Centre for Research on Peace and Development (CRPD) KU Leuven
Parkstraat 45, box 3602, 3000 Leuven, Belgium Phone: +32 16 32 32 50; Fax: +32 16 32 30 88; http://www.kuleuven.be/crpd
The Politics of Peace Education
in Post-Conflict Countries
Lynn Davies, University of Birmingham, UK
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
2015
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
2
The Politics of Peace Education in Post-Conflict Countries
Abstract
While peace education sounds an incontestable good, this paper highlights significant
questions regarding the discourse, practice, and impact of peace education post-conflict. Can
any country be truly post-conflict and what are the political agendas surrounding education for
peace and security? Locating learners as responsible for peace, through discourses of
‘learning to live together’, draws attention away from continuing political and structural causes
of conflict. Narratives of integration and reconciliation also need scrutiny, as does any peace
education which ignores the complexity and contradiction in religious tensions. The paper
proposes that an education based on principles of transitional justice offers greater traction in
attempting to shift oppressive regimes and to challenge the normalization of violence.
Transitional justice may require structural reforms in education to address past inequalities,
but also a justice-sensitive education which includes a critical history curriculum to openly
address the past. Understanding rights and democracy and why these were not upheld
enables a future to be fought for which embraces the rule of law and freedom of speech. For
this, however, teachers need training in how to tackle controversial issues and schools and
teacher training colleges need themselves to be free from violence, whether structural,
physical, or symbolic. This means attention to the timing as well as the situating of peace and
justice initiatives and their scaling up.
Author
Lynn Davies – University of Birmingham, UK
[email: [email protected]]
This working paper is a draft version of the chapter ‘The Politics of Peace Education in Post-
Conflict Countries’ in the book Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-
Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding, edited by Arnim Langer and Graham K. Brown,
Oxford University Press 2016.
The ‘Building Sustainable Peace’ project was made possible by a generous grant of Flanders
Department of Foreign Affairs.
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
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1. Introduction
Peace education sounds an incontestable good. Yet this paper highlights significant questions
regarding the discourse, practice, and impact of peace education—questions which underpin
any concerns about timing and sequencing.
In terms of timing, the first obvious point is whether any country can be seen as ‘post-conflict’.
There may be a cessation of violence, but the complex roots of conflict may not have been
addressed, or only partially. New structural inequalities emerge as power shifts. Migration
patterns may mean new under-classes. Adrian Little (2014) uses the term ‘enduring conflict,’
which means on the one hand that conflict endures in ‘post-conflict’ societies and on the other
hand that the quality of endurance is something that is demanded of people who live in post-
conflict societies. There has been much discussion of when something like peace education
should be attempted at the end of hostilities and war: the immediate concern is humanitarian
aid and physical reconstruction, but increasing calls have been made over the last decade by
international agencies (such as Save The Children, INEE, and UNICEF) for education,
including peace education, to be an immediate part of post-conflict rebuilding. Education
should be seen as integral to humanitarian work itself. This is part of the concept of ‘building
back better,’ the demand that reconstruction does not simply reproduce the conditions that
contributed to conflict in the first place. Such conditions may have included unequal access to
education, or a normalization of violence in schools.
However, the education in emergencies work has become entwined in powerful political
agendas and strategies, as Novelli (2011) has pointed out. Education has become caught up
in the merging of security and development. Initiatives in peace will depend on strategic actors’
analysis of the causes of conflict; the ‘peace dividend’ envisaged is not value free. Monaghan
(2015) uses frame analysis to examine how ‘framing’ an issue makes possible some policies
and programmes while excluding others; for example, beginning in the mid-2000s, UNHCR
began to frame the provisioning of education in protracted refugee situations as an urgent
matter of security when previously education had been framed as a fundamental means of
psycho-social support. It is in this light that it is necessary to see how peace, peacebuilding,
and peace education are framed, by whom, and with what interests.
2. Discourses of Peace and Conflict
There is a massive literature on peacebuilding and varied definitions, but usually the distinction
is made to peacemaking or peacekeeping, that peacebuilding is something that is attempted
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to achieve a sustainable peace. The well-known distinction is that of Galtung’s (1975) between
a ‘negative peace’ (the absence of war or violence), and a ‘positive peace’ (removing the root
causes of violence and making structural changes that address social injustice). He later added
cultural violence, which feeds into and enables direct violence, as something to be addressed.
Clearly, the notion of ‘building’ implies a process, not an end state. Peace is not something to
be achieved, but a dynamic situation with elements that contribute to making violent conflict
less likely both now and in the future. In a fragile, transitional context, these elements or
building blocks are usually held to be a stable economy, democracy, the upholding of human
rights, and the promotion of and respect for the rule of law.
