Gestion de la Crise
Crisis Management Committe
Senegal
CIE
Confederation Internationale des Etudiants
International Confederation of Students
Globally
CLASSE
Confederation Internationale des Etudiants
Coalition of the Association for Student Union Solidarity
Quebec, Canada
CONFECH
Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile
Confederation of Students in Chile
Chile
DGS
Danske Gymnasieelevers Sammenslutning
National Union of School Students in Denmark
Denmark
DSE
Danske Skoleelever
Danish Pupils
Denmark
DSF
Danske Studerendes Fællesråd
National Union of Students in Denmark
Denmark
EEO
Erhvervsskolernes Elevorganisation
Union of Vocational School Students
Denmark
EI
Education International
Globally
ESU
European Students’ Union
Europe
FEUQ
Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec
GCE
Global Campaign for Education
Globally
GSV
Global Student Voice meeting
Globally
HKFS
Hong Kong Federation of Students
Hong Kong
IAFS
International Association of Forestry Students
Globally
ISC
International Student Conference
Globally
ISIPE
International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics
Globally
ISM
International Student Movement
Globally
IUS
International Union of Students
Globally
Asia-Pacific region
Canada
University student federation of Quebec
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Quebec, Canada
ABBREVIATION
NAME
TRANSLATED
AREA
JUTS
Jamaica Union of Tertiary Students
LH
Landsorganisationen af Handelsskoleelever
National Union of Mercantile School Students
Denmark
NSO
Norsk Studentorganisasjon
National Union of Students in Norway
Norway
NSSC
National School Student Council of Jamaica
Jamaica
NUGS
National Union of Ghana Students
Ghana
NUS-AU
National Union of Students in Australia
Australia
NUS-UK
National Union of Students in the UK
United Kingdom
NUSAS
National Union of South Africa Students
South Africa
OBESSU
Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions
Europe
OCLAE
Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes
Continental Organisation of LatinAmerican and Caribbean Students
Latin-America and Caribbean
RSU
Российский студенческий союз
Russian Students’ Union
Russia
SANSCO
South African National Student Congress
South Africa
SASCO
South African Students’ Congress
South Africa
SASO
South African Student Organisation
South Africa
SASU
Southern Africa Students’ Union
Southern African Development Community
SAUS
South African Union of Students
South Africa
SDS
Students for a Democratic Society
USA
SEALDs
Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy
Japan
SOS
Študentska organizacija Slovenije
SRC
Student Representative Council
UED
Jamaica
Student organisation of Slovenia
Slovenia
Union des Etudiants de Dakar
Union of Students in Dakar
Dakar, Senegal
UNE-BR
União Nacional dos Estudantes
National Union of Students in Brazil
Brazil
UNEF
L’Union Nationale des Etudiants de France
National Union of Students in France
France
UNESCO
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Globally
USNSA
United States National Student Association
USA
USSA
United States Student Association
USA
WCHE
UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education
WESIB
Western European Student Information Bureau
Europe
WFDY
World Federation of Democratic Youth
Globally
ZANU-PF
Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front
Zimbabwe
ZINASU
Zimbabwe National Student Union
Zimbabwe
ÖH
Österreichische HochschülerInnenschaft
National Union of Students in Austria
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Austria
INTRODUCTION For centuries, the student voice has been at the core of the tertiary education system. It was students, who established and governed the World’s first modern university established in Bologna in 1088, when students from different nations employed scholars to lecture them. Since then, tertiary education systems have been radically transformed, but despite the commodification of education, students’ voice remains strong within almost every modern university.
of that year marked a radical swift that has been sustained in how students organise. The paper deals solely with representative student movements, i.e. movements with democratically elected representatives based on campus, as opposed to social movements led by students. Likewise, student organisations deemed primarily to deal with extracurricular activities, e.g. AIESEC and 180 Degrees Consulting, have not been included in any way.
In modern times, student movements1 placed themselves on the global map in 1968, when protests for a more equitable, dignified, and emancipatory education system erupted across the globe. What followed was a decade of student protests, where student led social struggles against virtually everything. Although the protests shared many core features, they were ultimately unorchestrated, yet they achieved significant progress for generations to come; overthrowing governments; overhauling education systems; and bringing about a new sense of idea of what it means to have a dignified life.
The paper is based on desk research undertaken between October 2016 and June 2017, as well as interviews with student leaders in the months June and July of 2017. Each section of the paper contains a short introduction of its methodology, as the sections were initially drafted independent from each other. Having said that, the paper places itself within a social constructivist tradition and draws solely on qualitative work.
During the same period, students also cooperated globally, through two competing unions, and their meetings attracted thousands of students, who deliberated on student and social struggles. As well as working with politics, both unions played an important role in disseminating information about students protests, and in preparing student leaders to claim the student voice in defence of progressive policies. Today, students continue to organise collectively at local, national, and in some cases also regionally, but for almost 15 years, students have been without a voice at global level. The absence of a global student voice not only causes students to miss out on global policy processes, but it also means that the enormous potential that lies in student movements capacitating each other is lost. As students have historically always been proponents of progressive social policies, the failure has knock-on implications for the larger community of civil society organisations. This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how students are currently organised globally, and what implications this has on the prospects of increasing cooperation among them. It does so by reviewing past literature on international student organising; evaluating the impact past and current student movements have had and continue to have on politics and student life in general; analysing student-formulated documents, to improve our understanding of what matters to students and how they organise; and lastly, it discusses the potential pathways towards increased cooperation, informed by interviews with student leaders. The scope of the paper is primarily post-1968, as the events 1 The broad term used in this paper to describe both student unions, governments, pressure groups, social movements and similar modes of organisation.
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LITERATURE REVIEW and IUS supported regional meetings among students that, among other things, led to education reforms in LatinAmerica and Asia, just as they provided national unions with technical equipment (such as instruments for health clinics), and both published magazines informing about student affairs from other countries. The IUS was also pivotal in the anti-colonialism in several countries. However, in the end, Altbach concludes, they both failed in delivering tangible change to students and in creating a global movement. Altbach’s article is published just when ISC bankrupted in 1969 as a direct consequence of the CIA funding, while IUS would later become paralyzed due to factionalism and militarisation from the post-colonial unions, before becoming completely inactive since 2003.
The aim of this literature review is to shed light on existing literature on local, regional and international student movements. I have strived to cover all world regions, but since little academic literature exists on student movements post-1978, some regions are naturally covered better than others. While conducting the review, no distinction has been made between levels of education that students have organised (e.g. secondary or tertiary), nor between different modes of governance (e.g. formal vs. informal).
Global level
Very little literature exists on the global role of students, and most of what does, deals with the history of the competing International Student Conference (ISC) and International Union of Students (IUS) in the run up to the 1968 student protests. Two important articles to mention in this regard are Altbach’s “The International Student Movement” (Altbach, 1970) and Paget’s “From Leiden to Stockholm: the CIA’s role in the formation of the International Student Conference” (Paget, 2003) that both critically outline the history and actions of the two organisations, and not least how the intelligence services became involved in them as a direct result of the Cold War.
It is remarkable how little has been written about student activism globally since the 1980’s, when the last impulses from the 1960’s died out. Inevitably, what little has been written builds on the major works from the 1970’s and 1980’s, such as Altbach’s international reference handbook (Altbach, 1989), which by now is rather outdated. Altbach’s conceptual framework will be outlined further down. However, before continuing I want to highlight a few of Altbach’s findings that can now be characterised as outdated.
Altbach briefly outlines the history of international student politics pre-1940 which was dominated by the defunct Confederation Internationale des Etudiants (CIE) established in 1919 primarily by European unions, but later gained a widespread member base. The CIE was successful in that it only worked with issues directly relevant to the students, and rather than politics its sub-committees dealt with student travel, sports and student press. Much of IUS’ and ISC’s failure to create a true movement and deliver in terms of their raison d’etre can be traced to their divergence from this tactic, he argues.
For a starter, Altbach finds that the European laissez faire university system (also exported to some former African colonies) allowed for more activism than in other parts of the World due to its flexibility. With the Bologna Process (and its introduction of ECTS and the 3+2 system) this can no longer be said, while the African countries have also adopted a more US-like system. At the same time, Latin-America has long had a very neo-liberal education system, and yet we have seen massive student activism in this area. Globalisation and its impact (for the better and worse) is also not mentioned in Altbach’s 1989 framework, which is of course excused by when it was conceptualised. However, since much of Altbach’s framework builds on findings about media’s behaviour and the economic development of the country where the activism takes place, this is another area where new data is needed.
Already at the creation of IUS in 1945 some delegates, mostly from western Europe, were critical of the executive power handed to the secretariat, instead wanting to preserve the idea of a non-political agency left from the CIE. However, the divergent group of delegates managed to agree due to a desire to prevent a resurge of fascism in Europe. Only four years later the western European unions eventually left the IUS, when it expelled the Yugoslav union of students against its own standing orders. One year later, the ISC was established by 21 unions in Stockholm, this time allowing its central secretariat much less power.
The latest attempt at shedding light on the student movement globally has come from Manja Klemencic, former ESU president who led much of ESU’s international work around and currently lectures at Harvard, who edited a special edition of “Studies in Higher Education” on global student movements and governments. In her introduction article (Manja Klemenčič, 2014) she builds on Altbach’s comparative framework from 1989 (Altbach, 1989) to develop a number of conceptual frameworks relevant to our discussion.
Both IUS and ISC grew big within the 1950’s, mostly due to covert funding as Paget shows in her article, and at a conference in 1964 the ISC’s secretariat was given more power, although not as much as the IUS’. The Cold Student War was complete and both unions became entangled in the fight between capitalism and communism.
She highlights how student governments are “political institutions through which collective student interests are aggregated and intermediated to other actors within the higher
Some positive change was achieved though: both the ISC
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rope, Klemencic in her introduction article draws several parallels to student representation in the former Eastern Europe (Manja Klemenčič, 2012). For instance, students are secured influence at institutional level all across Europe through the Bologna Process and have been given heavy influence in the various quality assurance bodies, while only few countries have legislation on national student unions (Norway and Slovenia as the most notable examples). The student-friendly developments in the Bologna Process have all come due to the extensive cooperation through the European Students’ Union.
education or wider political context”, and how their proven
“Student governments are “political institutions through which collective student interests are aggregated and intermediated to other actors within the higher education or wider political context” transformative power has led to authoritarian regimes to suppress them, or simply replacing them with puppet unions. Klemencic then makes a clear distinction from movements, in that they can arise when student governments fail in delivering results to the student body, and are often characterised by a lesser degree of organisation and representation.
In the introduction article, Klemencic looks at the organisational characteristics of student organising, as well as national systems of student representation. Klemencic makes a clear distinction about student associations as social movements or interest groups, how they are organised accordingly (network-like vs. hierarchically, volunteers vs. professionals, logic of membership vs. logic of influence etc.). Generally, the European student associations are moving towards an increased degree of professionalization, which Klemencic launches a slight criticism of, arguing they risk becoming out-of-touch with the demands of the general student population.
One of her main points is that studentship (i.e. the state of being a student) is highly conducive to collective action, as it allows for time to find common interests to express. However, student governments have been largely dependent on a very homogenous student body, which has undergone, and continue to undergo, massive changes towards diversification these years, leading to a harder time in defining just what the shared grievances are.
Sub-Saharan Africa
In analysing student governments, Klemencic proposes that we must analyse their autonomy and representative structures, to better understand where they derive legitimacy, and thus political leverage, from. The autonomy of the student government is rarely decided by itself, but instead its regulation within the larger higher education legislation or university structures. She also highlights how ceremonial structures are important in securing legitimacy. In essence, to understand how student government function, we must first look at the context which they operate in.
Research on student activism in Sub-Saharan Africa has generally been very incomprehensive up until very recently, when a large group of young international and African scholars compiled a book with comparative as well as national and local studies of student organising across the continent (Luescher, Klemenčič, & Jowi, 2016). The book follows 2015 special issue of the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa (Luescher, Klemenčič, & Jowi, 2015), making Sub-Saharan Africa the continent that is perhaps best covered at the moment. Ibrahim Oanda offers an interesting perspective on student activism in Sub-Saharan Africa identifying three distinct periods post-1968: the 1970’s when students became increasingly radicalised, seeking to establish themselves as the vanguard of independent Africa; the 1980’s and 1990’s when institutions decayed; and the post-1990’s of student fragmentation (Oanda, 2016).
Klemencic goes on to look at what creates and sustains student movements. In this regard she defines a supply and demand side. The supply side is defined by the mobilisation potential, i.e. the student body’s ability to formulate shared demands, while the demand side is characterised by the characteristics of broad social movements in the country. This helps explain why for instance Nordic unions have been very successful (think homogenous student population and vibrant civil society), whereas others have failed.
Student activists in the 1970’s benefited from the inclusion of students in governance that was inherited from the former British university system as the newly independent African states established their own higher education systems. However, the political leadership sought to limit the activists’ space by limiting genuine inclusion of students (Tanzania’s University Act for instance mandated students in governance, but excluded students from core bodies like appointment committees, complaint committees etc.). As if that wasn’t enough, national parties also increasingly inferred with university elections like in Ghana, where the ruling party attempted to replace the representative National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) with its own youth wing. Nonetheless, the decade was marked by highly politicised youth engaging in a broad spectrum of political issues, in particular keeping the generation above them, who secured independence, accountable to the promises they made.
Regional level
Regional student movements are only slightly better covered by academic literature than the global student movement. As such, only literature on Europe, Latin-America and Africa will be presented in this review. Instead, student movements from select countries representing some of the remaining regions will be covered in the section on national student movements.
Europe One of the most thorough attempts at presenting and analysing a regional student movement is the special issue in European Journal of Higher Education on student representation in Western Europe. Although the primary focus is Western Eu-
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Latin-America
The 1980’s and 1990’s were marked by fierce and violent clashes between students and the government, as governments across the continent were forced to implement structural adjustment policies (SAPs) to obtain funding from the International Monetary Foundation. The SAPs often targeted funding for university and not least student welfare. Students across the continent (with the All African Student Union acting as a shared platform) opposed the policies, which lead to clashes on campus. Governments replied by closing universities temporarily and eroding the student autonomy through departmentalisation as well as other structural adjustments. It is noted that at one time in late-1980’s national universities in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Uganda were all closed.
It is difficult to come across literature on the Latin-American student movement post-1968. A likely explanation is that most literature on the topic is written in Spanish or Portuguese, which is not covered in this review. However, Levy (Levy, 1981) does a good job at analysing the history of the Latin-American student movement pre-1968 as one of the most politicised and hailed student movements and its later development throughout the 70’s. Many of Levy’s arguments are, in my personal experience with the Latin-American student movement, still relevant today, as they had an immense impact on how students organised and perceived themselves as agents in society. Levy analyses the Latin-American student movement in the 1970’s along two different dimensions: the political regime and the level of privatisation of education. Levy categorise the countries into four distinct political regimes: 1) the traditional authoritarian regime, which is not given much space (e.g. Paraguay). 2) The oligarch regime (e.g. Guatemala and Nicaragua) where students are given considerable statutory participation in governance, albeit it is very token in reality. Student dissident often tends to be violent (sometimes even militant), as this is the only mean of overcoming the obstacles to meaningful participation, at which point the students will often have a large impact. It is worth noting, though, that Levy breaks with the romantic view of Latin-American students toppling dictators, as he argues students have more often complemented other catalysts to change. 3) Reconciliation regimes (e.g. Columbia, Mexico and Bolivia) are organised around a privileged corporatist model, and as such student unions are often recognised, but only to the extent that they do not threaten the stability of national politics. In practice, this means students are given a large space to affect intrauniversity politics, but should they expand from there the Government is likely to react forcefully, as was the case in Mexico where more than 300 students were slaughtered in 1968 and more throughout the 1970’s. Students at national universities played an important role in student protests under the reconciliation regime. One coping mechanism that was used from the Government’s side was to expand universities outside the capital region getting students at a distance from the centre of politics, but this strategy only yielded limited success. The 4) regime is the modern authoritarian regime (e.g. Chile, Brazil and Cuba), under which student unions are either outlawed or replaced by a government puppetunion, who is only allowed to deal with non-political issues like sports and culture (as it happened in Brazil and Uruguay respectively). It seems UNE (the Brazilian student union) was the only union that managed to properly respond to the regime and exist independently. Levy sums up that students under this regime posed no real threat to political stability, but indeed succeeded more than other groups in opposing, causing problems and embarrassing the regime.
