Civilizing the Natives: The Global Leadership Industry and Western Knowledge

In this age of neoliberal capitalism leadership as a concept is everywhere. Dominant narratives lament the deficiencies of leaders in the ‘third world’. Academic institutions host courses and programmes on leadership with concepts such as sustainable leadership, transformational leadership, positive leadership, empathetic leadership, non-hierarchical or horizontal leadership, strategic leadership, and ethical leaders. White Westerners dominate the leadership industry producing a range of online videos, concepts, models, consultancies, lectures, webinars, TED talks, and coaching services.

But how has the West and whiteness reached to being the dominant positionality that schools the world on leadership? How have dominant Western models of leadership, though removed from association with empire and violence, been affected by the ideas, knowledge, and values of those contexts? And what has the world lost in terms of alternative knowledge, values, and paradigms given the prevailing leadership models?

The issues with the diverse forms of Western leadership models are not only what they say but what they do not say, what they are silent on. Many models such as ethical leadership, sustainable leadership, and non-hierarchical leadership, sound good, and people might even find them useful, but ultimately they do not go far enough to engage the historical amnesia, coloniality and Western/white privilege upon which modern leadership thought and practices have been built. Thus, the global leadership industry can come across as many different flavours of civilizing the natives.

Empire, Coloniality, and the Shaping of Leaders and Thinkers

In the times of formal European empires, colonial authorities were quick to make examples of leaders of rebellions, with brutal tortures, public executions and displaying of dead bodies. Emerging leaders were often quickly identified and eliminated within the context of imperialism, genocide, and domination. In the Caribbean, Taino leader Hautey led a resistance against Spanish invaders before he was publicly executed on Feb. 2, 1512. This imperial enthusiasm to manipulate, sabotage and assassinate leaders who could not be controlled carried straight into the independence and post-independence period.

During Cold War, numerous covert and direct interventions were directed at assassinating, overthrowing, or sabotaging non-capitalist leaders of the Global South and installing leaders who would be accommodating of American and European interests. Leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba; Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo; and Guinea Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral were assassinated, and many other leaders were overthrown. Western powers have had no issues removing even democratically elected leaders to install brutal and corrupt dictators (See Chile’s Augusto Pinochet) in the hope that these leaders would toe Western economic and political lines.

In 1922 the colonial government in Trinidad and Tobago passed the Expulsion of Undesirables (Amendment) Ordinance which was then used to prevent Pan-Africanist organizer Marcus Garvey from visiting. It was also used to prevent the entry of feminist and communist thinker Claudia Jones who was being deported from the USA for ‘un-American’ activities. This fear of the impact that certain leaders and thinkers could have on citizens was, however, not only the domain of colonial powers. After independence, the government of Trinidad and Tobago under Prime Minister Eric Williams used the same law to prevent the famous Trinidadian-born Black Power activist Kwame Ture from visiting the country.

Western and capitalist interests often have the epistemic power to influence who are the legitimate and known voices of the Global South. With the domination of international media, institutions, and award and recognition systems such as the Nobel Prizes, leaders and thinkers can be made, and unmade. This power to determine the heroes, thinkers and leaders of marginalised people means that personalities whose example, agenda, and knowledge speak to the wider struggles of the people can easily get sidelined, or even demonised and invisibilised in favour of a person whose agenda is more aligned with corporate or imperial interests. Or it may just be that the promoted person has a less strident, radical, and urgent challenge to the structures of power, as is the case in the United States where Martin Luther King, who preached a relatively more moderate, non-violent, and integrationist vision, was preferred over the more militant Malcolm X, as the model of African American leadership. Or consider British Guinea (now Guyana), where democracy was easily sidelined when democratic processes did not deliver the results desired by Britain, as was the case when leftist leader Cheddi Jagan won the elections in 1953 only to have Britain overturn the constitution and place him under house arrest.

Leadership, Entangled Hierarchies, and the White Westerner as Guru

One of the popular concepts in the leadership industry is ‘non-hierarchical leadership’, which rightly challenges the typical male heroic archetype of leadership that revolves around one powerful charismatic person as the singular source of wisdom and direction. It is clear that the all-knowing male hero model of leadership has not worked well in human history. However, there is sometimes a romanticizing of some utopian non-hierarchical way of leadership that is not practical. How can we reach better ways of relating without doing the work to address the deep structural and individual ways in which human beings have been valued and devalued? After all, decisions on who are recognised as leaders and thinkers have not been made purely on merit but have been affected by power relations and by the proximity of individuals to certain ideal types. It is those who most benefit from global and local systems of false privilege who are often first in line to be leaders. As much as some Western perspectives on leadership talk about non-hierarchical forms of leadership, there is often a failure to directly address these deeply embedded ideas about who and what is superior and inferior. Thus, the default leadership mould has and continues to be, western, white, and male.

One of the main narratives of empire and coloniality was that non-white people were less intelligent and thus limited in their ability to govern and lead. The Haitian revolution was just as much a challenge to these ideas as it was to the French colonialists. Interestingly, one of the leaders of that Revolution Toussaint Louverture was kidnapped and imprisoned by the French in an attempt to subvert Haiti’s independence and self-determination. Another example is the West Indies cricket team which although comprising of a majority of non-white players was saddled with a succession of white captains. CLR James, the renowned Caribbean writer and activist led a campaign of cricket decolonization advocating for a change in the captaincy.

There is no denying that the weight of unaddressed history affects how leadership is conceptualised and practised today. Even in 2023, most people recognised for their expertise on leadership seem to be white Westerners. This fits into a wider reality of ‘the white Westerner as guru’ being an enduring feature of modern global knowledge production. One implication of this is that even when white Westerners say progressive things, they occupy spaces in which Western knowledge remains privileged, promoted, and perceived as legitimate regardless of merit.

At the same time, a range of alternative, indigenous and decolonial non-Western knowledge exists on the margins of how leadership is understood globally. Often good enough to be pirated, borrowed, extracted, and selectively promoted, but not good enough to be articulated by the bodies and communities in which they are based. Then we have the tendency towards token non-white voices where doors are opened wide enough to give the impression that dominant structures are diverse and non-racist but not wide enough to allow for deeper challenging of the core structures that reproduce a whole range of epistemic inequalities and injustices. To this end, epistemic justice around leadership requires more than just token non-Western and non-white faces being included within global spaces that retain white and Western privilege as core operational values.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.