Questions of democracy and rights reveal a more contested field than notions of harmony and
love. Much discourse on peace implies the binary opposite to conflict, when in fact relative
stability may simply be a different way of managing or even disguising conflict. A strong
argument, particularly within complexity theory, is that conflict is not only normal, but is
necessary to achieve a functioning society. Different forms of democracy require conflicting
agendas to be constantly surfaced, so that evolution and emergence occurs. Democracy is
not an antidote to conflict, but something that builds on ‘natural’ tendencies for dispute over
resources, and finds a mechanism to ensure that conflict is not entirely destructive. The term
‘positive conflict’ has often been used in this regard, for example with regard to initiatives in
citizenship education (Davies 2005). Conflict suppression or denial means a non-dynamic
society which is in the end fragile. Complexity theory is increasingly used to show that ways in
and out of conflict are not linear but the result of combinations of many contingent, contextual,
and often unpredictable features (Davies 2004, 2014; Little 2014). As Little points out with
regard to the riots in the UK in 2011, conflict can be seen as a pathological phenomenon to be
overcome by punishing the ‘mindless’ perpetrators. Narratives and discourses of conflict, the
stories that we tell ourselves, are an essential part of how conflict is seen and attempted to be
‘handled’. Does peace education programming address the broad issues of structural causes
of inequality and hence ethnopolitical grievance? What sort of peace is attempted to be built,
and on what foundations, becomes the key reality definer.
3. Who Is Responsible for Peace?
Peace education in schools carries the implicit assumption that students are the bearers of
peace, individually and in the future, collectively. The discourse of ‘learning to live together’
(L2LT) is very powerful. But this approach posits violence and conflict as primarily occurring
because of inter-cultural tensions and ignorance, and predicts that ‘learning’ cohesive
behaviours will become a permanent habit. Yet the instigators of violent conflict may be the
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state, the military, Boko Haram or ISIS. Children are not responsible, nor can they be somehow
held accountable for an unknown future. Peace education which stresses mutual
understanding and tolerance can be used by governments to deflect attention away from the
political and economic sources of conflict. This is not to say that students should not explore
inter-cultural relationships, but that there are real dangers if this is done at the superficial level,
or if this is not attached to an understanding of conflict in one’s own society. In a conflict or
immediately post-conflict society, children’s experiences of war-driven relationships and
human rights abuses may not match the messages of harmony and reconciliation they receive
in the classroom. The assumption of long-term scaling up is a deeply flawed one: the notion is
that if people of a certain age of learning and experience respect each other more than their
parents did (even assuming lack of respect was causal in conflict), this will somehow be
embedded, a genetic shift in the DNA. The long lead in time before school leavers, however
attitudinally attuned to peaceful relationships, assume any positions of influence or
responsibility has been a major barrier to assessing impact—together with the intervening
factors of joining the military or experiencing repeated abuse or oppression. Hence the
attributed responsibility for peace becomes a timing issue: long-term initiatives must be
accompanied by immediate, coherent interventions.
In divided societies, education for peace is often linked to narratives of integration. Integration
is not only difficult, but can essentialize ethnic or religious ‘groups’ as having specific
boundaries that need to be broken down and somehow intertwined. Zembylas and Bekerman
(2015) provide a valuable contemporary critique of the whole discourse and practice of
‘integration’ in conflicted societies. They discuss the main theoretical traditions which have
seemed to justify integration in the education sphere—social cohesion and acculturation
theory, the contact hypothesis, and multiculturalism. Using experience of countries such as
Israel, Cyprus, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, their ‘contentious’ concern that integrated
education may reproduce existing structures of division leads them to offer a different vision
and politics of recognition, based on the notion of mutual vulnerability, not on essentialized
identities of two groups. Inclusive education has itself to be inclusive conceptually,
encompassing socio-economic position, gender, ethnicity, and disability, and not remaining a
superficial convergence of two ‘identities’ whose separation is held to be a prime cause of the
conflict. Integrated schooling has also not taken off in Sri Lanka, with language differences
held to be the key barrier; in the post-conflict situation a strong emphasis on second national
language learning is understandable, but again frames the conflict—and future peace—as
embedded in linguistic differences (Davies 2012a). While the Sinhalese-only language policy
post-independence was certainly a trigger for the Tamil insurgence, it was not the only cause
any more than second language learning and student exchanges will address the wider, more
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political base to the three decade long conflict—with grievances and imbalances that have not
gone away.