Recently, the student activists have witnessed a fragmentation among themselves, accelerated by the massification of education across the continent. As the SAPs in the 1990’s increasingly privatised education, students now find themselves demanding different things depending on whether they are private or public students. Tribalism has also grown, with examples from Uganda showing how students vote along tribal lines rather than political lines, and all the while politicians continue to meddle with university elections (as for instance the case with ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe). At the same time, African student activists, of many who sympathized with communism, also became disillusioned and struggled to find clear alternatives to the neo-liberal agenda that was being implemented. Both Oanda and Klemencic et al. (M Klemenčič, Luescher, & Mugume, 2016; Oanda, 2016) argue that students suffer from their successful past, having been instrumental in a number of African independence movements and topping the regimes that followed (as for instance in Ghana and more recently Senegal). As a result, today’s politicians are painfully aware of the transformative power that students possess, but rather than engaging constructively with them, they seek to infiltrate and/or otherwise meddle with them. Klemencic et al. (M Klemenčič et al., 2016), surveying ten countries, also presents a few other interesting arguments: They highlight how national unions of students are often weak, due to the fact that for many years the only (or at least by far the largest) university in a country was often the national university. Thus, its student union is often seen to speak on behalf of the collective student population in the country and come to be seen as a national union, although, in fact, they only represent one university (using University of Botswana as a clear example). Looking ahead Klemencic et al. identifies much the same challenges as already presented by Oanda (though they surveyed other countries too). However, Klemencic et al. points to the African Union’s Agenda 2063 development plan, which does not specifically mention students other than youth, but for the first time saw active engagement in the formulation process from the All African Students Union (AASU). They argue this is could be a sign of regional change that will open a new avenue for the students to engage in regionally.
Levy goes on to argue how expanding private education was a deliberate strategy from some governments to depoliticise the student population, highlighted by, among other things, the wave of privatisation that flooded the continent in the early 1970’s. While the last governments (like Peru) in the 1970’s were finally implementing the demands from the 1918 Coimbra Declaration, at the same time they opened up the opportunity for private education providers, in an attempt to
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Chilean students protested again in 2015 in demand of new education reforms. Credit: Francisco Osorio
Chile
counter the increased politicisation of students in public education, as they gained access to co-decision making. This was a tactic especially popular among the reconciliation regimes.
When Chilean President Michelle Bachelet in January 2016 signed a new law into action granting 50 percent of the Chilean students access to free higher education, it was the temporary culmination of student protests that had started in 2001. The achievement echoed across the world, and inspired other student movements to push harder for free education (Chile’s overhaul of tuition fees has been repeatedly highlighted by the CFS - Canadian Federation of Students and other unions).
In summarizing, Levy uncovers a continent of student protests that lost momentum after the numerous victories in the 1960’s, achieved in large part due to the ideological political nature of students at that time. Much of the reason for this is government policies deliberately aimed at depoliticising the students and creating bulwarks against their activism spreading into broader society. What is interesting to note, from a contemporary perspective, is how the strategy of privatising education in recent years “backfired” in that it acted as a catalyst of renewed student protest in the late-2000’s and early 2010’s across the continent, witnessing major student victories in Chile and Argentina, and violent student confrontations in Colombia and Mexico.
Through interviews with education stakeholders in Chile, Grugel & Singh (Grugel & Singh, 2015) seeks to uncover the strategy that students deployed, as well as explain the larger societal impact of the protests. Their main claim is that the student protests were successful in reframing what it means to be a citizen in Chile. Since Pinochet took power in 1973, Chile had been dominated by neo-liberal policies. Further, the transition to democracy in 1990 was only possible due to “pacto de olvido” (an agreement to forget), in which questions shaped by the past were ignored (such as wealth distribution and land ownership), and consequently the neo-liberal policies continued to thrive. Citizenship came to be seen as an individual responsibility to contribute to the wealth of the society, without anyone raising the issues from Pinochettimes, out of fear of creating political instability.
It’s interesting to note that Levy’s article does not mention the regional Latin-American organisation Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes (OCLAE) that has operated with the Cubanese student union at the centre since 1966. Today, OCLAE exercises strong influence across the continent, and is a recognised actor towards governments at regional level, even though it emphasises communist ideology and activist activities.
One of Pinochet’s most hated policies was the “Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza” (LOCE) which decentralised education and introduced a voucher system, in which municipalities were reimbursed a fixed amount per student, leading to an explosion in the number of students. The system remained in place when democracy was restored, and at the same time education came to be seen as a tool to instill the skills needed to grow the economy. The result was a
National level
While the previous two sections have focused on very generalised trends in student organising throughout the years, this section, looking at the national level, seeks to deepen our understanding of student protests at micro level, while also extending the geographical scope of this review.
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highly-commodified system, hard to access, and without any guarantee of a job afterwards. In 2006, in an attempt to fix the system after the first wave of student protests, the Government expanded access to loans to low-income families, intensifying the commodification, rather than dismantling it.
organise around ideologies, rather than the common good of the students. Students themselves view their involvement in the student unions much the same way: they point to developing leadership skills as their main responsibility as student leaders.
The first wave of student protests started in Santiago in 2001, when the school student union (ACES - Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios) managed to bridge the class divide between low-income students from the city outskirts, who felt disillusioned by the prospect of paying out huge fees, without guarantee of a job, and the more privileged inner city students who wanted to offer a political critique of the political transition in the 1990’s. Students soon sought to reconnect with the movement’s pre-1973 radical activism, and started to change the narrative around education, calling for more equitable and democratic education.
However, albeit the political parties are still able to mobilise students, an increasing number are disengaging from student politics. O’Neil argues this is because the political parties, as well as previous student leaders, have failed to address the democratic hopes of the students. Faced with participating in student politics at huge personal costs against little democratic progression, students choose to abandon politics.
“[The analysis] indicates a strong hope among young people, exemplified by the phrase “Let’s see what happens”, often used by student leaders.”
The first wave culminated in 2006 with three weeks of national protests and violent clashes with the police, which forced the government to open unconditional negotiations over changes to LOCE. As mentioned previously, the result was largely dissatisfying, and as a consequence the protests continued on a second wave, which saw the university students (CONFECH - Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile) join.
More recently, Snellinger (Snellinger, 2016) returned to Nepal to analyse students’ resilience 10 years after they led the second People’s Movement. Her analysis is perhaps more positive than O’Neil’s, in that it indicates a strong hope among young people, exemplified by the phrase “Let’s see what happens”, often used by student leaders.
CONFECH’s strength is two-fold in that 1) it has established itself as a voice of all students (public as well as private, technical as well as university), and 2) has begun to articulate a new way of being democratic and civic engagement, very much inspired by past communist sentiments from within their own movement.
While student unions have not distanced themselves much from the political parties, Snellinger argues that the protests have helped young people realise the transformative power they posses, inspiring them to take on new democratic initiatives, such as establishing independent youth parties.
By emancipating themselves from a fear of return to authoritarian rule (which they themselves have not lived in), the students have started to redefine the very nature of political and civic engagement in Chile. Students have reconnected with the rights based approach to education pre-1973, politicised themselves, and broken away from the corporatist model of meetings, instead favouring new modes of (largely nonviolent) actions in the streets.
Russia Chirikov & Gruzdev in their article on path dependence problems in Russian student representation focuses on the role that the professional student unions in Russia have come to take in representing student interests (Chirikov & Gruzdev, 2014). The article shows how the professional student unions have largely continued to operate under the same system under which they were established in the 1930’s. The only slight change has been how the unions have come to organise much of the student leisure activities that were previously the responsibility of the Communist Youth League Kosmopol.
Nepal From the outside students in Nepal have often been at the forefront of national protests: student unions led the first protests demanding democracy throughout the 1970’s (even though they were officially illegal); in 1990 they were at the forefront of the first People’s Movement securing democracy; during the civil war a large number of students turned paramilitia; and again in 2006 students led the second People’s Movement, bringing the monarchy to an end.
Chirikov and Gruzdev points to four important challenges currently facing progressive student representation in Russia (and many former Soviet states, they argue): Firstly, while Russia’s new Law on Education seeks to implement co-decision making with students at all levels, the task will be hard to implement, because there is currently no framework in which students can engage with decision makers, nor are the professional student unions fit to aggregate student demands (as an example, Chirikov & Gruzdev points to how the professional unions fail to operate at supra-institutional level).
O’Neil (O’Neill, 2016) critically seeks to uncover the structure and mobilisation of Nepali student unions. He argues that student unions in Nepal have historically served as a breeding ground for future political leadership. That is, national political parties have to a large extent integrated student unions into their organisation as a mean of human resources to lead protests, and a way of instilling their political ideology into future leaders. As such, student unions take on much the same role as political youth parties would in many other countries. A consequence of this is that the student unions
Secondly, student rights are still understood very narrowly (mostly as access to financial support, housing and extension of exam deadlines for student activists), which means students will have a hard time formulating any real demands. The professional student union’s dominance in turn means
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as well as protesting united.
that many students inherit their understanding of student rights from the union, again limiting the conception of student rights.
During the protests CLASSE, inspired by past protests in Britain and and Chile, mobilised around the broader commodification of education and deployed a ruptural metamorphosis strategy under which they sought to mobilise enough students and citizens to shift the power balance. The target was to mobilise 5 - 10 percent of the population by breaking (neo-)liberal consensus and exploiting emotions. The students more than achieved their target: at its peak the protest involved more than 300,000 students, the equivalent of 75 percent of the entire student population in Quebec.
Thirdly, under the current culture in Russian institutions, student leaders have a much closer relationship to the administration than the students they’re ought to represent. Consequently, professional student unions are often used as a convenient vehicle to receive students’ approval, and should protests against the administration erupt, the student leadership is likely to oppose it. Fourthly, the professional student unions dominant position (with approx. 60-70 percent of all Russian students as members), means that it is hard for any new initiatives to gain track. However, recent developments in Russia have pointed towards an increase in independent student activism, such as in 2012 when various independent groups protested university mergers, out of dissatisfaction with the professional student union’s inability to react.
In conjunction with several failed moves from the Government (such as limiting the right to protest and refusing negotiations for more than two weeks), the protests spread rapidly and attracted global attention. In the end the Liberal government saw no other option than to call for early elections, hoping to receive a renewed mandate. Instead, CLASSE managed to once again mobilise the students to vote, allowing the Bloc Quebequés to form a minority government that immediately repelled the fee changes.
Independently from Chirikov & Gruzdev’s article, it is worth noting that recently an attempt was made to establish the Russian Students’ Union (RSU), but that after a short period activity, the fate of the organisation is currently unknown as of August 2017.
Summary
This literature review has sought to shed light on the historic role of student movements post-1968 in shaping higher education policy; representing the students’ voice; and not least contributing to broader social change in society. This has been done both by presenting the historic contribution of student movements, as well as analytical concepts that will be helpful in later analysis of the impact that student movements have had, and how global cooperation today can be supported.
Canada/Quebec In their article, Bégin-Caoutte & Jones provides an excellent overview of the factors that played into making the 2012 Maple Spring student protests in Quebec successful: overturning the provincial government and rolling back in fees increase (Bégin-Caouette & Jones, 2014). It’s worth noting that the article only deals with the protest in Quebec, which the rest of the Canadian student movement doesn’t have much contact with, and that higher education policies in Canada are a matter of provincial governments.
The review has been slightly limited by the low number of articles that have been published focussing on students’ role in the aftermath of the so-called 1968 student revolution. Still, it seems that a new “wave” of literature on student movements is starting to emerge. This might be explained especially by students’ role in opposing the neo-liberal policies that followed the financial depression, witnessed by their prominent engagement in the global Occupy-movement, as well as their involvement in the Arab Spring.
First of all, Bégin-Caoutte & Jones points to the fact that students in Quebec are used to gaining concessions through protests: “in 1968, they went on strike for tuition fees; in 1974 for more funding and loans; in 1978 for accessible loans and scholarships; in 1986 for a tuition freeze; in 1988 for aid for part-time students; in 1990 and 1994 to fight against tuition increases; in 2005 to oppose the conversion of student funding grants into loans; and in 2007 and 2012 against tuition increases”, in other words, the students had experience and faith in that protests would work.
In writing the review, I had to delimit myself from covering some countries that otherwise have relevant literature, instead focussing on the most relevant cases and the geographic scope of the review. Some notable articles that could have been included are Rivetti & Cavatorta’s analysis of how Iranian students have helped sustain the authoritarian rule (Rivetti & Cavatorta, 2014); Phelan’s article on the Burkinabes student union’s historic ties to the trade union and its role in military coups (Phelan, 2016); Brooks et al.’s criticism of how NUS-UK both criticise but also sustain a consumerist rhetoric through its income generating activities (Brooks, Byford, & Sela, 2016); Shin et al.’s overview of how Korean student movements have developed under both authoritarian rule and anti-union policies, in order to fight tuition fees (Shin, Kim, & Choi, 2014); and Luescher’s theoretical perspective on the #RhodesMustFall protests in South Africa (Luescher, 2016). Another highly relevant book is “Student Politics and Protest: International perspectives” edited by Rachel Brooks (2016),
Another important factor in making the protests successful was that for once students managed to unite an otherwise fragmented student movement. Student politics in Quebec were characterised in a divide between the two more formalised student unions Quebec Federation of University Students (FEUQ) and Quebec Federation of CEGEP Students (FECQ), who work with the Government, the more activist Association for a Student Sindical Solidarity (ASSE), and the informal student forum Discussion Table for Quebec Students (TaCEQ). During the spring, the students managed to unite under the larger CLASSE coalition, bringing together members from ASSE, FEUQ, and FECQ. The coalition meant that for the first time, the students had experience from lobbying
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which provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of recent student protests globally (including protests not mentioned here, such as Turkey and Hong Kong). Although not covered in this review, the book and its chapters will be referenced later on.
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STUDENT MOVEMENTS’ HISTORIC IMPACT the Anglophone, Francophone, Arabophone, and Lusophone African countries. Working to inform the masses of problems confronting the continent and addressing the needs of students, AASU’s activities seems to have been more or less consistent up until the mid-1990’s, when its efforts were recognised in a certificate by UNESCO. Its work in this period largely centred on pro-democracy issues, working against oppressive regimes and promoting parliamentary democracy.
This section seeks to map the scale and evaluate the impact that student movements at regional and national level have had in the period following the vibrant 1960s. A large number of movements qualify to be covered in this section, but in order to keep it concise, a selection had been made among them. Priority have been given to the most prominent movements, as well as those not covered in the previous literature review.
The 2000’s were marked by a leadership crisis, effectively paralyzing the union until 2012, when Fred Awaah was elected the new Secretary General and the organisation steadily started to operate again.
Evaluation criteria
The evaluation looks at student movements and protests across more than 40 years from the 1970s to 2010s, spanning across some of the most diverse cultural and political contexts. As such, it is impossible to apply any sort of universal criteria when evaluating the impact student movements have had in creating positive change to its constituencies.
Today, AASU seems to have some relationship with the African Union (AU), and is recognised by both UNESCO and the African Association of Universities, whom they have also hosted conferences on quality assurance in education with. Other topics AASU has worked with include electoral violence, climate change, and exchange programmes/student mobility, with the latter being a prominent topic. The issue of student mobility is contentious, because, while it does offer the individual members of AASU’s member unions a prospective future, it also hampers the development of a vibrant political movement on the continent.
Instead, each student movement should be compared against its own objectives and the context within which it operates. Throughout the section, I will be doing so by both presenting the specific student movement, but also attempt to describe the context within which it operated. In relation to the objectives of each movement, it is interesting to note the three core functions that Stuart et al. (2016) identify in their literature review on student governance: 1) to represent students’ interests; 2) to provide political and social activities such as leadership development and dormitories; 3) to provide welfare services (Stuart, Day, McVitty, & Francis, 2016). Some functions might be more prevalent than others in certain regions, which is interesting to examine further when attempting to fuse the expectations from national and regional student movements into a coordinated global movement.
AASU’s activities are very much based around the Secretary General, and the organisation’s small secretariat hosted in Accra, Ghana. It appears though that the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), has made attempts to leverage this to wield extended power in AASU, which helps explain why some NUSes in Southern Africa have accused the AASU of being a Western African regional union. It is also problematic, because NUGS has in recent years been increasingly coopted by political parties in Ghana, despite its proud history of pro-democracy fights, and used as puppets in national politics (van Gyampo, Debrah, & Aggrey-Dakoh, 2016).
