Anti-colonial aspirations in Arab entrepreneurship education: The RACES framework for negotiating epistemic and institutional constraints

Entrepreneurship education in the Arab world has expanded alongside national development and diversification agendas, while educators describe many programmes as shaped by imported curricula, English-language hierarchies, accreditation regimes and audit-based measures of legitimacy. Drawing on 32 interviews with entrepreneurship educators across eight Arab countries, analysed using Template Analysis, this article examines how educators negotiate contextual legitimacy and anti-colonial aspirations within globally governed systems of entrepreneurship education. The analysis develops the Representation, Awareness, Contextualisation, Economic Relevance and Social Impact (RACES) framework. Rather than presenting these registers as evidence of epistemic rupture, the article shows how educators contest exclusion while continuing to work within inherited institutional categories. The study contributes by foregrounding educators as mediators among competing legitimacy audiences, conceptualising context as epistemic infrastructure and developing RACES as a heuristic for analysing contextual adaptation, pedagogical agency and the selective institutional recognition of locally grounded entrepreneurial knowledge within contemporary Arab higher education systems.