4. Coherence and Contradiction
Peace education therefore often assumes there is a linear path, with consistency in learners’
responses to threatened conflict. Yet there may not be consistency in the programmes
themselves. In looking at the international moves towards standards and competences in
peace education, Carter (2015) draws attention to the lack of coherence in goals of some
governments within education: while one state goal for education is orientation of its citizens
towards defence, another is individual problem solving without violence. The former
preparation typically positions students for citizenship with a political orientation towards armed
defence of the nation. As she points out, standards that omit peace history, which includes
analysis of non-violent responses to structural conflict, normalize violence as a means of
national defence. It is confirmed that standards for peace education tend to prescribe the
norms of the dominant culture, so that non-dominant groups have needed to create their own
standards. Carter argues that no government has a truly visionary pedagogy.
Contradiction also bedevils the relation between religion and peace. While the major religions
will espouse peace in their writings, texts are also characterized by violence and revenge.
Research shows that religious conflicts are more intractable than those that have other sources
of tension (Svensson 2007); while conflict between two religious groups is not necessarily
worse than between other sorts of warring factions, when religion is held to be the cause of
the conflict, it is more difficult to solve. There is no exchange value, no bargaining, as there
might be for land or political power. An essential problem for a critical education is the
continuing strictures on critique of religion or religious practice (Davies 2014). Inter-faith
dialogue, as with student exchanges, aims at understanding of ‘the other,’ but can ignore intra-
faith issues, the divergences and conflicts within a religion, as are seen with Sunni/Shia
divides, or Christian fundamentalism versus liberation theology. These complexities are not
normally part of the religious education school syllabus, nor of peace education. Yet until young
people learn of how religious factionalism can be used to manipulate and divide, peace
education will not be a critical force. Religion cannot be immune from critique, not elevated
above other sorts of economic, political, or social worldviews.
This is particularly important in the current issue of extremism. Schooling or educational level
as such does not appear to be preventive of people joining extremist groups, whether far right
or Islamist. Indeed, the authoritarian nature of schooling may predispose to obedience to
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messages of authority (Davies 2004, 2008). A schooling where racism or violence is explicitly
or implicitly condoned normalizes such relationships, and is drawn on as a resource or a
justification for future behaviour. Current research into the backgrounds of former extremists
indicates that schooling was not protective (Davies et al. 2015). Nor did families seem
particularly influential, and indeed were often mortified when their children joined radical
groups at odds with their own values. Religion was certainly not protective, with a range of
faith backgrounds and conversions from one religion to another. A recent issue of teenagers
being recruited to join fighters in Syria means that schools in the UK are being scrutinized to
see how far they are preventing radicalization. It is the assertion of this paper that programmes
labelled peace education or even conflict resolution will not necessarily address the reasons
why young people are drawn into extremist groups. Leaving aside the search for adventure
and a sense of mission, justifications for ‘joining up,’ whether far right or Islamist, include
foreign policy, perceptions of structural causes of discrimination, broader Islamophobia, and
government policy on immigration. Peace education in its L2LT form cannot address these
shifting geopolitical issues. An approach to examining reform post-conflict which does have
the requisite political lens comes from initiatives within the sphere of transitional justice,
discussed next.
5. Transitional Justice Approaches
Transitional justice refers to the judicial and non-judicial measures that are engaged in to
address the grave violations of human rights that occurred in countries transitioning from
conflict. These measures are reflected in the various truth and reconciliation commissions in
countries such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Rwanda, Peru, and Sri Lanka. As
well as the building blocks of democracy and rule of law mentioned earlier, transitional justice
adds—or insists on—the dimension of redress: in order to build a peace, past injustices and
violations of rights must be recognized through truth-seeking and accountability for
perpetrators. Where possible three features must be instituted: 1) Reparations made to victims;
2) Institutional changes made to prevent injustice occurring in the future; and 3) New or
restored cultural norms introduced that are different from those during conflict or oppression.
Military victories can bring an apparent peace, but unless grievances that fostered conflict are
addressed, there is latent tension. Education is relevant both in institutional and cultural
change.
Transitional justice is constantly Janus faced, past and forward looking, with a concern that a
violent past is directly contributory to the potential for a violent future. Addressing the past is a
way of building a future which is recognizably better. One of the key debates is on reconciliation
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versus retribution, not just about where the emphasis should be, but whether retribution
actually impedes the possibility of opposing sides reconciling differences. There are problems
with the whole notion of reconciliation, as this implies a return to previous harmonious or equal
relationships, either with other groups or with the state. Such relationships may never have
been there. Elizabeth Cole (2007) draws attention to how reconciliation may have been set
against justice, in the sense that for some, reconciliation after violence refers to the very
‘Christian- tinged’ pursuit of harmony, apology, forgiveness, forgetting (which is contingent on
forgiveness), and sometimes truth—but not so much truth as to disrupt the utopian ideal of
harmony. Can one seek reconciliation without justice? Also, those in power who are associated
with earlier perpetrator regimes have sometimes promoted or legislated reconciliation as a
means of public amnesia and in pursuit of a legal amnesty. Examining the past in terms of who
was denied rights, and seeking to compensate for that, is more concrete. In education, this
has two major aspects: structural reform and the development of a justice-sensitive learning
culture within schools and higher education which will help non-repetition of conflict.