The decision to base the evaluation on context specific targets can be rightfully criticised and risks causing bias in the evaluation. Nonetheless, developing an evaluation matrix in itself leads to bias, just as it is outside the scope of this paper.
In general, the AASU does seem to face some major challenges truly becoming a continental organisation, bringing together the five regions of the African continent. Some of these regions have previously also had their own regional unions that cooperated with AASU, but as of now, the Southern African Students’ Union (SASU) seems to be the only active, having recently been revitalised by students from seven countries1. As of January 2017 SASU is operating on a small grant from the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), which allowed it to organise a strategic workshop in
Africa All-African Student Union It is hard to assess the true scope and impact of the AASU due to limited documentation in scholarly as well as popular literature. AASU’s own website does provide some historical overview (AASU, 2013), but the information is hard to verify, and in some cases, it can be disproven.
1 The seven countries are: South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana, and Namibia. The platform is currently open to all student unions in each country, for instance both ZINASU and ZICOSU participate from Zimbabwe, despite often being in conflict at home.
Founded in Ghana in 1972, today AASU claims to represent 51,000 members through its 69 member organisations across
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April 2017, where its members planned ahead, including how to stabilise SASU and forge stronger links with AASU. In summary, it appears AASU was indeed a well-functioning platform from 1972-1990’s, supporting NUSes in their pro-democracy struggles. However, with democracies increasingly established across the continent, NUSes became co-opted and/or turned towards different objectives, which marginalised the role of AASU. In recent years, AASU has started to make up for this, by, among other things, engaging with AU on quality assurance in African universities, and student mobility programmes. However, at the moment it is unclear to what extend AASU engages itself in continental politics and is able to truly support its members in the struggles they face.
Senegal The Senegalese student movement has been marked by successive movements since 1968, each with their own distinct role in a larger political, cultural and economic struggle in the country. The one common feature is that they have all been centred around the University of Dakar, which up until 2007 was only one of two public universities in the country, with the second University of Saint-Louis since its establishment in 1990 limiting its student population to just 2,000 students. The objectives of these various movements can, however, be clustered into two broad categories. 1) From 1968 to the early 1990’s the students pursued anti-imperialist objectives, attempting to nurture a sense of national/African identity, by acting largely as a group of intelligentsia. 2) With the World Bank’s Structural Adjustments Programs implemented throughout the 1990’s, the students mobilised against these neo-liberal policies and the erosion of public quality education (Bianchini, 2016). This development follows the patterns also highlighted across the continent in the previously conducted literature review. Still, the Senegalese student movement in 1968 and the influence the events had on later movements is particularly interesting. Students in Senegal started their protests already in March 1968, two months before the French student protests started, some even argue that the Senegalese students inspired the protests in France, as the two movements were closely connected (Zeilig, 2007). Although students are often characterised as the elite, this was not entirely the case at the University of Dakar. 72 percent of the students were sponsored, a large group came from rural communities with no traditions of higher education, all students received a monthly stipend from the government, and the graduate employment had started to increase. In all ways a student body who could not be generalised as belonging to the elite, instead, they risked their futures by
Fig. 1: Timeline of the student movement in Senegal from 1968 and up until the last protests in 2014. Senegal has a proud history of student protests in defense of national identity, democracy, and student struggles, but the history also shows how students can be coerced and subdued.
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didate, and the division was also reflected among students, where especially the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) had established a core group of supporters. However, students were successful in uniting under the Comité de Gestion de la Crise (CGC) whose general assembly demanded an increase in the student grant and called for a strike. The strike soon turned into chaos: the CGC leadership was accused of accepting bribes from the government, security forces entered the university critically injuring five students in what came to be seen as an attack on academic freedom, and once the CGC leadership called off the strike (winning come concessions), the student body ignored the call, signalling the death of CGC and the beginning of a new UED.
standing up to the then-President Leopold Senghor (ibid). It is also important to note that students at University of Dakar were generally very politicised, with 74 percent of the student body listing that they had basic disagreements with the government. Because the university also operated as a regional university, it had a lot of international students from neighbouring countries, which could have stimulated further political discussions. But frustrations over the French-modelled university system, coupled with a surge in price on basic commodities and high unemployment, fuelled dissatisfaction among the student population, who a few years earlier in 1965 had united the different faculty unions as Union des Etudiants de Dakar (UED). As a reaction, UED organised protests on campus that later spilled into the streets, managing to detach the otherwise government-controlled labour unions and unite students and workers. The protest was the first to shake Senghor’s rule, who had to flee Dakar, and call in the French military to reestablish order. Although unsuccessful in their objectives, the students proved that they were a potent political force that had to be taken seriously.
UED came to play an integral role in the election of Abdoulaye Wade from PDS in 2000, who promised increased financial support, fee reduction and more. By championing the neighbourhood committees and moving outside Dakar, students were able to sensitise and register voters in the rural areas, which was the key in ensuring Wade his victory. The students’ efforts were also rewarded, with one of the student leaders, Aliou Sow, becoming Minister of Education, and enjoying a great deal of influence within the government.
The following years were marked by turmoil among students, mainly due to pressure from the government and social unrest in the country. Communist, socialist and liberal students all struggled to unite the voice of the students, but effectively no one succeeded. It was not until 1984 that the students came together again and organised a strike, but a real movement did not gain track until 1987 when the Coordination des Etudiants (CED) emerged.
However, one year later, Wade turned on the students by proposing to increase the university inscription fee, arguing the World Bank demanded it. Small groups of students from a few faculties called for an indefinite strike and the movement steadily grew bigger within the university. However, it was not until the student Balla Gaye was killed in clashes with the police a few weeks into the strike that students from outside the university and other regions joined the protests.
Contrary to prior movements, CED organised itself around general assemblies and quickly connected with the school students who organised themselves around the Coordination des Eléves du Sénégal (CES). Students manifested themselves as a potent force, when they contested the result of the 1988 general election. Fearing what the movement could spill over into the larger society, the government banned general assemblies in an attempt to subdue CED. Instead, the students organised around neighbourhood committees, where students would inform and agitate their peers locally.
Balla Gaye’s death ignited students across the country. Pupils, school students, and even students from private universities joined the protests. A few days later, student leaders met with Wade in the Presidential Palace, where Wade conceded and agreed to implement all his campaign demands immediately and mark the death of Balla Gaye. Along with this, Wade also strategically offered leaders of the UED scholarships abroad, with contributed to the student movement more or less dying out by 2004. Since then the national student movement has been largely dormant, with only few local protests taking place, as for instance in 2014, when students demanded their financial support be paid on time. Leo Zeilig summarises the student movement by saying that “today, students mobilise for visas”, which is perhaps the most striking characterisation you can give of the movement today.
These preparations were vital, when in 1992 the World Bank launched reforms of the higher education system as part of the SAP. The aim was to limit the number of students, as well as to privatise services on campus. In essence, the World Bank was targeting 30 years of core student demands. When by December 1993 the government decided to implement the reforms, students from both Dakar, and soon also SaintLouis who responded in solidarity with violent clashes between students and police in Dakar, went on strike. Students were soon joined by the teacher union and school students, but when the government annulled the academic year and forced students to return home, they effectively disorientated the movement, which was unable to remobilise the following academic year in 1995. The reforms were ultimately implemented in 1997, but the students and trade unions were successful in getting rid of the most contentious parts.
In summary, the developments in the Senegalese student movement post-1968 exhibits the essence of the challenges and strengths that other movements only witness parts of. Students were the vanguard of an emerging national identity, the intelligentsia, and catalysts of democratic change. They insisted on social development for every citizen of the country, fought for their own privileges, and overcame the factionalism that had gained track. They united across generations and social classes, became entangled with party politics, and at last co-opted holding their own aspirations above those of the country.
By 1999 students were gearing up for the 2000 general election. The opposition was divided in uniting behind one can-
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Students at the University of Cape Town protest in front of the disputed Rhodes-statute. Credit: UCT Rhodes Must Fall Facebook
South Africa
institution. The call was supported by a joint-call with NUSAS for one man-one vote to be implemented in the governance of South African tertiary education (ibid.).
South Africa has a proud history of vibrant student movements, but to an extend also a tumultuous history that has seen movements come and go, become co-opted by partypolitics, and factionalism among the students themselves.
With de Klerk’s election in 1990, Mandela’s release, and the beginning to the end of apartheid, SANSCO and NUSAS hosted a week-long session at Rhodes University, which ultimately led to the merger of the two organisations into the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO). With the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 students in South Africa effectively achieved co-governance on their campuses (Mpotulo, 2003).
In the post-1968 period South African student movements have largely been informed by the ideologies that the South African Student Organisation (SASO) championed. SASO itself was established in 1969, when black students broke away from the National Union of South Africa Students (NUSAS), which, although progressive, was dominated by white students. SASO instead advocated black-consciousness and repeatedly clashed with the government in the 1970’s over apartheid laws and a proposal to cut funding to politically active campuses (Stuart et al., 2016). Ultimately, in 1977 SASO was declared illegal and its leaders arrested. The remaining members of the movement never attempted to continue it as an underground movement.
As such, between 1969 and 1997 students managed to position themselves as one of the most dominant forces in the South African politics, helping abolish apartheid, and ensuring students stronger rights on campus. In doing so, they also showed how rift between black and non-racialized students could be mended, something which Mandela praised and said the larger South African society could be modelled around.
Instead, two years later the Azanian Student Organisation (AZASO) was formed by black students in order to pick up the baton from the SASO and advance the black consciousness movement (BCM). Yet, its leaders increasingly advocated the ANC’s Freedom Charter instead of the BCM, which brought it into conflict with the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO). As a consequence, the organisation renamed to the South African National Student Congress (SANSCO) (Online, 2011).
Up until the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests in 2015, however, the student movement lay largely dormant. The South African government adopted a pluralist policy system, which left both SASCO and the South Africa Union of Students (SAUS, a national body uniting SRCs) struggling to influence the formal politics, while the diversification of the student body made it hard to formulate a common grief to organise around (Luescher et al., 2016).
SANSCO led a wave of the school boycotts through the 1980’s and repeatedly clashed with police. However, the turning point came in 1987 when SANSCO called for tertiary institutions to become “People’s Campuses”, demanding Student Representative Councils (SRCs) at all levels and areas of the
What changed in 2015 was that black students realised the education system had not changed much since the 1990’s. Although apartheid had been replaced with affirmative action policies, aimed at increasing black students’ representation in
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pupils involved in the coup attempt have later moved on to become high-ranking politicians (Elming & Kestner, 2007). In 2004, however, the two existing pupils’ unions merged into DSE, while the liberal school student union shut-itself down and merged into DGS in 2005, the same year as the liberal students’ union also shut itself down.
the education system, black students were still relatively outnumbered, with the white students and academics dominating the research, curricula and campus in general. The Rhodes statute came to be a symbol of the inequalities that remained in South African higher education. Mixed with the University of Cape Town being a politically vibrant campus, students were soon able to organise around #RhodesMustFall and garner international attention. As the protest proved successful, students at University of Witwatersrand asked themselves what other had to fall: the exorbitant fees, proposed to be increased, limiting black students’ access further, presented themselves as the answer. As we already know, these protests later spread to most other campuses in the country (Luescher & Klemenčič, 2016).
The unity among students at all levels is only possible due to an informal pact that party politics are kept outside of the movement, and that in turn, the movement only engages in issues specifically related to education and/or students’ living. With the complexity of the combined student movement, it is hard to exactly assess the impact it has had through the years. While it is evident that the protests in 1968 had a major impact, and the impulses from then did carry over into the 1970’s and 1980’s, most of the victories from this period were on the defensive side, rather than securing improvements to the learning experience. Even though the movement was on the defence in Denmark, it was within the same period that the university students established what is today one of Denmark’s largest development organisations, Oxfam IBIS, initially aimed at supporting the anti-apartheid struggle and later also the popular movements in Latin-America (IBIS, 2016). In the 1980’s, the school students in coordination with the other Nordic countries established Operation Dayswork (Dagsværk, 2016), which organises an annual day of work with the proceeds going towards a development project abroad.
Established student movements like SASCO and SAUS played central roles in the #FeesMustFall protest, uniting with other youth organisations as part of the Progressive Youth Assembly (PYA), once again showing the potency of students when uniting with broader movements. However, a minor detail in the latest protest have been the small number of white students that have participated, which indicates an increasing racial divide that is also witnessed within the broader society.
Europe Denmark The student movement in Denmark is perhaps one of the most formalised movements in the World: the pupils (age 6-15) are organised in Danske Skoleelever (DSE), the high school students under three independent unions Danske Gymnasieelevers Sammenslutning (DGS, representing students in “traditional” high schools), Landssammenslutningen af Handelsskoleelever (LH, representing mercantile high school students), and Erhvervsskolernes Elevorganisation (EEO, representing technical high school students and vocational students), and last but not least, Danske Studerendes Fællesråd (DSF, representing university students). Adding to this, most shorter tertiary education programmes have their own national union (e.g. nurses and teachers etc.), which is the consequence of trade unions mobilising these students to begin with.
During the 1990’s the movement at all levels had a downturn in its activity, with most of the unions making a strategic rightturn, in order to span the opinions of all the students they claimed to represent. It was not until the liberal government came into power in 2001 that students once again started to organise themselves in defence of quality education, culminating in the 2004 welfare demonstration, which was the largest national demonstration in Denmark since 1968, led by the student unions with support from the trade unions. Since 2004 it has become more or less a tradition that the combined student movement (excluding the pupils) protest on the day that the parliament resumes sessions after the summer holidays. Unfortunately, the effect of the demonstrations and the work in government committees is still the same as in the 1970’s and 1980’s: students most of the time manage to defend the current expenditure and welfare level of students, but rarely manage to achieve progress in terms of improved quality of education, investment, or welfare.
Denmark is known for its corporatist model, which the web of student unions is well-integrated into through seats in different relevant committees, agencies, and complaint bodies, as well as by receiving grants from the national budget. This is largely the result of the protests taking place in 1968, which, although very peaceful compared to other countries, had a major impact in ensuring students co-governance at all levels of education.
Nonetheless, it is evident that the movement has been instrumental in securing the extent to which Denmark today continues to have public quality education at all levels and the state ensuring the welfare of students through a grant system. While the major battles have often been on in defence, there is also no doubt that through its parliamentary work, students have also secured minor victories that add up: the limit to number of students in a classroom, softened reforms, increased investment into teaching at tertiary level, improved pedagogy, and not least the support for local (school) student councils are all the work of student movement.
However, up until the mid-2000’s student unions at all levels (primary through to tertiary education) competed to be recognised as the primary representative of their constituencies, resulting in two differing opinions often being voiced from the apparently same constituency within the same forum. The differences were mostly along party-political lines, for instance with a second pupils’ union being established by the Social Democratic Youth, after a failed attempt to coup the existing union from the Communist Youth Party. Some of the
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European Students’ Union
tance.
Founded by seven National Unions of Students (NUSes) in 1982, ESU today represents 45 NUSes from 38 countries. Originally established as the Western European Student Information Bureau (WESIB), the organisation rose out of the international mess of the International Student Conference (ISC) and International Union of Students (IUS), who had both become entangled in the Cold War (European Students Union, 2012).
Its main vehicle to achieve this is its conferences and seminars, which it organises approx. 4 of each year on a wide range of topics such as global citizenship (one of its core areas), diversity, activism, governance, and quality education. With global citizenship being a dominant topic, OBESSU has also established itself as a preferred organisation within the Council of Europe and the Council’s youth work, which very much aligns with the priorities and informal workshop tradition of OBESSU.
From its outset, the members wanted to avoid this. Rather than emphasising politics, they wanted WESIB to act as a platform of cooperation between NUSes with the primary objective of collecting data and informing discussions on education related issues. Research came to dominate the organisation, which is also reflected in the number of alumnus who to this day continue to pursue doctoral degrees upon leaving the organisation.
Throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s OBESSU also played an important role in supporting the establishment of school student unions in countries that had no existing unions. As such, unions in Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were all established in collaboration with OBESSU. More recently, OBESSU has also helped establish a school students’ union in Georgia.
WESIB (and from 1990 and onwards the European Students Information Bureau, ESIB) excelled in this function up until the establishment of the Bologna Process in 1999. With the Prague Communique in 2001, it became apparent that students needed to unite at European level to defend their own political interests, and as a direct consequence ESIB had to prioritise its political work above its research. To reflect this, the organisation changed its name to European Students’ Union (ESU) in 2007.
