Towards a decolonial curriculum of human rights education in Palestine

The politics of knowledge economy have long governed the process of spreading the United Nation's universal culture of human rights into diverse contexts. This article examines the strategies utilized in introducing and operationalizing the UN's normative discourse of human rights through integrating an ideological model of Human Rights Education in the Gaza Strip. This is through the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and its education provision services in Gaza. In particular, I apply an abridged version of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, from a discursive psychological viewpoint, to generate an understanding of identity construction within the wider context of the continuing Israeli settler-colonial project in Palestine. The aim is to challenge the particular subject position of Palestinian learners as advocates for human rights, which they cannot claim through the UN's highly bureaucratic and standardized tools. In this context, a decolonial response is indispensable for addressing the role of the politics of knowledge production of human rights in regulating the learners’ subjectivities while ignoring the intricate geopolitical and historical factors that shape the learners’ identities. Therefore, the article contributes to decolonial research by examining the UNRWA as a modern and hegemonic institution that guards and delivers a decontextualized HRE curriculum in Gaza.