5.1 Structural Reforms
Where broad embedded structures of division such as ethnic or religious segregation of
schooling were implicated in the conflict, then measures are needed to break down the more
harmful aspects of this divide. South Africa had to repeal old legislation on separate, unequal
schools based on race/colour, opening up formerly white schools to students of other
backgrounds. There was also reallocation of funds to try to equalize historical discrepancies
between types of schools. As Murphy (2014) holds, however, South Africa’s reforms are rare
in comparison to other divided and transitioning countries—though it is true that South Africa,
despite its shortcomings, has been a paradigmatic example within transitional justice cases.
Yet as Murphy also points out, if society continues to be divided and hostile, integrating
education will have little impact. In the absence of a broader transitional justice framework,
there will be a lack of commitment to both reforming education and to addressing the past. In
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Northern Ireland, for example, the way that the conflict
‘ended’ profoundly shaped and informed its transition. Both ended by negotiated settlements,
the Dayton Accords (1995) and the Belfast Agreement (1998). In both, not only were
educational reforms largely neglected, but the key factors such as interpretations of the past
or the connections between political/cultural power and identity were ignored, and the
agreements themselves legitimated segregation based on the honouring of a complex cultural,
linguistic, religious, and political identity. The fear of a group’s identity being threatened or
subsumed by another permeates both agreements. In BiH, no organization, international or
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domestic, was given a clear mandate to ensure educational reform until 2002 when the Office
of the High Representative (OHR) admitted it was late too consider this.
One question in reform is whether language issues are used as a further means of
marginalization or attempted assimilation. Debates and dilemmas abound generally around
the encouragement of the use of minority languages in education. There are pedagogical
reasons why mother tongue teaching can be beneficial in the early years, but in transitional
justice terms the question would be whether the lack of acceptance of minority language and
cultures was part of the conflict and grievance. As well as curriculum change, structural reforms
will then include allocation of teachers and resources to different language communities, and
recognition of language in different political spheres. In Sri Lanka, structural integration is much
more difficult than it would be in Northern Ireland or even BiH because of language divides.
The promotion of a second national language is more than just a curriculum area: if successful,
it represents a reform towards genuine bilingualism in education and governance. But it would
need to be accompanied by an equally genuine equity in education resourcing for Tamil and
Sinhalese (and Muslim) schooling, as well as opportunities post-schooling. And this is not to
mention equity in power and resourcing more generally. The roots of conflict were not that
people could not really communicate.
Structural reform needs to be constantly mindful of such roots, but also of realism. In Northern
Ireland, the lack of progress on fully integrated schools has generated the interesting initiative
on ‘shared classes,’ a collaborative network across Catholic and Protestant schools. Students
travel and share classes for certain core curricular areas. Evaluations show that fears that this
would lead to greater sectarian violence have been unfounded. Students enjoyed the activities
and meeting students from other areas. This is very much a refinement of ‘contact theory,’
more complex than simply bringing people together. There was experimentation, learning from
mistakes, a bottom-up venture. Many pupils considered religion as less important than shared
interests when they were making friends. In this philosophy of shared classes emerges the
central idea of leaving boundaries where they are but making them less important (Duffy and
Gallagher 2012). The timing issue here is whether such initiatives delay the push towards the
ideal of full integration or represent a useful compromise, in that integrated schools are a long
way off in the future. They are nearer to the idea of mutual vulnerability, mentioned earlier.
Some structural reforms are also proposed in the immediate aftermath of conflict, when many
have been denied education, and may be still vulnerable to being drawn into violent groups.
These reforms can include reparations, in terms of providing education to victims of the conflict
who had missed educational opportunities, as in Peru, Chile, Rwanda, and South Africa. The
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policies of ‘catch-up’ education, or Accelerated Learning, or a stipend programme, attempt to
compensate for past lack of schooling, and provide redress; an economic interpretation of
transitional justice may also propose shifts to more vocational education in order to make
students employable and in theory boost the economy. Yet in countries such as Sierra Leone,
these are not without problems, and cannot be undertaken without analyses of the labour
market for males and females and whether there are real opportunities post-schooling (Davies
2012a). Again, this is a timing issue, and it would seem obvious that vocational graduates
should not be disgorged into the labour market without real jobs available.