In general, OBESSU’s global outlook has been strong, so has its progressive ideas. In the past, OBESSU both worked to establish a European school student exchange programme, and supported the establishment of Operation Dayswork in the Nordic countries. In summary, OBESSU has indeed managed to make itself relevant as a platform of cooperation. Not only has it supported movements where none existed previously, but it has also pushed forward the understanding and work that its members do in areas such as diversity and global citizenship, something which the education system (formal as well as non-formal) otherwise has a hard time getting a grip on. While it has strong policies in place to be used in lobbying, the equal focus on capacity building is what immediately strikes as a strength of the organisation.
ESU now works to promote students economic, social and cultural interests towards the European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, UNESCO and other supranational bodies. In doing so, ESU also tends to favour the logic of influence and more formal ways of working, rather than direct action and activism, which it leaves for its national members. While ESU is not recognised by many students at national and local level, it is a recognised stakeholder among international education stakeholders. It has certainly made a positive difference to students, particularly through its involvement in the Bologna Process, helping ensure students’ right to cogovernance at local level, but also more recently at EU level by pushing the EU2020 and ET2020 strategies by attempting to limit the degree of commodification. That said, there is no doubt that ESU could make a larger impact, also directly to students at national level, had it been able to coordinate its members more actively on issues deliberated on in the European Council.
Slovenia The structure of the student movement in Slovenia is rather unique, in that it is one of the few countries in the world, where the existence of a national student union is mandated by law. Although the Law on student community, in which the national union is stipulated, was adopted in 1994, it was not until 2002 that the local student councils united in Študentska organizacija Slovenije (SOS). School students united under Dijaška Organizacija Slovenije already in 1995, but it was not until the mid-2000’s that they became truly stable, partly with the support of ESU, partly SOS who they operate under as of today2.
OBESSU
Despite the short life of the student movement in Slovenia, it has established itself as a vanguard of the student welfare and quality education in the country. One reason for this is that SOS also operates as the trade union student workers3, who in turn pays 15.5% of their monthly income, which also covers health insurance and pension. Thus, the financial backbone of SOS has allowed the movement to consolidate
Founded in 1975 by school student unions from the Nordics (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), United Kingdom, and Ireland, as a platform of cooperation, OBESSU has grown into representing students from more than 22 countries across the continent. Because the EU has no mandate to legislate in the area of education, and there is no intergovernmental process as with the Bologna Process in Higher Education, OBESSU’s main focus has been to support national unions of school students through co-operation, exchange of experience, and assis-
2 DOS is operates as an independent entity, but its offices are located together with SOS, and it receives a substantial amount of money from SOS’ trade union income. 3 Defined as any person older than 15 in education working part-time
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itself, and reach out to most students in the country.
Students had produced leaflets and attempted to mobilise against the regime already in November 1987 when the decision to withdraw the banknotes was announced. However, it was not until March 1988, when a student from the Rangoon Institute of Technology was killed, after clashing with the son of a military general over a tape that the protests really gained track. The next day, 500 students protested in front of the police station.
The fact that SOS enjoys support from the students, beyond merely paying a membership fee, is seen in how SOS has managed to mass-mobilise in defence of free education and quality assurance. In 2006 students took the streets and occupied the parliament, when the government proposed to introduce fees. The protests jeopardised the political stability of the country, and in the end the Prime Minister conceded to the students’ demands, and led efforts to include SOS more in the education policy process. In 2010, more than 20,000 students took to the streets of Ljubljana again, protesting proposed changes to Labour law and scholarships that would have seen SOS’ role as trade union diminish, and the general working conditions of young people deteriorated with the introduction of mini-jobs, as we know them from Germany. The law was repealed soon-after. While the Government pushed ahead and adopted the Law, SOS and DOS managed to collect enough signatures to force a referendum, which with an overwhelming majority of 80 percent rejected the law, ultimately leading to the fall of the government in 2011.
From there on the movement only grew larger, despite several killings and even slaughters of student protesters. General Ne Win was forced to resign in June and promised multiparty elections soon after. The students had skilfully turned the protests into a larger popular movement and called for a national day of protest on the 8th of August, attracting more 1 million protesters in Yangon alone, jeopardising the military’s continued rule over the country. Protests continued across the country until the military retook control on the 18th of September by introducing a state of emergency, and sanctioning killing of any protesters. The indiscrete killings left an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 protesters dead, resulting in students and civil protesters fleeing to neighbouring Thailand.
SOS was also instrumental in established the national Quality Assurance Agency of Slovenia, an effort which they led in 2006, and has since become an example on how students can engage in quality assurance efforts, in order to influence their teaching. One reason it was able to push for QA agency, was its formal involvement in education committees, a position that SOS has also used to secure a national meal voucher system for students.
The student movement only recovered from the violence in 2003, with an attempt to reorganise ABFSU. That said, it wasn’t until 2012, when a Central Organising Committee was established, and ABFSU started providing support to establish local councils that students once again had a movement in Burma. When the Government adopted a new Education Law in 2014 limiting academic freedom, students had already attempted to prevent it through formal lobbying, but to no avail. Instead, a new wave of student protests spread the country with students giving the government a 60-day ultimatum to turn on it. As the ultimatum elapsed, students started their march from the central Burma towards Rangoon in the south. The march was abruptly brought to a hold by a military blockade on the 3rd of March. ABFSU issued a global call for solidarity, so that when they attempted to breach the blockade on the 10th of March, students from around the world were ready to echo the cries of the students. The military once again responded with violence and mass-detentions.
With a very specific mandate only to engage in education issues and students’ welfare, SOS has been very successful in achieving its objectives, and defending the interests of students. It has done so with a unique structure that, although not easy to replicate, is worth considering in an international perspective too.
Asia Burma Since its inception in 1936 the All Burma Federation of Student Union has been about ensuring the freedom of Burma4 and its students. First, students protested the British colonial rule, and later students have been some of the most outspoken critics of the military junta, who officially banned the organisation. While 1968 was a calm year in the Burmese student movement, the international actions could have inspired students, because the following years were some of the union’s most active years in history: In 1969, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, and again in 1978 students mobilised nationally against the military junta.
ABFSU has been a vibrant pro-democracy force in its country, and students (school students as well as university students) have literally taken a beating to advance the cause of democracy. Despite attempts to subdue the movement, it has regained momentum, and is to some extent the reason why Burma is today an emerging democracy, despite all the flaws that still exist (of Student Unions, 2015).
Hong Kong
The early 1980’s were relatively calm, until 1988 when students organised mobilised the 8888 Movement. The broader movement was fuelled by the withdrawal of banknotes without compensation, but as much the result of general resentment with the military’s violent suppression and economic mismanagement of the country.
With the small size of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Federation of Students’ consensus policy, HKFS has throughout history made a legitimate claim to represent the voice and concerns of students. Although established in 1958, it was not until 1971 that students made a name for themselves, when they protested the administrative transfer of the Senkaku Islands from the US to Japan. During this period the student
ABFSU consistently uses Burma as the name of the country, signaling its opposition to the military’s renamed Myanmar.
4
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movement was officially banned by the Royal Hong Kong Police, and as a consequence a large number of student protesters were jailed peacefully. During 1975 and 1976 the HKFS experienced for the first time to be out of touch with its membership base, when the leadership voiced official support for Cultural Revolution in China. The support was resented among students and became a hot topic during the 1986 HKFS election. Subsequently the consensus policy among HKFS’ then eight member student councils. Throughout the 1980’s the HKFS steadily withdrew its support for communism and increasingly support for movement for democracy in Taiwan and mainland China, finally declaring its support officially in 1984. 1989 was a particularly important year, when in February 4,000 students boycotted classes and went on strike against new policies proposed by the Hong Kong Education Department. In April students joined the China-wide Tiananmen Square protests. After the June 4h massacre, all member students of HKFS left classes for the remainder of the year. Between then and 2014 HKFS was not particularly politically active. That all changed when students initiated the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement protesting the decision not to allow Hong Kong universal suffrage for the elections. School students were among the first to join the popular movement that soon also gained support from scholars, human rights organisations, and other pro-democracy organisations. While the movement gained a large momentum, and received international support, it ebbed away when the Hong Kong Special Administration Region conceded to send a new Occupy Report to Beijing, voicing the concerns of the protesters. When the report was released, protesters felt it did not reflect their concerns fully, but at this point it was too late to revive the moment. In the aftermath HKFS has come under attack from its members, accusing the Federation of failing to lead the movement, which it in fact launched. The criticism triggered a disaffiliation referendum at five of its eight member institutions, resulting in four of them leaving. In its almost 60 years of existence HKFS has continuously been able to echo the voice of the students it claims to represent. It has done so mostly on social and cultural issues, and in recent decades dedicating particular attention to the independence and pro-democracy struggles of the country. While it has not brought about tangible change, there is no doubt that the Federation has advanced the causes that students care for. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2014 protests, HKFS is not also faced with the challenge of regaining the trust from students who felt they failed during the protest. Whether or not the bounce back from this legitimacy crisis, will determine the future of the Federation. People camp on an occupied road in central Hong Kong during the Umbrella Protests that were started by students. Credit: Katie Brinn.
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Latin America
deployed hard counter-measures, with as many as 1,800 students arrested in Chile, and several injured (Clarin, 2011).
Colombia and Chile
Although the Colombian students achieved its aim quickly, the Chilean students had to continue their protest until 2013 before they saw changes to the funding of secondary and tertiary education, as described in the literature review.
These two countries will be covered together, as the developments in the student movement reflects one another, and even included a coordinated day of action, in order to achieve the same target: to ensure free quality education by opposing the commodification of education in their respective countries. Both movements saw school and university student unions join forces in otherwise conflictual environments. And lastly, both movements were at least partly successful in achieving their demands.
While both movements were successful in achieving their immediate aim: to prevent damaging legislation from passing, it is harder to tell whether or not progress was made in ensuring investment into public quality education. OECD numbers do show improvement in public spending between 2008 and 2013 (latest numbers available), but the increase is not the largest among the countries, and both countries maintain the lowest public investment into secondary and tertiary education (OECD, 2016). Further progress from this is in part hampered by the students’ reputation due to the protests, which has caused some politicians to refuse cooperating with them. This leaves the students with only one avenue to seek influence through: protesting.
The first wave of student protests in Colombia started in April 2011 following a proposal from the Government to adjust the Higher Education Law. The proposed changes sought to increase the capacity of the higher education system by empowering private universities and introducing mechanism such as loans and debt forgiveness to encourage students to opt for private rather than public universities. Trade unions and student argued this would leave the public universities disabled and with not guarantee of the much-needed resources to invest in expanding quality education.
OCLAE
With discussions on the proposal starting in March and the announcement of the proposal in early April, school and university students were quick to unite and call for the first protests already on the 7th of April. Students united under the MANE coalition, which was led primarily by students from OCE and FEU, with other student unions, such as ACEU, joining the coalition later on too.
Information about the history of the Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes (OCLAE) is hard to come across, and as such any assessment of its scope and impact is hard to complete. It is clear that OCLAE has always enjoyed close links with the student movement of Cuba, who also hosts the secretariat and has a monopoly on the position as President of OCLAE. The communist heritage and rhetoric is evident in all of OCLAE’s work, which is imbued with left-wing radical language and an emphasis on students as suppressed social class.
At the same time in Chile, the national students’ union CONFECH, had been gearing up to launch a second wave of student protests, following the successful 2006 Penguin protest led by school students. It has been argued that many of the students who led the 2011 student protests, had also had leading roles in the 2006 school student protests. However, in the interim 5 years, the then-two national school student unions had collapsed, so instead the organisers had to rely on local school student councils to aggregate the school student demands. Together, they proposed a social contract, whose primary objective was to ensure investment in the public education system (Ahora, 2011).
OCLAE appears to exercise a lot of influence on its otherwise autonomous national members, but perhaps this is only in relation to international affairs. In this regard, OCLAE was also the leading region within the now mostly defunct International Union of Students. While most of OCLAE’s work is based around activism, it seems they have built up increasingly strong representation within the regional policy fora by being recognised by the Latin-American University Association and establishing strong ties with the UNESCO office in Santiago, Chile.
From the description above, it is evident that the two movements saw eye-to-eye on the issue of commodification of education, and how it should be solved. The leaders were quick to connect, and called for bi-national student protests on the 24th of November 2011. However, before the scheduled protests, the government of Colombia withdrew its proposal, making the solidarity demonstration significantly smaller (Devia, 2011).
Egypt The student protests of 1968 in Egypt were not part of the broader global wave of student protests as such, instead, they were fuelled President Abdel Nasser’s announcement of a new education law, which the students opposed. The law was announced in November, and with students having previously boosted their own moral earlier in year, with smaller protests against the military’s defeat in the Six-day war with Israel, the students were ready for fight.
Both movements based their efforts on mass mobilisation of students to protest in the streets and occupy institutions. Demonstrations in Bogota averaged 30,000 - 40,000 attendees during the months April - October, with the final demonstration, the day after the Government announced it would not proceed with the proposal, seeing as many as 120,000 attendees. The Chilean protests on the other hand averaged around 100,000 attendees. However, police in both countries
The uprising was led by school students from Mansoura, who agitated students in University of Mansoura to join them. The
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Nonetheless it seems it has often been in touch with the base of the population, and as such the movement has to some extent achieved success, despite numerous attempts to coopt and subdue the movement.
day after, they clashed with the security forces, resulting in three students losing their lives. As the news of the death reached Alexandria, students there went on strike too. As the Governor of Alexandria attempted to mediate with students, he was briefly held hostage, resulting in the Parliament being forced to discuss the issues students had with the proposed law. Ultimately though, students had to abandon the strike due to lack of food during Ramadan and the Governor’s threat to evict them by use of force. Nasser was not kind of the students, jailing most of them and forcing the leaders into military service.
United States By 1968 the existing National Students Association in the US was still involved with the CIA in funding the International Student Conference as a counter-weight to the KGB-controlled International Union of Students.
In 1970 Anwar Sadat became the President after Nasser’s death. Initially, he promised to be tough on Israel, but by 1972 Sadat had not yet fought Israel, and student grew contend. For the first time in the history of the Egyptian student movement (going back to 1919) students across the country stood up to Sadat, forcing him to take action against the Israeli military in the Sinai Peninsula. However, Sadat spoke out against the students publicly, jailed student leaders (many were Marxist students), and ultimately coerced the student movement to comply with him.
At home the association increasingly grew into what was perceived as a radical left-wing organisation back then: it endorsed the Black Movement by “all means necessary”, featured workshops on gay and women’s rights, and in 1972 sent a delegation to Vietnam to gather evidence of US war crimes. Its very radical activist work alienated some of its membership, resulting in a break-out organisation called the National Student Lobby (NSL), which would have a much stronger focus on lobbying the students’ interests in D.C. In the meantime, NSA implemented measures that would ensure gender and racial diversity in its organisation.
Between then and 2011, the student movement in Egypt was largely dormant: throughout the 1980’s it showed support of the Palestinian Intifadas, but when Hosni Mubarak became President, he ordered the security forces to infiltrate and subdue the student movement (Nasser, 2014).
The split between students did not remain for long. Already in 1978 the two organisations agreed to merge and become the United States Students’ Association, which still exists today. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s USSA expanded its grass root work by employing field organisers and teaming up with like-minded grass root initiatives to create among other things the Grass Roots Organizing Weekend (GROW).
By 2006 the student movement slowly started to flourish again. After more than two decades with a co-opted student movements and falsified university elections, a new initiative was launched among students who started to organise their own free elections. With the wave of the Arab Spring hitting Egypt, students came to the forefront of protest: local student unions mobilised students on campus to participate in demonstrations, while the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution took on a leading role in coordinating the protests (Hamed, 2013).
In recent years USSA’s main focus has become the increase in tuition fees, the subsequent student debt crisis, and the police’s crackdown on dissent with a new wave of activism. Its flagship campaign in this regard was its 2015 Million students march wants free college and university, which attempted to mobilise one million students across the country. Its activist activities are combined with lobbying efforts in D.C, with attention given to empower local students to impact their local senators and congressmen.
With Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s military coup students once again were split: those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood formed the movement Students Against the Coup, while the remaining student protested the imprisonment of its fellow student activists. As al-Sisi sought to consolidate his power by limiting the academic freedom and permanently deploying security forces to campuses around the country, students once again united to oppose al-Sisi. Despite their efforts, al-Sisi crackdown manage to once again subdue the student movement: by his first year, more than a thousand students had been jailed, a hundreds hospitalised after violent clashes. The last impulse to the movement for now seems to have ebbed away in 2015, when students sought to oppose new geographical limits to university admission, but merely the threat of repercussions calmed the movement (MEE, 2015).
While USSA is a strong movement, its geographic scope appears less so. Its support for state-wide and local chapters is strong, and has without a doubt helped advance the causes of student organising and diversity on campus. Among other things USSA was very involved when students at University of Missouri stood up to the administration’s inability to react to racially motivated violence on campus, and it also bolsters strong links with the Black Lives Matter. But it appears that USSA has previously had some struggle making headway as an advocacy union at national level (Johnston, 2016). Interestingly, Bernie Sander’s endorse of free tertiary education during the primaries in 2016 appears to have boosted USSA’s position, reflected in that the President of USSA launched the Democrat’s push to make public colleges and universities free.
The Egyptian history shows that students have been instrumental in regime change over the years. While the catalyst for mobilisation has been both social, military, and educational issues, it appears it has always targeted the incumbent President in an attempt to achieve progress. It has brought about hope of democracy, but also led efforts to go to war.
The past struggle to mobilise nationally can be partly explained by the fact that USSA does not represent students at campuses and in state-wide organisations across the country.
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police, so pro-democracy students rely on informal organising (Rivetti & Cavatorta, 2014).
Instead, its chapters are often focused around politically vibrant communities with a tradition of organising, while more conservative areas are not mobilised, but instead left for the competing Young Americans for Freedom.
•
●Zimbabwe: Another case where students led the freedom struggle that turned into an authoritarian rule. When the independent Zimbabwe National Student Union became too popular in the early 1990’s, Mugabe responded by establishing a ZANU-PF friendly student union. ZINASU since jeopardised its own political independence, when it co-funded the Movement for Democratic Change, which is today the main opposition party. That said, it is students who continue to lead the fight for a more democratic Zimbabwe (Makunike, 2015).
•
●New Zealand: Previously student associations were very influential in New Zealand, owing much thanks to the model adopted from the UK. With recent changes to funding in higher education, the balance has tilted, as student have come to be seen as consumers rather than student citizens. Combined with limits to university’s ability to collect union fees and allow collective membership, the NUS-NZ has witnessed a steep decline influence (Nissen & Hayward, 2015). The same developments are also seen in Australia.
•
●United Kingdom: 1969 marked a radical shift in NUS-UK, when the “no-politics” clause introduced in the aftermath of World War II was removed from its statutes. Even before then, NUS-UK has played a major role in establishing and driving forward global student cooperation, being founders of both the IUS and ISC. In recent years, NUSUK has battled a fee increase at home, in many ways adopting the same historical radical language that we all saw Colombian and Chilean students do (Brooks, Byford, & Sela, 2015). Still, there is a paradox that NUS-UK also operates a large number of business, and as such rely on student consumerism to fund its operation (Brooks et al., 2016).
Another reason why it appears difficult to mobilise students nationally in the US, when students in the much-alike Canadian system has been so influential, could potentially be the fact that student activists in the US tend to identify stronger with affinity groups, rather than as a class of students. This limits the potential size of the specific movement and the grievances it can encompass, thus hampering a broader collective student movement (Mehreen & Thomson, 2016). This is however not to say that the student movement in the US is not blooming, almost on the contrary: its history of vibrant student movements is rich, with students across the country mobilising on a number of different issues (e.g. introduction of fees at Cooper Union, tuition hikes at University of California, or racism at University of Missouri). Some of the most tactical student movements remain in the US, with its strong focus on training future student leaders and a syndicalist approach, it has shown the value of strategizing and continuous escalation of protests.
Other noteworthy movements
Some noteworthy movements were left out of the comprehensive mapping and evaluation above due to a variety of reasons such as geographical balance, lack of information, and a very concentrated period of activity. A number of these movements nonetheless deserves a quick remark: •
•
•
●China: Between April and June 1989 Chinese students mobilised in more than 400 cities across the country in opposition to newly introduced economic reforms that increased inequality. Students demanded corruption be combatted and democratic reforms. Protests ended with the Tiananmen Massacre on the 4th of June. Rather than democratic reforms, the communist party tightened its control with media and activists, but did also delay additional economic reforms.
Summary
While it is hard to conclude anything from such a comprehensive mapping and evaluation of student movements across different time periods and contexts, a few tendencies nonetheless emerge.
●Serbia: In the winter 1996/1997 students established themselves as the main opposition force to President Slobodan Milošević by protesting electoral fraud in the local elections. Milošević quickly ended the protests by conceding defeat. In November 1998 a new movement called Otpor! emerged. It was students who had learned from the previous protests, and now sought to overthrow Milošević through non-violent actions. Through 1999 and 2000 the Otpor! movement built itself into a broader popular movement, successfully overthrowing Milošević on the 5th of October 2000 (Nikolayenko, 2009).
Firstly, it appears that movements can create momentum through campaigns, but sustaining that momentum is often hard, and at the very least requires some sort of organisation. As students become vested in single issues and protests, it can be hard to transform their engagement into broader issues or even new protests, as soon as the first wave dies out. Establishing some sort of structure to bring together core activists and coordinate further actions should be a priority.
●Iran: It was the students who led the Iranian Revolution that ended the Shah’s rule and established the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1978-1979. As resentment with the Islamic rule has increased through periods of time, so has it been the students that launched pro-democracy protests as witnessed in 1999, 2003, and 2009. Officially though, the student unions are subdued by the secret
Secondly, it is very rarely that student protests erupt spontaneously. Often, they are the result of a larger societal struggle that students can see themselves reflected in. This argument is further supported by the fact that the most successive movements are those who have united students across different levels of education, and organised in solidarity with workers.
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Thirdly, a slight pattern of intense activity followed by a period of restitution can be observed. Whether the restitution is voluntary or simply due to suppression is hard to conclude, but the period can be leveraged to reorganise and strategize in preparation of a renewed push. This is important, because this paper points to some movements currently facing challenges, but perhaps we need not worry too much. Finally, students have been and continue to be a vibrant change agent in their societies. Whether they only engage in education issues or broad societal struggles, student movements have repeatedly proven that they are able to mobilise and even jeopardise the political stability of the country. In concluding so, it is also evident that no generalisation of the scope of the student movement can be made, which is perhaps also the beauty and strength of the movement: the fact that it responds to local needs and adapts to fit in a variety of contexts.
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Analysing student documents Ask we seek to understand how a resurgence in global student cooperation can best be supported, we must first seek to understand past struggles and identify commonalities that students can organise around. This is the ambition of the present section: to contribute to an understanding of how students have organised the past 100 years (from 1917 onwards), by analysing the documents that have laid the foundation of student struggles; looking at of how they were adopted by the student movement; what topics they cover; and how they guided action specifically.
●Is there a coincidence between strong and lasting student movements, existence of such documents, and the way they have come into being?
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●What are the potential benefits of student charters, bills of rights and other documents expressing the shared creed, goals, and civic outlook of students, and how do different factors come together to determine whether this potential will be realised?
●Do there appear to be persistent regional differences in the formulation and use of such documents?
•
●What recommendations can be made to students at national and regional levels with respect to drafting and using anchoring documents?
The documents analysed in this section were collected by reaching out to a global network of current and former student leaders. Individuals from North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia were approached and asked to provide student-formulated documents that had guided cooperation, dialogue and action. The documents impact should go beyond a single institution and address more than a narrow time-bound set of issues in their scope. In choosing this approach the individuals came to be the judges of whether or not documents qualified for the study, which is important because it ensures that the documents fulfil that given role within a specific cultural context. The global and regional documents were mostly collected by myself.
Central to this are the following questions: •
•
While the effort was successful in terms of collecting a large number of documents, their global representativeness is
Fig. 1: Map of countries and regions covered in the list of student-formulated documents. Only Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, South-Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Botswana, and Namibia have been included under the All-African Students’ Union’s participation, because the involvement of other NUSes is unclear. As for the Asian Student and Youth Association, India, Indonesia and the Philippines have been included, as all three countries were very active in ASA.
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mostly achieved through regionally and globally formulated documents (see fig. 1). This in itself is most likely a sign of how documents are understood and used within the movements, but this is a question we save for later. Another explanation is that a large number of countries do not have any documents that are in active use today. While they might have had vibrant student movements at earlier stages in history, these movements have now been subdued or replaced, which means no new document fulfils the criteria listed above. A third explanation is that some countries were simply unresponsive to requests, despite following up numerous times.
enjoy the human right to study for free, but have to fight back against an increasing number of private providers who erode the quality in public education. University students can make a claim to “progressively free” tertiary education, but in essence, corporations and conservative politicians have been successful in completely diminishing this perspective on tertiary education.
All the documents discussed in this section can be downloaded online from www.goo.gl/azvemv.
“Our university is not a business. Its goals are academic, not commercial. It is here to foster inquiry, not to extract profit. We are motivated in our scholarship not by incentives of financial gain but by the pride we take in our educational and scholarly work. We are driven by a quest for truth and a passion for learning. Our ambition for the university is not that it should be ranked above others in terms of quantitative indices of performance or productivity, but that it should stand out as a beacon of wisdom, tolerance and humanity. These are our core values.”
The revolt against the neoliberal economic dogma is wellreflected in the documents, as for instance in the Reclaiming Our University-manifesto from Edinburgh:
Clustering of topics
In order create an overview of the documents, we first need to cluster the topics covered in the documents. The clusters are generally quite broad, but nonetheless serve to highlight what topics student could potentially achieve consensus to organise around. Generally speaking, reading the documents, twelve distinct clusters can be identified. Each of the clusters carry sufficient weight and repetition across the 28 documents in the study, in order to justify it as an independent cluster. Of course, other topics have also been brought forward, but these have either not been distinct enough or not been mentioned in more than a small number of the documents. See table 1 for a complete overview.
Yet, despite the general agreement on the fact that fees pose an obstacle to accessibility, there is no consensus on whether education should be free or merely affordable. The division seems to be along the Anglophone world and the rest, which can be partly explained by the generally higher fees faced in the UK, Australia, and North America, forcing the student movement to adopt of strategy of affordability, potentially later taking aim at the fees all together.
Cost of education
Governance of education
Naturally, the cost of education is one of the topics covered most extensively throughout the documents. To many potential students their choice comes down to whether or not they can afford to continue their studies at university. As such, the cost is often one of the largest obstacles to accessibility and thus social mobility in education. School students
At their core, student movements represent students’ priorities, be it through formal structures or as a vehicle of popular opinions among students. Although the specific focus changes from document to document, it is clear that students demand to be involved in decisions that impact their educational life. The different demands include both a plea for governments to respect the students’ right to organise
Table 1: Overview of what topics each of the mapped documents include mentions of. The table is also included in the appendix in larger size.
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experiences recognised as an important part of educational quality and to be able to make use of them. 6. All students have the right to an education imbued with different equality perspectives that improve the quality of education.”
themselves; calls for financial support to representative bodies; and the inclusion of students into decision-making bodies at various levels. These demands reflect the idea of modern collegiality, where the academic community at large works together to run and develop the university, as a governance form of universities very well.
JUTS Constitution: “[...] to achieve our ultimate goal — a system of post‐secondary education which is accessible to all, which is of high quality, which is nationally planned, which recognizes the legitimacy of student representation, and validity of student rights, and whose role in society is clearly recognized and appreciated.”
This is one of the topics, which the Bergen Declaration is strong on: “We believe all students have the right to be represented by and able to participate in a democratically run, autonomous students’ union in their institution- membership of which must be accessible and free to all students. Students’ union’s democratic structures should reflect the diversity of the student population, in particular, equal participation of women must be ensured. A democratically elected student organisation should represent students nationally, through which students are able to participate in relevant national decision making processesand which is recognised as the national student voice by the government and other stakeholders.”
Student welfare The concept of student welfare is rather broad, in that it is any measure that improves the life of students outside the classroom. The idea behind it is to ease students’ life in such a way that it becomes easier for them to focus on actually studying. Examples of initiatives aimed at improving student welfare include, but are not limited to: student grants, housing, insurance, and food banks. Judging from the overview, it is striking that it is particularly movements from Anglophone countries that articulate the need for stronger student welfare services. One like explanation is that fees are generally higher in these countries, thus creating a need for students to save money in other areas. Alternatively, it could also be that these movements are simply at the forefront of articulating a new important issue to students globally, as neoliberal policies increasingly get a firm grip around students’ life. One example is the NUS-UK’s 100 year manifesto:
Democracy The fact that several student movements operate in authoritarian contexts or have previously championed democratic movements at home, is also reflected in the documents. Mostly, it is not a topic that is elaborated on, instead it is focused as something rather obvious, which might also be the reason other movements operating in democratic contexts take it for granted. Perhaps the most striking example of democracy being included in the student documents, is the HKFS Declaration for Student Strike, which was the document that the HKFS sparked the Umbrella Protests with:
“We want to achieve an understanding that welfare and wellbeing enables students to enter, remain in and flourish in education, and that providing help, advice and support is therefore a core part of our work.” - NUS-UK 100 year Manifesto
“As such, students must temporarily leave the classroom and throw ourselves into social activism, to turn Hong Kong from its current inauspicious path. To strike, is to refuse to watch apathetically. To strike, is the first step in resisting oppression. To strike, is to create a new opportunity for synergy. To strike, is to push each Hong Konger to rethink their own “fate”. To strike, is the youth’s challenge to their preceding generations to hark to the call to resist. We defiantly refuse to accept this state of matters – because we swear to retake our future, our future of self-governing democracy.”
Academic freedom Historically, academic freedom has been understood to be the freedom of scholars to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment. Recently though, the concept has been broadened to ensure the freedom of the academic community as a whole (incl. students), as well as placing more emphasis on coercive strategies from external groups that attempt to control academia. These developments have been important as states tighten their grip around financing, and campuses increasingly become politicised. One example of the inclusion of academic freedom is the Bergen Declaration:
Education quality The concept of education quality is addressed in a number of different ways. Some documents, like the European Students’ Rights Charter, discuss it in terms of the formal system that should be in place to conduct quality assurance, recognize degrees etc., while others, such as the JUTS constitution, merely demands quality and slightly elaborates on its content.
“Unless academic freedom is upheld in our education systems, education is not truly free. We believe that campuses must be places for debate and discussion, where freedom of speech is fostered and freedom of ideas is encouraged. Students have the right to self determined and self produced media on campus.” - The Bergen Declaration
European Students’ Rights Charter: “1. Everyone has the right to an inclusive, high quality education free of charge. [...] 5. All students have the right to have their backgrounds and
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Sustainability
truly a space where equality reigns and differences are respected. Our fervent wish is for an educational system that allows each and every one of us to blossom.” - CLASSE manifesto
Education is one of the key enablers for a sustainable future. Empowering the future generations to tackle in particular environmental challenges, is vital in order for them to be able to analyse and solve the challenges. This is an old realisation within the most left-wing parts of the movement, but an increasing consensus is emerging that students need to be at the forefront of sustainable development, as for instance reflected by the NUS-UK major environmental sustainability projects that have also won UNESCO awards.
International cooperation Historically, student movements have always cooperated internationally, or at the very least been inspired by actions elsewhere on the planet. The Liminar Manifesto is a great example of how the actions of students in one place spread throughout a continent and inspired other students to engage in a shared struggle. The more formalised cooperation thrived between the two World Wars, and again in the immediate aftermath of World War II with the IUS and ISC dominating international student politics. While the global cooperation has partly suffered the past 25 years, we have seen regional cooperation remain strong. Surprisingly though, the topic is given very little attention in the national documents, but it still stands out as an independent cluster, due to of course the nature of the regional and global documents.
