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In this chapter, the author argues that in order to meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goal 4 which calls for education to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030,” transformative leadership may be key. Transformative leadership goes well beyond traditional technical and rational approaches to leadership; it includes but extends theories such as social justice leadership and transformational leadership and involves two general principles and eight interconnected tenets. These include knowing oneself, one’s community and organization; deconstructing frameworks that perpetuate inequity and reconstructing them in more equitable ways; addressing the inequitable distribution of power; emphasizing individual and collective good; focusing on democracy emancipation, equity, and justice as well as interconnectedness and global awareness; and offering both critique and promise. Transformative leadership theory is a critical, holistic, and normative approach that focuses on values, and on beliefs and mindsets as well as knowledge and action. It is characterized by its activist agenda and its overriding commitment to social justice, equity, and democratic society. Thus, it is an approach to leadership that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-xenophobic, etc.; it calls for rejection of deficit thinking and for inclusive and equitable practices that require moral courage. It is such a holistic and critical theory that would help to promote the United Nations’ education goal by the target of 2030.

Against the grain of the paradigmatic postcolonial analytics of the colonial state, this chapter presents a non-dichotomous comparison of two regimes within the late 18th century Danish empire, which are commonly presumed to be of essentially different kinds – namely the colonial state in Tranquebar in South East India and the metropolitan government of rural Danish society. By focusing, firstly, on practices of policing and, secondly, on the general technology of power that targeted these significantly different socio-political spheres, it is argued that these regimes were governing according to similar strategies: seeking, on one hand, to deploy societal mechanisms of self-regulation and, on the other, to provide a balance and order to the otherwise chaotic forces of the population. On the basis of a Foucauldian vocabulary of government, it is thereby argued that colonialism, at this time and place, had not yet clearly constituted itself as a particular form of rule.