Each national context is therefore distinct in terms of whether to focus reforms on ‘difference’—
whether in opportunity or identity. When inequality is mapped onto ethnic divides, it will be
important to attempt to redistribute resources, give cultural recognition or widen access—in
the process surfacing and prioritizing difference. But when attempts at integration lead to
further and stronger ‘nationalism’ (BiH), or are unpopular with parents who fear assimilation
(Northern Ireland), or draw attention away from the real problems (Sri Lanka), then it may be
better to accept the boundaries between groups and find ways to reduce the impact of
difference—or the manipulation of it.
5.2 Justice-Sensitive Education
Within schools and higher education, post-conflict reforms point towards what I have termed
‘justice-sensitive’ education (Davies 2015 forthcoming). This has two linked areas of curriculum
and education for non-violence. Firstly, the backward looking glance of transitional justice has
often meant reform of the history curriculum—particularly if it presents a biased or incorrect
view of war and conflict and has indirectly contributed to prejudice or even hatred. There is
widespread agreement that nationally accepted historical narratives should not whitewash acts
that inflicted major suffering nor exclude the experiences of non-victors, including women, the
economically marginalized, and, in the case of international conflicts, citizens of other states
who were victims of historical violence perpetrated by the in-group’s state (Cole 2007). But this
is not just about replacing one version of history with another. Carretero and Borrelli (2008)
recommend analyzing the social structure, linking human acts with social conditions, as well
as avoiding simple reductionism (good vs. bad, innocent victims vs. villains). It can be seen
that revision of the history curriculum is also revision of pedagogy: hearing contending voices,
deliberative democracy, debate, argument, and dialogue in a history classroom are essential
precursors to a democratic political culture as well as the recognition that there is more than
one version of history. The way that history is taught might be argued to take priority over
textbook reform—another timing issue, returned to below. The South African history curriculum
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asks students to explore the violent past—and the human behaviour that animated it—through
the lens of human rights. Students are to study the transition itself and some of the transitional
justice efforts such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. BiH now has Guidelines for
textbook writing and evaluation of history textbooks, which has been adopted by all Ministries
of Education. The OSCE is implementing the project History for the Future—aiming towards
reconciliation through education.
Yet the revision of the history curriculum is another timing issue: it is felt that this can be too
sensitive immediately after a conflict, and best left until later, as was the case in Rwanda. While
alternative narratives are required in the long term, memories now are too fresh; would
revisiting the question of who are victims and who the perpetrators stir up old hatreds? There
can be little acceptance of the importance of acknowledging the injustices of the past. This has
a variety of reasons—it can relate to denial of culpability, but also a strategic view and
ideological preference for a ‘clean slate’, for moving on. Not all educators believe in confronting
the past, or lack the skills or confidence to engage in this in the classroom. There can be
government bans on talking of genocide (as in Rwanda) or on admissions of guilt. The
language of past crimes presents a problem—Turkey refuses to see its historical treatment of
the Armenians as a ‘genocide’ at all. Both South Africa and El Salvador also suspended their
history curriculum after the conflict. This is what Rodino (2014) refers to as the ‘null
curriculum’—everything that is not named or discussed. There can even be the use of
education to deny culpability (as with peace education in Japan) and a reframing of who the
victims were.
Two fundamental aspects of history curriculum reform are first who writes the new versions,
and second how learners interpret them. One recent important edited collection is History
Education and Post-conflict Reconciliation which explores joint history textbook writing
(Korostelina and Lässig 2013). This is significant, for as Rosalie Metro (2013) points out in her
study of post-conflict history curriculum revision—which she calls an ‘Intergroup encounter’—
revising history curricula in post-conflict settings can either worsen or ameliorate conflict. Her
research was with Burmese migrant and refugee communities in Thailand, where history
curricula have been controversial in their vastly divergent accounts of history, depending on
whether they are Burman-centric or ethnonationalist, portraying Burmese as oppressors. Many
factors impeded reconciliation about revision between the different stakeholders, including
language and class, but also participants’ fear that if students were taught critically about
history and identity they would no longer respect their elders.
Finally with regard to history curriculum, Michelle Bellino (2014) makes the important point that
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history education remains reliant on the connections that learners make to their own lives. She
asks: ‘What should educators teach young learners about the world when contemporary crime
overshadows recent genocide, and when memories of violence are sometimes perceived as
threats to peace?’ In Guatemala, there are a number of projects based on local experiences:
students produced a play and later a video called There is Nothing Hidden that will not be
Revealed about the 1982 massacre in their community and the villagers’ flight into Mexico.