One example of the sustainability being included in a document, is the IUS constitution, which can be seen to be aligned with the view of former Cuban President Fidel Castro, who voiced his view on environmental policies at the Earth Summit in 1992. “The contribution to the struggle for finding solutions to acute economic problems hindering development of whole nations, and for the implementation of principles for a just world system of equal economic relations and security among states; the finding of solutions to urgent global problems that humanity faces, through its joint efforts particularly the problems of the environment, sustainable development, poverty, overpopulation, drug abuse health, etc., and the establishment of a just world information, cultural and communication order.” - IUS constitution
“We, as representative student organizations from across the globe, consider it our responsibility to fight for quality higher education for all and for student rights and participation, while being fully aware of our role in preparing students to become active citizens in the current and future global society.” - WCHE 2009 Student Statement
Equality Egalitarian values have been embodied into the student movement for centuries. Whether it was about the students in Bologna, who formed a university to organise collective bargaining with the city council in 1088; the Argentinian students who wanted to be free men in 1918; the IUS who supported independence movements across the World; or today’s Canadian students who are a vital part of the Black Lives Matter-movement, students have always been at the forefront of equality. The development lies in the scope of equality, having developed from merely social equality, to, really, equality for all, with identity politics gaining significance within the movement globally. While social equality through education remains the core of the student movement, issues around gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity have grown to be almost equally important issues to the movement. Some movements solely focus on marginalised groups access to education, while others engage in broader social discussions and the groups’ conditions in society.
National economy
“We, the students of the United States Student Association, through democratic participation in our representative body, the United States Student Association (USSA), as student activists and advocates dedicated to the principles of expanding access to higher education for all persons regardless of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, financial constraint, political affiliation, veteran’s status, documentation status, or religious affiliation, do hereby ordain this constitution.” - USSA constitution
Anything that has to do with support for student mobility and international recognition of degrees has been clustered under “student mobility”. Unsurprisingly, it is the international and regional documents that dominate this category, with Romania and the NUS-UK as the national exceptions, which can be explained by their high outbound and inbound mobility respectively.
The national economy is discussed in several the documents, most often in ideological terms, and if not, then in terms of how students can contribute to improving the national economy. Documents that engage in discussions around the national economy clearly manifest themselves as movements with a value orientated with a societal focus. Looking at the list of documents involving the national economy, it is also clear that these are often adopted by very ideological movements, such as the ISM, or movements from countries with poor-performing economies, such as Zimbabwe. “A university that takes sides for the full validity of human rights and for reversing the perverse logic of the neoliberal model that has declared war on the poor leaving poverty intact.” - ACEU constitution
Student mobility
“In order to increase the transformative potential of scholarships we must also ensure that the scholarships are awarded to those most in need and to a representative group of students. There is nothing transformative in supporting students from the Global South, who would be able to finance the education
“We are against prolonging this discrimination against women as well as against people who are in any way shunted aside by society. Our aim is to make our educational system well and
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themselves even without the scholarship.
Particularly, it seeks to understand how they place themselves in the internal hierarchy of the movement. To do so, first a categorisation system must be developed, in order to differ the importance of the documents, which is needed to inform a general discussion. Looking at the documents, a categorisation system with four levels can be generalised: The core documents; the founding documents; the political statements; and those with low or no relevance.
Ensuring equity in scholarships is most easily achieved by distributing them on a need-based basis that pays careful attention to marginalised groups such as persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities and indigenous people.” - A joint vision for Secondary and Higher Education for All in Europe
Core documents are those documents that movements have truly organised themselves around and embody without any need of more formal documents, such as a constitution. They need to be the primary source of policy and action, or at least have taken on this role earlier on in history.
Given the major increase in number of mobile students, it is striking that the topic is not dominant across all the documents. One possible explanation is that national organisations for students abroad (e.g. the Association of Norwegian Students Abroad) or local student clubs (e.g. Asian student clubs in larger universities) tend to be very well-organised and capable of providing support for individual students as well as lobbying national governments to improve living conditions. In Europe, the Erasmus Students’ Network is also an example of a dedicated organisations fighting for mobility, which helps explain why unions in Europe leave this topic to other organisations. Still, as mobility increasingly intersect with other topics such as quality assurance and financing, there is a potential to integrate it more into the representative student movement.
The founding documents are those documents that define the basic principles, including formal hierarchies, of a movement. The policy and actions will be more specifically formulated in other documents such as policy papers and work plans that are updated on a more frequent basis, and thus don’t qualify because they don’t go beyond a narrow time bound set of issues. These documents will most often be constitutions. The political statements are the statements that are political in nature and guide action, but still do not take on the form of the core documents described above. While they enjoy a certain privileged position within the movement, they are ultimately subordinate to what is stipulated in other documents the movement has adopted.
Labour market influence/policies This cluster covers topics that relate to the labour market’s influence on curricula design and the education system at large, such as how the two systems can be bridged. For the most part, the documents are critical of the labour market entering the university system, fearing it will infringe on the academic freedom, but at the same time many documents also recognise the importance of securing graduates a job, the latter being particularly dominant in documents adopted after the global financial recession.
Lastly, there are the different documents that, for various reasons, had a short-lived life and a no longer actively used by student movements. However, these have been included in the mapping in order to better understand the politics of student movements in the time they were adopted, and in order to learn from the lessons that led to them failing.
An example is the 2014 Romanian Decalogue that demands “focus on students’ challenges on the labour market by bridging the two sectors”, while the CLASSE manifesto goes more into detail:
The documents included in the mapping can be categorised in the following way. Core documents • Liminar Manifesto (1918) • ISM Statement (2008) • CLASSE Manifesto (2012) • SAUS Students’ Rights Charter (2014) • HKFS Declaration (2014) • SEALDs Manifesto (2015) • ISIPE letter (2014) • Reclaiming Manifesto (2016) • Grenoble Charter (1946)
“Free access does more than simply banish prices: it tears down the economic barriers to what we hold most dear. Free access removes the stumbling-blocks to the full flowering of our status as humans. Where there is free access, we share payment for shared services. By contrast, the concept of price determination - the so-called “fair share” - is in truth no more than veiled discrimination. Under the supposedly consensual “user-payer” principle, a surtax is in fact charged to people whose needs are already at the bottom of the heap. Where is justice, when a hospital can charge the exact same fee from a lawyer as from a bag clerk? For the lawyer, the amount is minimal; for the bag clerk, it is a back-breaking burden.” - CLASSE manifesto
Founding documents • CFS Bylaws (1981) • USSA Constitution (1946, latest upd. not known • ZINASU Constitution (2013) • NUS-AU Constitution (1987, latest upd. not known) • ACEU preamble (2000) • NSSC Constitution (2006) • JUTS Constitution (2015)
Order of relevance
This section seeks to examine how the documents have been put to use and referenced in the student movements.
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deal with policy do establish the broad political limits that the movement has to operate within, which has major implications over time. However, because of their general nature and small size within the larger document, it is hard to access exactly what impact these documents have had in their respective movements.
Political statements • European Students’ Rights Charter (2008) • Bergen Declaration (2016) • Declaration of School Students’ Rights (2006) • Joint Vision for Secondary and Higher Education in Europe (2016) • Common Declaration of Student Unions in Romania (2010) • ABFSU Demands (2014) • NUS-UK Manifesto (2016) • AKS-Schulmodell (2010) • Forum Hochschule (2013)
Lastly, there are the political statements, which complement other documents in their movements. Although the documents cover a broad range of topics, similarly to the other two types over documents, they all also go more into detail with exactly how the students’ demands should then be implemented. This technical detail makes it easy to pinpoint whenever the documents have an impact, such as in how the Students’ Rights Charter has helped secure diplomate supplements in the Bologna Process, or how ABFSU insisted on participating in the drafting process of the new Higher Education Law. What is interesting with this category is that there is a great variety in how actively the documents are used. The Declaration of School Student Rights is one of the most referenced documents in OBESSU, just as the NUS-UK Manifesto is essentially the foundation for the organisation’s development, but while for instance the Students’ Rights Charter is mostly actively used by ESU’s Human Rights and Solidarity Coordinator, and not so much the rest of the organisation.
Failed documents • WCHE Student Declaration (2009) • Port Huron Statement (1962) • IUS Constitution (1947, upd. 1991) As the categorisation shows, the documents distribute themselves more or less evenly across the three categories, which are still actively in use. Three documents fall in the category of failed documents, however, only the WCHE Student Declaration has directly failed at its task, while the Port Huron Statement and IUS Constitution have failed due to the respective movements ceasing to exist. The WCHE Statement, although written by students and touching on many of the same topics as the other documents, appears mostly to have failed due to the students’ low involvement in the WCHE process up until the actual forum. The WCHE Students statement was adopted in parallel to a broader WCHE conference organised by UNESCO in 2009. The HKFS Declaration and SEALD’s Manifesto could potentially have been included in this category, as their respective movements have peaked and potentially ebbed out, but at the same time it appears that they still inspire groups of students in their respective countries.
Rhetoric
As previous deliverables have shown, one of the most dividing forces of previous attempts at cooperating globally has been the tone which the different movements used, perhaps even as much as the actual policies that they want to adopt. Keeping this in mind, it is interesting to better understand the differences within the rhetoric used in these documents, and doing is also essential in order to establish a baseline from which future documents can be formulated. The three categories outlined earlier each have distinct tones, but even within the categories we find that there is a difference in the tone and rhetoric according to different movements.
The most success in found within the category of core documents, with the majority of the documents having been instrumental to successful student movements such as the ones in Canada and Japan. However, what characterises these documents is that while they were successful in facilitating an intense student movement capable of making an impact and changing things for the better of students, they have often struggled to facilitate any meaningful activism afterwards. The HKFS Declaration is a great example of this: it initiated a movement, which as its peak threatened China’s control over the Hong Kong peninsula, but as authorities started to quell the movement it collapsed in lack of stronger hierarchies. The ISM Charter also takes on a role to unite different student groups around the ISM platform, but in effect it is hard to show that the charter has had an actual impact on the actions on students on the ground. Rather, this is a role that other more local documents have taken on.
Looking at the documents involved in the study, and drawing on Altbach & Cohen’s (Altbach & Cohen, 1990) typology, it is possible to conceptualise model in which documents can be placed in a matrix according to their orientation (normative/ value) and degree of formalisation (formal/informal). These two dimensions are important, as they help us understand both how the movement positions itself within society, as well as giving us an indication about the degree of formalisation within the movement. The latter builds on an assumption that more formalised movements will also tend to use a more formal language in their documents, although the for the founding documents this does create a bias. One example of a normative orientation is the Declaration of School Student Rights, which outlines explicit rights that school students hold, such as: “School students must be involved in the decision-making processes in all matters of concerning the school. This must be guaranteed by legislation.” An example of the opposite, that is a document with a value focus, is the CLASSE Manifesto, which deals with larger values embodied in society and how these should be
The founding documents are the complete other extreme of the core documents. These are documents that have maintained their role over several decades and continue to guide the movements that adopted them. The politics of the movement is embedded into the constitutions, but often in such general terms that it can be hard to identify any particular impact. Nonetheless, the sections of these documents that
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task to include in this paper.
changed: “The way we see it, direct democracy should be experienced, every moment of every day. Our own voices ought to be heard in assemblies in schools, at work, in our neighbourhoods. Our concept of democracy places the people in permanent charge of politics, and by “the people” we mean those of us at the base of the pyramid - the foundation of political legitimacy.”
The matrix exposes a clear difference in language between student unions and student movements. All documents value focused documents written using informal language, have been adopted by movements of students that were not organised around aggregating the student voice. Similarly, all the normative focused documents written using formal language, have been adopted and used by student movements. The more informal and normative documents are, except the Bergen Declaration (which still needs to materialise properly), political documents which have been adopted by student unions as supplement to existing (formal) documents. Interestingly, the IUS and ISM documents both place themselves in the formal category, which indicates that as we attempt to formulate a shared global document, we need to stick to a rather formal language. The reason why could be that formal language is easier to comprehend and agree on, even when taking into account the cultural differences among the movement’s’ members.
On the other hand, we have the degree of formalisation. Some of the documents are structured almost as UN resolutions, using certain clauses and obeying to a strict paragraph policy, while others are structured more as speeches. An example of the first is the ABFSU demands, which is composed of short numbered paragraphs: “Faculty and student representatives should be allowed to participate in the drafting process of all legislations and policies on education.” An example of the latter is the HKFS Declaration, which closely resembles a speech that could have been given at a political rally: “Today, students across different universities and tertiary education institutes lead the stand against this tyranny and the so-called fate. We call for civil disobedience by boycotting classes, aiming to awake the sleeping souls in the city. As university students, we share the responsibility to live up to the expectations of society, guarding our precious social values.”
Drafting process
As we seek to understand the impact the documents have, we must also understand where they derive their legitimacy from. First of course, they derive their legitimacy from the movement itself, as discussed in thought paper I, but its legitimacy within the movement is also interesting to examine further, as this could be one of the decisive factors when it comes to the document’s durability. The documents’ legitimacy hinges both on how they were adopted, but perhaps more importantly, how they were conceived through a drafting process. In this section, we will look at the different ways
As the documents were sorted into the matrix, a number of subjective decisions had to be made. However, as noted earlier, the matrix is by no means an absolute truth, rather it helps inform the overall question of better understanding the role and potential of organising around student formulated documents. The documents could also have been placed on a scale, however, it was deemed to too time consuming a
FORMAL
NORMATIVE
VALUE
• •
• • • •
IUS constitution ISM statement ZINASU constitution ACEU constitution
• • • • • •
WCHE Student Statement Declaration of School Student Rights Students’ Rights Charter CFS bylaws USSA constitution Common Declaration of Student Unions in Romania ABFSU Demands SAUS Student Rights Charter NSSC constitution JUTS constitution NUS-AU constitution Grenoble Charter
• • • • •
Bergen Declaration Joint Vision of EFA Europe AKS Bildungskonzept NUS-UK 100 Manifesto ÖH Forum Hochschule
• • • • • • •
Liminar Manifesto CLASSE Manifesto HKFS Student Declaration SEALDs Manifesto ISIPE letter Reclaiming Manifesto Port Huron statement
• • • •
INFORMAL
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in a larger group of activists, the document will fail sooner or later. This is also a risk which the Bergen Declaration runs, seeing that perhaps very few student representatives feel an ownership of the document, and some of these have already left their national movements.
in which the documents have been drafted, and what, if any, implications this has had on how they were used. There is no detailed list of information on how the documents were drafted, but a few distinct features can be derived from the information collected along with the documents. Generally, there are two models with some variation between them. At one end of the spectrum, there is the model where an individual drafts the statement, which is later adopted by the movement, such as the Port Huron Statement. At the other end is the model, in which the statement is written in plenary, often striving to reach consensus, such as the Reclaim Manifesto. Variations include the possibility to amend the documents in plenary (e.g. as seen with the IUS constitution), or documents that have been agreed among a smaller group of participants, and is later endorsed by more movements (e.g. the Bergen Declaration).
Durability
One important feature of student formulated documents is to be able to sustain a movement over time and remain important to its actions. As we look at the durability of the documents, there is a general pattern that emerges: the core documents often have a short-lived, but very intense life; the founding documents have a long durability, but their relevance can be hard to evaluate; and the political statements place themselves in between. That said, exceptions do exist, such as with the Liminar Manifesto and the Grenoble Charter.
The model of consensus seeking is most often used by smaller independent student initiatives, such as the ISIPE and the Reclaim Manifesto. Probably, the reason why it is so, is that these movements are sufficiently small to enable consensus building to be somewhat efficient. As we look at larger independent student movements, such as the ISM and CLASSE Manifesto, as paradox arises: these are some of the movements closes to grass root activism, but their manifestos have all been drafted by an individual or small group of activists, and then endorsed by the broader movement without any consultation or opportunity to amend the document. The reason for this is most likely two-fold: 1) the documents adopted by these movements are core documents effectively establishing the movement, i.e. the movement is only made up from a handful of people, when the document is adopted, and 2) as these are movements rejecting any forms of hierarchy/bureaucracy, they do not possess any structure that would effectively allow any other activists to engage with the document. That said, the HKFS Student Manifesto and the SAUS Students’ Rights Charter are examples of the same model taking place within organised student movements, which can be harder to explain. It is a model that is largely dependent on the activist base to accept and internalise the policies expressed in the documents, i.e. a sense of normative legitimacy (as discussed in Thought Paper I).
The reason why core documents have a short-lived life is perhaps not surprising, as the majority of these have been adopted by movements that grew big fast, garnered a large crowd of activist followers, threatened the status quo, and required attention from the people in power, be it university leadership or national governments. As protests dragged on, pressure was applied on the movement, or its objectives were fulfilled, which caused the movement to slowly succumb and leave the movement in a state of hibernation or greatly reduced capacity.