The play continues to be produced by successive generations of high school students who
tour the country performing in schools and municipal salons (Oglesby 2004). Here the timing
issue refers to keeping memories alive in the long term, an important part of non-reoccurrence.
History education can then be linked to human rights education. The distinctiveness of a
justice-sensitive approach is an understanding of rights in terms of how these rights had been
violated in the past, and therefore what needs to be done to uphold rights in the future. How
did ‘derightsification’ occur, how was it possible that some were cast as inhuman and not
worthy of rights? Yet exploring past rights abuses is a difficult area for teachers. Some
educators will simply talk of ‘human values’ in order to tackle past dehumanization (Gill and
Niens 2014), but this can be very vague—and an equally contested concept in terms of whose
values prevail. The international set of rights as specified in the conventions do provide a solid
starting point and platform for analysis. Many international organizations, such as UNICEF and
Save the Children, will promote human rights and children’s rights as ways to generate child-
friendly and non-violent schools. International human rights frameworks also cut across
religion, so that they provide a secular but commonly acceptable framework to discuss values
and to make decisions on what to tolerate and what not to tolerate (Davies 2014) .
Pedagogically, the sensitive transitional context will determine whether the entry point to
talking about rights is the individual student and their family, or more general violations of rights
nationally and internationally. HRE manuals written by international organizations have to be
used with care. In some countries and religious contexts, human rights might be sensitive in
itself, although children’s rights are acceptable. Sometimes there is a need to find a way in.
Work in Afghanistan, for example, found that it was possible to persuade families that girls’
education was important once an illustrated booklet was prepared for them showing human
rights in the Quran (Davies 2014).
One vital perspective in HRE then is not to see transitional justice as just about abuses, as just
about horror and crime, but also as about a positive future, with a stress on shared values and
commonalities in rights. There is a need for a ‘usable past’ (Fullinwider 1996), a past in which
students can find values and projects to take as their legacies, seeing that not all was dark. If
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a positive national identity is sought, then there needs some past to justify, illustrate, or
celebrate this.
Yet the future orientation aims to envisage a future which is less violent than before. How did
violence become normalized in a society? A justice-sensitive education explores how hatreds
build from what was once apparently peaceful or cohesive (as in BiH or Rwanda), or how
existing divisions can be further manipulated into violence. It would also touch on how
schooling may itself have been implicated. The education priority is for a schooling in
alternatives to violence. Social change is envisioned, but education can help to analyse and
develop non-violent means to get there—advocacy, campaigning, lobbying, and of course the
myriad ways to use social media to establish networks. A great problem with the ‘normal’
democratic processes in many countries is the slow rate of change—waiting for elections, then
for the results of these to be reflected in policy. Impatience with these processes can mean
turning to more visible, dramatic, publically confrontational styles, particularly with the far right
(Davies et al. 2015). A preference develops for active movements, violent if necessary, rather
than party politics and going to meetings. Mistrust of the state to tackle apparent ‘takeovers’—
whether by Jews, Muslims, or Christians—justifies taking the law into your own hands. In these
contexts, education for non-violence has a more immediately political thrust than education for
peace, and can be more localized and less abstract.
Education for non-violence therefore has to tackle a number of fronts. One is the culture of
school or training college. The obvious point is that schools need to be free from violence, first
in terms of banning corporal punishment by teachers, as well as symbolic violence in terms of
humiliations and harassing of students. Codes of conduct for teachers are needed, before or
at the same time as codes of conduct for students. Nepal’s Schools as Zones of Peace are
often cited in this regard, as while the origin was ensuring that schools were not used for
recruitment by government or opposition forces, this became broadened to ensure that schools
were places that were safe from violence generally. In many parts of the world teachers still
have to be trained in alternatives to corporal punishment. Timing and sequencing does become
important here—there is no point in doing peace education if the culture of the school is hostile
or oppressive.
Another front is the political education which examines why people are drawn to violence to
achieve their aims and what alternatives are available. Clearly this varies according to context
of immediate community politics and broader state politics. The great problem is that violence
can sometimes be successful—whether through revolutionary groups or the demands of
extremists. The aim of spreading fear is easily achieved. What schools can do is tackle
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escalations, particularly in terms of revenge. Revenge is sanctioned in some religious texts,
which is a particular concern in issues such as insult of the Prophet. The Pope recently
sanctioned revenge in saying that he would hit someone who insulted his mother. He also
sanctioned smacking children. In their punishment regimes, schools are often very vengeful
places, and this becomes even more normalized when supported by a global religious leader.