“In that capacity, the documents have offered themselves as an idol of past success, which the students use to revitalise the contemporary movement. Current policies and actions becomes imbued and guided by a past rhetoric which signals success.” When we look at the two primary exceptions, the Liminar Manifesto and the Grenoble Charter, it is clear that these two documents have suffered the same destiny at one point in their life. However, what has helped them become relevant once again, has been a development within the student movement, where students have reconnected with their past narrative. In that capacity, the documents have offered themselves as an idol of past success, which the students use to revitalise the contemporary movement. Current policies and actions becomes imbued and guided by a past rhetoric which signals success. Through this development, the documents also place themselves in between being core documents and acting as political statements. To a large extend, the same can be said about the political statements. None of them are more than 10 years old, indicating that these too struggle to maintain relevance across generations.
Contrary, the model of consensus building, incl. models in which the majority impose policies through amendments, is one that builds more on a political sense of legitimacy. One in which the document’s policies is ensured political representation by giving everyone a voice. The pure consensus model is, however, very inefficient in larger movements, which tend to introduce a model that calls for a simple majority to define the final shape of the documents. The latter runs the risk of marginalising parts of the membership, but as the organised student movements have shown, the voting dynamics are often-times flexible enough to ensure everyone some sort of representation.
There is no definitive answer as to why it is so. One plausible explanation is that the high turnover of student activists leads to a memory loss internally in the student movement, causing the movements to adopt new documents, sometimes essentially with the same content, rather than continuing to use the older documents. Another explanation linked to the high turnover rate is that students simply want to define their
However, at the end of the day, it seems the most important part of the drafting process is that students feel some sort of ownership over the process and/or movement. This is the lesson that the WCHE Student Statement and the Port Huron Statement have taught us: if the documents are not anchored
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are great for organising potent mass movements for a short period of time, as witnessed in for instance Quebec and Hong Kong. In this capacity, organisers are able to formulate the aims of the movement and make them easily accessible to the broader activist base, who in turn can translate them into concrete actions. It fits well with organising theory’s idea of incremental pressure building, with formulating the manifesto as a first step.
own movement generation by generation, and as such each generation adopts its own defining document. Nevertheless, what the durability (or lack of) does show, is the clear need for an established structure to exist, which the documents can be anchored around. This is the task that the founding documents carry out, and as such working with developing progressive policies in these could be a way forward to ensure a lasting impact. No matter what category the documents fall under and their durability, it is clear that they have indeed made some impact on the movement. The benefit seems to be that they help establish hegemony about the actions and priorities of the movement, something which is important in a diverse movement like the student movement, which makes a claim to be representative of the entire student body. As such, the documents are the result of a series of compromises. Further, the documents act as a reference tool that helps bridge the knowledge gap left behind by a high turnover rate of student activists. In concluding so, rather than thinking of the student movement’s actions as a linear progressive process, we should think of them as a process with twists and turns, as a result of competing interests and change in activists, in which documents have helped sustain strategic direction.
Regional differences
•
●As documents guide actions and support the establishment of a movement, it is important that more formal documents, that is founding documents, are also agreed on. Without these, there is no governance structure that can ensure the continued existence of a movement, such as by reinterpreting the original policies, mediating between factions, representing the movement externally, and planning long term.
•
●Depending on the objective of the document, it is important that organisers are aware of the implications the drafting process has on the odds of success. Generally speaking, documents drafted through and open process with an explicit agreement tend to support longer lasting movements, although the process is also more demanding and can require an existing framework.
•
●When drafting international documents, it is vital for the different groups involved to make a distinction between the rhetoric and the actual content. While the rhetoric can be hard, the policies are often were similar. This gives hope it is possible to agree, but it will require compromises, perhaps particularly from Europeans who tend to have a more formal language.
•
●The clustering of topics shows a great diversity in topics that student movements have worked with. However, it is striking that cost of education and students’ inclusion in education governance are covered in almost all the documents surveyed. Equality also seems to be a topic, which most movements would agree on. As such, one recommendation is to start off with these two or three topics, as these will be the easiest to agree on, and leave more contentious topics for later in the “integration process” of coming together to cooperate globally.
While it is hard to conclude anything definitive in terms of regional differences from this rather small sample, there are nonetheless some contours of differences that are worth noting. Firstly, the tradition of bylaws as political documents seems particularly prevalent in Anglophone countries. This is a tradition that has probably been disseminated through the British colonial rule, but it is hard to answer why so. Secondly, political statements seem particularly popular in Europe. Once again, there is no definitive answer, but it could be the higher degree of corporation seen in Europe than elsewhere, which could foster higher degrees of bureaucracy, including documentation. From the analysis it is also clear the Europe has a much more normative tradition than the rest of the world, where students work with broader societal challenges through value-based policies. The corporatist history in Europe could help explain why so, but another answer could be that radical student activists are more and better organised in other parts of the world. Last, but not least, the difference could also be due to a need for students to be the vanguard of democracy, as seen for instance in Zimbabwe and Hong Kong, and exposed previously in the literature review.
Recommendations
Having analysed and evaluated the impact of student formulated documents throughout this paper, recommendations can be derived on how to work with similar documents in the future, in particular how movements at national and international level can organise around such documents. •
●Documents, particularly those informal value-focused,
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Cultivating space for global student action For more than 10 years students have been without a strong voice globally. The lack of global student cooperation has not only had negative consequences in terms policies hostile to students dominating the global stage, but it has also caused students to miss out on opportunities to learn from and support each other in the struggles we all share. A number of different actors have attempted to rectify the lack of a student voice in a number of different ways, such as by organising student forums, inviting individual students as representatives of the broader student constituency, or simply relying on youth organisations to fill the void. But in order for the student voice to grow stronger globally, students must also organise themselves globally. A number of initiatives over the last 10 years have attempted to just do this, but so far none have been successful.
level. With the de facto collapse of the International Union of Students in 2003 (and one could argue even since its Congress in 1992), students have seen the longest period without global student cooperation since the Corda Fratres was established in 1898. At the same time, the globalisation process has only picked up pace and international processes are currently influencing our education systems more than ever before. The lack of a global student platform puts students at a disadvantage when it comes to influencing global policy spaces, but also hampers the same sort of capacity building that states get through international organisations and think tanks such as United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and Brookings Institution. The result is a weakened student movement globally, which misses out on a lot of potential to strengthen students’ voice.
This section attempts to provide new perspectives on how students could organise themselves globally. It does so by analysing why past attempts have failed, and provide recommendations on how students can avoid repeating those same mistakes. The work rests on interviews with student leaders from across the world, which is the first time in many years that anyone have carried out a geographically broad consultation in order to map the perspectives on global cooperation from a students’ perspective. The underlying assumption of the paper is that any future cooperation by students, must also be driven by students. Therefore, no final template for cooperation is proposed, rather, this section uses the interviews to reflect on a number of components that could make up future student cooperation at a global level. The hope is that the section will help inform student leaders, who seek to reach out to other movements and build a new global student platform.
During the same period that students have been without representation, states, civil society, and other actors in the education sector have increasingly strengthened their global work. Education has taken on a central role in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and now Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); teachers have confederated in Education International (EI); international organisations such as Save the Children, the World Bank and the OECD have expanded their own mandate to include the education sector; the Global Campaign for Education has been established as a vehicle for civil society to promote the right to education; and much more. This raises the natural question, why students have not been successful in achieving the same? Students have in fact made several attempts at organising globally in the period following IUS’ last congress in 2003. The three World Conferences on Higher Education (in 1998, 2003 and 2009 respectively) each presented themselves as pivotal moments to accelerate international student cooperation. Students were well-represented at all three conferences, including being in the organising committee and having closed side-events, and yet none of the conferences succeeded in bringing students unions closer together. The student participation at all three conferences was very diverse, with representative student unions coming together with student organisations and professional organisations such as Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de l’Europe (AEGEE) and the International Association of Forestry Students (IAFS). It’s worth noting that the WCHE in 2003 is the only event that has brought together the four major regional representatives from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin-America, as well the International Union of Students. Ironically, the diversity is one possible explanation of why the conferences failed in creating momentum: each of the organisation pursue different objectives and organise in different ways, which makes it hard
The primary focus is on representative student movements, understood as in those movements who can legitimately claim to represent students through direct election of student representatives at different levels. These are movements by students, working to improve the life of students, and sometimes beyond. As such, there is also a clear distinction from social movements lead by students, or student organisations who work in specific areas. The representative student movements are unique in that they aggregate the student voice by involving all students at local level. Bringing these representative student movements together globally will not only create a global voice linking local student struggles with global policy, but it will also build new capacity for local and national movements to claim a stronger student voice.
Identifying the challenges
At present, no meaningful international cooperation among representative student movements exist beyond regional
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to establish a shared baseline from which cooperation can be developed. Although the reasons for including the diverse group of student organisations is noble, that is to ensure the broadest possible representation, it ultimately made it harder for any meaningful cooperation to develop from the conferences. The lesson learnt is that when supporting global student cooperation the involved partners should be equals. To this end, representative student movements present themselves as the best option of securing broad representation with just one type of student organisation, because the struggles and interests of the other student groups will be reflected in the representative student movement as well1.
challenge that students must address and seek to compromise on. Another important lesson from the GSV meeting is that consensus processes do work, at least in smaller spaces, in that they are inclusive to everyone. This is important, because former student platforms, such as the IUS, failed exactly when certain student representatives felt too marginalised and eventually broke away. Another issue that the GSV faced was the lack of simultaneous translation, which put the representatives from Latin America, Kazakhstan and Burkina Faso at a major disadvantage, because they had problems engaging in the sessions. The experience points to the need to ensure an accessible event for everyone, including ensuring translation, as we cannot rely on everyone being able to send a representative who speaks English. A 2nd GSV meeting was planned to take place in Brazil in June 2017, but due to lack of funding for international travels, the sign-ups to the meeting were very low and the meeting had to be postponed. Contrary to many other organisations, such as teachers, student movements cannot raise funds from their members, as these are already indebted, and consequently their budget is too small to support any global work. Thus, future attempts at building global student cooperation must ensure funding for the participants.’
Another attempt was made in 2012 when the National Union of Students in the UK (NUS-UK) hosted an international student conference in London with participation from over 100 student representatives from across the World. Although envisioned as a fresh start to international cooperation, the conference was largely a failure. The majority of the Latin American representatives backed out already on the first day, when they realised the conference was sponsored by the Santander Bank, which is not only perceived as a sign of capitalism, but has also had controversial engagements across the Latin American continent. Later, there were major disagreements over the outcome declaration of conference, which had been drafted by the organisers, resulting in no outcome document being formally adopted. The failure points to two challenges that must be overcome: 1) the history of colonisation is still very real and must be recognised in the process to build stronger cooperation among students movements, and 2) Europeans tend to lead the process, which again leads us back the history of Europeanisation and colonialism.
Recently, the SDG process also proved that if students are not present to claim their voice, the space will be claimed by other voices, less representative of the student constituency. Particularly international organisations have repeatedly failed to understand the difference in youth and student representatives. Students are most often youth, but youth is not always students. It is a clear distinction that must be recognised by all stakeholders in education, if we are to leverage the knowledge that students have as everyday experts of their education systems, and as agents with legitimacy to support the implementation of policies.
“The experience shows that students can certainly agree on the content, but that the degree of radical language remains a challenge that students must address and seek to compromise on.”
One last challenge is the distrust that exists among student movements. Historically, students have always been very ideological, and as we have seen, this factionalism was what brought down both the IUS and ISC. Combined with the history of colonialism, especially the European student movements must tread carefully, and focus allowing non-European movements to lead the process. Increasing the frequency of students meeting globally will also help address this problem, as the representatives then also build friendly ties across the regions, which ultimately is what is needed to ensure trust and the ability to overcome political differences in unity.
The latest attempt was made with the Global Student Voice (GSV) meeting in Bergen in 2016. This time, only few representatives were invited and the outcome document was drafted by the participants through a consensus based process. Even then the process was jeopardised last minute, when disagreements over language, specifically the inclusion of UN language, meant that large parts of the document had to be redrafted. Some participants felt the UN was a sign of imperialism and capitalism, and demanded the language be removed or changed. The result was a document that in many ways speaks about UN agendas, such as the SDGs and the Safe Schools Declaration, but does not spell it out. The experience shows that students can certainly agree on the content, but that the degree of radical language remains a
To sum up, the following must be ensured to overcome the primary challenges to global student cooperation:
1 The idea behind this statement is that the representative student movements represent all students. Whether you’re a forestry student, pro-European, or something third, your voice will at one level be present in the student movement. As the student voice is aggregated at different levels of representation from local to international level, the priorities might change, but the result is the most representative student voice possible.
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•
●The student movements that are brought together should be as similar as possible. The more alike the movements are in their objectives and organisational structure, the easier it is to build a structure that supports links among them. Bringing together representative student movements from the same level, i.e. regional, national or both, presents itself as the best possible chance of succeeding.
•
●The process of organising and bringing together student representatives must be inclusive and student-led, otherwise the student representatives will disengage from it.
(OCLAE), União Nacional dos Estudantes Brasil (UNE-BR), European Students’ Union (ESU), Southern Africa Students Union (SASU), and the National Union of Students in Australia (NUS-AU). Several attempts were made to reach out to the All-Africa Students’ Union (AASU), but unfortunately without success.
In particular, it is important to be sensitive about the history of colonialism and ensure that representatives from outside Europe are empowered to lead the process. •
•
•
•
●Any future global cooperation should be sufficiently close that the student movements feel ownership of it and obligated to participate, but at the same time, the cooperation should also be sufficiently loose that unions do not feel it infringes on their autonomy.
All the participating organisations were positive towards increased global cooperation. There was an understanding that as students, we all face some of the same struggles, and should be acting in solidarity to overcome them together. However, it is also clear that substantial differences in the perceived objectives of cooperation do exist, particularly in terms of whether it should be focused on technical capacity building or aim to engage directly in political processes.
●On a related note, it is vital to ensure the right balance of politicisation of the organisation. As history has shown, global student unions tend to get caught up in factionalist battles. One potential solution is to adopt a culture of consensus, where the organisation limits its political work to political positions that students can agree to in consensus, leaving the more contentious topics for other fora.
Below, each component will be introduced briefly, followed by a discussion of pros and cons informed by the interviews with student leaders.
●Long-term funding for the cooperation must be ensured. The history shows numerous examples of one-off events, but in order to keep the momentum alive and movements committed, funding for the future should be ensured. Because funding cannot be generated from the members, movements must look for external funding from for instance private foundations or international organisations. Another, less plausible option, is that a few financially strong unions commit long-term funding, or that the unions enter into a bulk purchasing collective. Sufficient funding is also of critical importance in order to organise simultaneous translation at events, which is required in order for the event to be accessible to more student representatives.
Information sharing It has been said that knowledge is power, if so, then information is a prerequisite for power. As countries increasingly look to each other when developing new policies, and supranational organisations make policy recommendations within almost any given domain, students must also seek to capacitate themselves with the information needed to engage in policy processes. The component is heavily inspired by how the European Students’ Union (ESU) initially started as an information sharing bureau and later gradually evolved into a political union as well. An advantage with information sharing, is that it is non-contentious in nature, which, as highlighted earlier, is something that makes it more likely to succeed over time. That said, the idea of sharing information can take on many shapes and sizes: it can be an online repository of campaign ideas and materials; coordinated reports on shared struggles, such as the development of fees; online webinars; news relevant to student movements, such as protests; or something completely different, and it can be done through various different structures be it working groups, staff support, or alumnus employed in the area of research. The bottomline is that sharing information has a clear advantage for the national work, while also boosting global consciousness and doing so in a way that focuses on what students share rather than disagree on.
●The frequency of meetings must be increased, as well as the turnover in representatives decreased. This is necessary in order for representatives to build trust in one another, which is a prerequisite for developing the cooperation further. Significant distrust does exist among regional groups of students, which must be addressed and solved in order to ensure the success of a future global student platform.
Potential components of global cooperation
This section collects and presents in-put from student leaders on six specific components that could shape future cooperation among students globally. The components have been developed by looking at past experiences from regional and global cooperation of students, as well as based on feedback received during the consultation process with student leaders. The components are not mutually exclusive, in fact, a number of them would supplement each other very well, but they are distinct and in that sense serve as great points of departure for a general discussion on how students imagine increased cooperation to look like.