Together with rights and the search for truth, a justice-sensitive education will usually have a
political dimension of promoting democracy. Democracies do not have a spotless human rights
record, but on the whole they fare better on the protection of human rights than their
alternatives. Yet narrow conceptions of democracy as relating just to elections or periodic
regime change are not necessarily justice-sensitive. Democracy here is not just about voting,
nor even just about political participation—both of these had high levels in Hitler’s Germany. A
fuller conception is needed which is related to protection of minorities, upholding of gender
rights, the promotion of transparency and the protection of freedom of speech. Again, the past-
looking view enables discussion of what was or was not democratic about a society in the past.
Political participation will be a key dimension, leading to awareness of the need for active
political participation as a citizen in order to try to bring accountability and avoid the
authoritarian nature of past decision-making.
This leads on to the question of immediacy: while democracy is not just about elections,
transparent and violence-free elections are very important in fragile states, and voter education
can be a key underpinning. A good example of this is currently in the Philippines, which has a
history of elections rigged by family dynasties, warlordism, and private armies, with
manipulation of voters, vote-buying, and violent partisan and clan warfare. Electoral reform
also is a key part of the peace process with Muslim Mindanao and the establishment of the
Bangsamoro autonomous region. One strong organization involved in accountable election
processes is the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), run by the Catholic
church which uses church and lay personnel for political education (as well as for Poll Watching
and the ‘Unofficial Parallel Count’). There are modules for every educational level, and comic-
style booklets, and volunteers with a caravan-style training who try to reach inaccessible
places. A multi-media campaign used the Philippine peso plastered on voters’ faces to
symbolize how ‘money blinds us to the true value of our vote.’ Much is designed to appeal to
the young voter; yet a timing issue is of course when to start voter education: when the voting
age is eighteen, as in the Philippines and many countries, then should this be started in school
or not? One argument would be that one can start quite young, perhaps in civic education,
thinking about how governments get elected and in whose interests: peace education in this
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15
scenario would not be about love and harmony but about not voting in a government that
oppresses its people.
This leads on to the area of citizenship or civic education. Because of the time needed to agree
and establish a sensitive history curriculum after conflict, it is sometimes quicker to adapt or
introduce civic education (which is what happened in Argentina in the 1980s and in Chile).
However, civic education without an acknowledgement of the past can be abstract. For
example, in the case of Guatemala, Oglesby (2004: 28) noted that the recent conflict was being
attributed to an unspecified ‘culture of violence,’ a tautological and vague cause that diminishes
and obscures rather than clarifies the conflict. There is similarly always the danger that
citizenship education is used for nationalistic and patriotic purposes (learning to be a ‘good
and dutiful citizen’) rather than a critical examination of who has had citizenship denied in the
past. Such critiques may include work on whether women are really constituted as citizens
(Arnot and Dillabough 2000).
Similarly, one of the goals of TJ is the restoration of the rule of law and from this the
improvement of civic trust. There is however a problem of teaching the rule of law. Erika
George (2007) points out that this has often been uprooted or may never have taken root in
conflict societies. Building or rebuilding the rule of law needs the creation of a widely shared
public commitment to human rights and a preference for relying on the law and the political
process rather than resorting to violence to resolve conflict. This underscores the issue of
timing: is there any point in teaching the rule of law in schools when it is not in daily evidence
outside, or is the only way to create a commitment to the law to use educational processes? If
schools do not begin the process of understanding rights, democracy, and the law, who will?
6. Teacher Education
However, it can be seen from all the above that curriculum reform and changing school cultures
requires teacher training. This has to include knowledge of and implications of children’s rights
and human rights generally. Teacher education colleges in many post-conflict countries can
be authoritarian and even violent (with peer bullying). Rights to freedom from harm, to freedom
of expression, and to participation in decision-making have to be operationalized on a day to
day basis. Given the links of masculinity to militarism, gendered violence is also an issue for
teachers to consider. The problem again for timing in immediately post-conflict states is that
teachers themselves may have been subject to violence in war, may be traumatized, may
retain ancient hatreds or suspicions, or may still be subject to gendered and domestic violence
in the home—often exacerbated by war. They have to work through their own experiences and
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
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this can be painful. In the case of recent post-conflict societies, practising teachers will have
experienced this from the perspective of one of the parties (perpetrators, victims, or witnesses)
and will have suffered the consequences of such experience, as Rodino (2014) confirms. This
will affect their capacity to teach about the past, regardless of the study programme and
teaching materials they have. Nonetheless it can be argued that a rights-based approach, as
in transitional justice, enables teachers to recognize their own rights. Sadeed (2012) claims
from their peace education in Afghanistan that peace education teacher training and coaching
has reduced counter-productive corporal punishment practices (among teachers) to almost
zero. Measurable improvements in behaviour among students are then noted, with a decline
in observed aggressive behaviour among students. Teachers actively modelling peace
education concepts in the classroom—treating students with dignity, recognizing their equal
rights—form the bedrock of a comprehensive peace programme. This is what Baxter (2012)
refers to as teaching through social justice rather than about social justice.