It is perhaps the component that received the most positive feedback during the interviews. SASU, for instance, focused on how as students operating in a society with little experience of social movements, can benefit immensely from peer-learning. In particular, the students expressed a wish to learn more about how student movements elsewhere have organised themselves in terms of organisational structures; how they engage constructively with politicians; and how they strategize to mobilise students for protesting. The same focus on peer-learning was reflected in almost all interviews, with the representative from Brazil suggesting it as the most likely way to build a global platform from which students movements can cooperate.
Interviews with student representatives were carried out through the months April - July 2017. The following organisations were consulted: Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), United States Students Association (USSA), Organización Continental Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Estudiantes
At the same time, SASU also envisioned a research collective, initially focused on collecting and analysing data on fee de-
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Participants at the 70th Board Meeting of the European Students’ Union. An example of a regional umbrella organisation. Credit: ESU
velopments, as well as providing recommendations on how to finance free education. The same idea was presented by SRC representatives from University of Witwatersrand where the Fees Must Fall-protests started, who wanted to organise a global meeting with technical delegations2 from student movements across the world reporting on their respective financing systems, as part of a larger effort to develop a tool box on combating fees and implementing free education. This sort of meeting could also be easily linked with the charter process component detailed later in the present paper. As mentioned previously, it is the same sort of research collective that ESU grew from. The European delegations interviewed, also showed great support for the idea, in particular if it also provides policy recommendations.
solidarity statements or direct involvement, as for instance the All-African Student Union (AASU) is known to do with its members. The feedback to this component was generally negative, with the only really positive feedback coming from ESU, which could be explained by how it is a component that really recognises the pivotal role that regional bodies could have. While the other movements recognised that the small size of the council makes it practically feasible, they also voiced a number of concerns: UNE-BR, in Brazil, feared it would be hard to ensure the legitimacy of the council, because it would be too distant from the national unions. NUS-AU raised the question of how they would be represented, seeing there is currently no regional body for Asia or the Pacific. The major concern that was voiced from SASU is that it is a component that is inherently political, which would also increase the risks of it becoming part of larger geo-political conflicts, thus rendering it useless.
Global council The idea behind a global council is to entrust a council consisting of regional representatives with a mandate to represent students globally. It is a component that ensures representation at global level, and its envisioned smaller size brings about a number of advantages, such as: a more agile organisation that is able to convene and making decisions swiftly; it is easier to create sustainable financing, because there are less expenses; and with only a few persons involved, it is easier to build trust internally in the group, which is needed to compromise. The council can also take on a role to provide global support for local struggles, either through
One variation of a global council that is still relevant to consider, is one where the council becomes more of a reference group in international processes. For instance, a group made up from regional representatives could be recognised as a single stakeholder in the Global Education 2030 Steering Committee in UNESCO3 or other global processes under the UN, OECD or similar initiatives. The group could either in-put as one, on what it is possible to achieve consensus, or it could in-put through a report that reflects the different student per-
2 With “technical delegation” is meant a delegation with is not necessarily composed of the highest ranking political officers, but rather those representatives with most knowledge in the area of financing of education and combatting fees. The hope of the SRC is that this composition will lead to less political conflicts.
3 The Global Education 2030 Agenda Steering Committee is convened annually and aims to ensure coordinated support to Member States and partners to achieve SDG 4 and the education–related targets in other goals of the 2030 Agenda.
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Activist exchange network
spectives. In any case this is an idea that would also require support from the international organisations involved. No matter what, such a structure would act as an easy point-ofentry to student engagement, which could help increase the student voice.
The idea of an activist exchange network emerged out of the growing number of students that spend part of their studies abroad. Leveraging this development to link national student movements with each other, could bring about increased capacity building, supporting national movements as well as lay the foundation for future cooperation among movements. The network can be implemented in various ways, such as through organised workshops for students studying abroad or actual work placements/internships in a foreign student movement. In the years between the two World Wars the Confederation Internationale des Etudiants (CIE) organised sport and student exchanges, and so, in many ways, the idea can also be seen as a return to the fundamentals of the international student movement.
Global umbrella organisation When we look towards other actors in the education sector, we find that teachers are united globally in Education International (EI) and universities in the International Association of Universities (IAU). Both organisations are umbrella organisations consisting of national umbrella organisations, and in that sense, developing a component in this way is carrying on the experiences from national level. IAU’s model is particularly interesting, because it is recognised and heavily supported by UNESCO, who also hosts the organisation in UNESCO office buildings and grants financial support to the organisation. Such a model both addresses the need to ensure funding for global cooperation, as well as the objective of ensuring student cooperation in decision making fora.
Overall, everyone responded very positively to this component. SASU highlighted how it not only helps build capacity in both the home and hosting organisation, but also acts as a general motivator among the local activists that there is a chance for everyone to go abroad and connect with other movements.
This component finds great support from unions in the Global North (CFS; USSA; ESU; and NUS-AU), some of whom have long been attempting to rebuild a sort of “student United Nations�. ESU and USSA in particular emphasise the importance of students claiming a voice at global level, and would want to see a global organisation with a strong voice in policy. As the global council suffers from quite substantial shortfalls, a global umbrella organisation is perhaps perceived as more realistically to get everyone to agree to.
That said, there are a few obstacles to it: international student mobility is still mostly confined to regional mobility, and mobility towards some major international destinations such as the US, UK, and Australia. The majority of national and local student movements probably also cannot offer activities in English (or other international languages such as Spanish or French for that matter). Still, the idea of an activist exchange network deserves further consideration, in order to see if and how it is practically feasible.
That said, it does also conflict with priorities of other student movements. OCLAE, for instance, continues to show support for revitalized the dormant International Union of Students (IUS), whom no one really knows the current status of. A revitalized IUS is also likely to meet opposition from unions in the Global North, due to its history of communism, something which would be hard to distance the organisation from.
Online platform An online platform can take on many shapes and sizes. Currently, a number of informal Facebook groups with student activists already exist, with the International Student Movement (ISM) boosting more than 2,200 members in its global group and almost 115,000 followers on its page, which functions as a focal point for news about student protests. Online platforms could be developed further to support increased global cooperation, for instance through more structured forums, organised online community calls, or as a repository of student activist tools. These ideas could either act as independent ways of boosting cooperation, or as support to other components put forward in this section.
Perhaps most importantly, a global umbrella organisation working with policy is very likely to lose its sense of direction and get caught up in political battles between factions. Already now, as students were asked about the main political issues, which they would expect a global union to deal with, it is clear that there are major hurdles in terms of agreeing on the scope (i.e. social vs. education policy) and who to work with (i.e. not all unions agree that it is a good idea to become involved with stakeholders whom you have major disagreements with, rather, they want to criticise these). SASU also voiced concern that their unions already have their hands full with organising nationally, and as such are very likely to feel that they do not benefit a whole lot from global politics, or have the capacity to engage in it for that matter.
There is a general agreement that some sort of online platform could be helpful to engage students globally, and that it should be dedicated platform in order to be successful (i.e. no unmoderated Facebook group). That said, beyond the general agreement, there are very different expectations as to what such a platform will actually be able to offer. USSA envisions a platform with articles on student protests and webinars, while SASU proposed a forum to discuss current topics and call for solidarity statements.
As important as it is to give students a global voice, the feedback above indicates that creating a global umbrella organisation should not be the first step of increased cooperation globally. Instead, it can be an objective that students can work towards as a long-term goal, whenever cooperation has proven itself feasible in other less complex ways.
An online platform can certainly support other components discussed in this section, but as one SASU representative points to, it is critically flawed due to facelessness, which will cause students to not feel ownership over it, nor connect with the global movement at a deeper level. Also, not every stu-
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two components which seem the most promising to explore further are increased information sharing, both technical and political, as well as a charter process, aimed at consolidating the cooperation long-term.
dent, or representative for that matter, is able to access online platforms, which will further marginalised groups of students, especially on the African continent, and prevent them from becoming engaged globally.
An important feature of the two components, is that they can be established without having to define membership criteria. Particularly ESU and USSA have concerns over who they involve themselves with internationally, in terms of maintaining their legitimacy and not endorsing movements who they do not share fundamental values with. That said, both movements also recognise that the elaborate membership application process that their own members have been through is unrealistic to implement at global level. Thus, avoiding the question is both practical, but also keeps students out of potential conflicts that could arise when defining just constitutes a legitimate member movement, and how to handle situations where more movements make a claim to represent students in one country. As the cooperation matures and the need to answer the questions becomes more pressing, some of them might answer themselves, and no matter what the students will be better suited to agree on common ground.
A charter process One process of global student cooperation that is already underway is that of the Global Student Voice meetings (GSV) initiated with the adoption of the Bergen Declaration in 2016. A charter pins down what students can agree on, and sets out objectives for them to pursue as a collective. As such, a charter can present itself as a strong tool to organise and mobilise around, as we have already witnessed in parts of the world such as South Africa. The component could be made up of a single charter, or could be a process in which students gradually build a body of charters that together make up a strong student voice. With the process already underway, it was positive to learn that there is a broad support among the student movements for it, even from movements who were not directly involved with the meeting in Bergen, but have later learnt of it. It is particularly positive to see that UNE-BR is now taking over the responsibility to organise the next Global Student Voice meeting, something which is important in order to ensure that the process does not become Eurocentric.
The three existing regional bodies (ESU, OCLAE, and AASU), and to some extend SASU, presents themselves as gatekeepers to the national student movements, and there is no doubt that increased global cooperation cannot be achieved without the support of these three bodies. That said, from the feedback above, it is hard to envision a sort of global cooperation built solely around the regional bodies, which means that a future process should be aimed at bringing together national student movements, all the while recognising the role the regional bodies can play in bringing about experience of successful international cooperation; international policy work; and representation of smaller movements that might not have the capacity to engage in global student politics independently.
One challenge that the GSV meetings are facing, is to maintain its relevance to the participating student movements. The Bergen Declaration is broad in terms of the topics it covers, but some of the political demands are also relatively vague. An attempt was made after the adoption of the Bergen Declaration to organise a month of global protests under the banner of “#FundOurFuture�, but the attempt only had limited success beyond Europe. One way of addressing this challenge is to make more thematic declarations that address some of the specific student struggles that there is broad agreement on. These could be the cost of education; students’ right to participate in education governance; access for all to an equitable education system; the quality of education; or student welfare services. This way the GSV process can maintain its relevance from meeting to meeting, all the while being true to its consensus principle.
In order to get the cooperation off to a good start, students should focus their attention on issues, which they all struggle with and have a degree of consensus on. A previous mapping of student documents shows that the cost of education; students as equal stakeholders in education governance; and equality are topics which matter to almost all student movements. The interviews carried out for this paper, echoes the same findings, adding that students should also be vanguards of democracy in their society. The latter speaks to a need to agree on the scope of the cooperation: some, particularly European unions, have a very narrow mandate that limits them to education policy, while other views it as impossible to have a student movement that does not engage itself with broader societal struggles. Again, one recommendation is that students start off with what can be agreed, and solely develop their cooperation from those issues into broader issues. In this process, students must also seek to develop a shared language that everyone feel comfortable using. The Anglophone countries tend to use very formal language, whereas the Hispanophone and Francophone counties are much more radical in their language. Students must work to ensure that disagreements over what language is used do not get in the way of cooperation, seeing that, for the most part, they all agree on the substance of policies.
Still, a series of meetings solely focused on drafting political declarations will not be able to sustain over time. Therefore, the organisers must also look to address other demands from participating student movements, such as including peer-learning sessions in the meeting; formulating documents of more technical character, as requested by the SRC at University of Witwatersrand and SASU; develop campaigns with broader support than the #FundOurFuture, something which was specifically requested by UNE-BR, USSA, and CFS; or slowly move towards a more established organisational structure, in which responsibility is to delegated to some participating unions to undertake work on behalf of the collective.
Moving forward
As the feedback above indicates, there are numerous ways in which students can work to advance global cooperation. The
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countered with information only, rather, the frequency of meetings must be increased, in other for student leaders to familiarise themselves and their respective movements with each other.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have also offered themselves as an issue to organise around, with particularly ESU wanting to ensure a stronger student voice in this area that could help guide implementation of the education goal. Although the SDGs also find some support from CFS and AASU, the majority of the student movements interviewed have not worked with the goals before, and some, such as OCLAE, are outright critical of them, believing that they help justify the status quo of commodified education. Should students agree to organise around the SDGs, they still need to address how to make it relevant to local struggles, and situate it within a context where students could use it to improve their organisational capacity.
The feedback received from the interviewed student leaders indicates that the best way forward is through increased information sharing and a process of meetings that allows students to deliberate on political issues together. Combining these two components will also help address the different priorities that are echoed globally: SASU wish to build organisational capacity at local and national level through global peer-learning. UNE-BR and USSA are very keen to see global campaigns against fees and pro-equitable education. While ESU and NUS-AU, still in support of the other ideas, think it is equally important to ensure formal representation in policy processes. Whatever shape the cooperation takes on, it must be consensus based to begin with, as to not marginalise any student movement from the outset, and only later could it seek to consolidate itself into a more political union. The mapping indicates that the cost of education; students as equal stakeholders in education governance; and equality are topics which it would be the easiest to build consensus around.
Summary
The present section has analysed and suggested ways in which current student leaders can advance the cause for increased student cooperation globally. Looking at the past experiences of the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Student Conference (ISC) it is clear that students can indeed organise globally in defence of shared struggles. That said, the fate of both former global organisations also speaks to three major challenges that students must address in any future cooperation: 1) a global student platform with the potency to influence global politics will inevitably become the target of geopolitics, which jeopardises the unity and ultimately the existence of a global platform. 2) As students are brought together from across the world with different cultural and political backgrounds, there is a great risk of factionalism internally. Factionalism is not necessarily a bad thing if real disagreements exist, but as we saw in the later years of the IUS, there is a risk that it paralyses the organisation over minor details. 3) As very few national student movements have the financial capacity to engage themselves globally, students must look to ensure sustainable long-term funding for their activities.
Despite the challenges outlined above, the interviewed student leaders are overwhelming positive towards increased global cooperation. Bringing together these student leaders will be the first step in any future process aimed at increasing global student cooperation.
A look at the efforts over the last 10 years to revitalize the global student movement there are also a number of lessons to keep in mind: •
●Any process involving increased student cooperation must be student-led and inclusive in order to have any chance of success. Some past efforts have failed, because students felt they were being orchestrated or simply did not feel ownership of the process.
•
●It is important to recognise the role that colonial history has in any attempt to organise globally. Students from the Global South must be empowered to take on leadership in the process.
•
●It is vital to strike the right balance of politicisation of the student cooperation. If the cooperation becomes too politicised, there is a risk some movements will feel marginalised and ultimately leave, perhaps even to set up a competing global union, as was the case with the IUS and ISC.
•
●The trust between the continents is still low, with misconceptions of one another thriving. The distrust cannot be
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conclusions selves, but in turn it makes it harder for students to identify shared grievances. Nationally, students globally continue to be coerced by Governments that view them as revolutionary forces, and increasingly also by Governments that view students as annoying hurdles in policy processes. When cooperating globally, students are particularly faced with the risk of factionalism, sometimes over minor details, that can destabilise the entire partnership.
This paper shows that there are indeed opportunities to increase global student cooperation. The interest in organising globally remains strong within the national and regional movements, and in the same way it is clear that students continue to face many of the same struggles no matter where they study. A difference remains in the language that students adopt, as well as the way in which they engage with other education stakeholders, but these are all issues that students should be able to work around, as long as there is an agreement about the substance of the cooperation.
Any future cooperation must be led by students themselves. The consultation carried out in this paper indicates that the most likely forms of cooperation to succeed are information sharing and a process of developing student charters. These two components address the need to build capacity in national movements, while also steadily building trust and developing policy in consensus. Over time, students can consolidate the cooperation further, if they wish to. The document analysis shows that the most likely topics for students to agree on are the cost of education and students’ inclusion in education governance, and to a slightly lesser extend also issues around equality.
While social movements led by students and student organisations dedicated to single-issues continue to thrive globally, there is evidently a need for the representative student movement to come together as well. Not only is this the way, in which the broadest representation can be achieved at global level, but increased cooperation also presents itself as a welcome opportunity to build capacity at national and local level to improve students’ ability to organise in defence of their rights. As the literature review and evaluation of the student movement’s historic impact showed, students, however, continue to face challenges when organising. At local level, students are confronted with an increasingly diverse student body, something which is generally welcome by students them-
A student at UNE’s Congress holds a banner reading “Education is not a commodity”. A slogan students seem to agree on globally. Credit: UNE - União Nacional dos Estudantes
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