There is also the argument that there is no point in introducing human rights education or
education for democracy when the wider society is undemocratic or corrupt. Where there is
indeed little point is when teachers themselves do not understand the materials, do not know
how to teach controversial issues, are wary of the language of rights or do not want to give up
power in favour of student-led democracy. Then human rights education or revised history
curriculum projects do not find a permanent home in the classroom, and there is lip-service to
real shifts of pedagogy. Teachers will need good materials on alternative narratives of history,
but also incentives to use them. They need incentives to change the way they relate to students
and alternatives to humiliating punishment. Above all, they need experience and possibly
training in working with the community to create change.
The school system itself may be reluctant to deal with conflictive or controversial issues: its
traditional position was to transmit certainties and avoid intellectual or social conflicts, and the
teachers bear the uncertainties and contradictions of the system as well as their own. Teacher
education colleges are often the most conservative of all higher education institutions because
of this remit to socialize the young into the accepted ways of society. So our questions become:
Are teacher training colleges democratic, with respect for human rights? Do teachers learn in
critical ways? Do they have knowledge of the past and of alternative past narratives? Research
in South African teacher education institutions (Harber and Serf 2006; Mncube et al. 2014) is
uncovering cultures which include features ranging from authoritarian lecturing and teaching
to sexual harassment among trainees or between lecturers and students. It is clear that if the
teacher training experience replicates the cultural conditions surrounding a conflict, then it is
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
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unlikely that teachers will know how to teach in participative ways or to understand the
implications of rights.
Working with teachers and teacher educators to shift the way that they teach can be quicker
than creating, approving, producing, and distributing new textbooks, even if resources for this
exist. As with the debates on multicultural education, should old biased textbooks be sanitized
or sensitized? Should they be used creatively to uncover with students how the world used to
be presented? All this requires acceptance by teachers. In countries where there are truth and
reconciliation commissions, teachers will need good materials on TRCs themselves, but also
incentives to use them. They also need incentives to change the way they relate to students,
and alternatives to humiliating punishment, such as restorative discipline.
7. Scaling Up
Finally comes the question of scaling up peace and non-violence programmes. The non-
structural initiatives often begin in pilot schools, with the backing of NGOs. The endpoint, if
these are successful, is to have them mainstreamed. This presents sequencing issues. Is the
beginning the establishment of a unit or section in a Ministry (of Education or Ministry of
National Integration)? Or the drawing up of a policy on education for peace/non-
violence/integration which includes the need to establish a base and legitimation in a formal
government institution? Much depends on who participates in drawing up the policy and, as
intimated earlier, what their agendas are. NGOs are often influential here. UNICEF’s child-
friendly schools, for example, are well known as models; currently the Sri Lanka government
is however questioning this title, as it implies that other government schools are not child-
friendly. But the term is usually more acceptable to cautious politicians than ‘Rights Respecting
schools,’ as used in the UK.
NGOs and INGOs will often have an exit strategy of attempting to mainstream their work in the
relevant ministry, with a cadre of officers, a budget, a workplan, and transparent lines of
accountability, etc. The downside of this institutionalization is inevitably that the work becomes
less politicized and more bland, with a preference for the visible but safe areas such as student
exchanges and cultural events. Promotion as an education officer is not often achieved by
being a fierce advocate for children’s rights and for a critical justice-sensitive education.
Experience in Sri Lanka finds that psycho-social care initiatives supported by German technical
cooperation (GIZ), which train counsellors to deal with issues that include trauma and exposure
to violence, can be co-opted to turn counsellors into careers guidance or ‘discipline’ teachers.
Disaster risk education, which might include the risks of a community erupting into violence
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
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again, can be taken over by popular and non-controversial agendas regarding climate change.
This is not to deny the importance of these areas, but they leave gaps in official ministry
provision.
It might be thought that the recommendations regarding education by truth and reconciliation
commissions in different countries would carry much weight, especially as they have
international recognition. In Sierra Leone, for example, the TRC provided the momentum for
the largely World Bank-led reform of the educational sector, even though several
recommendations (such as for free secondary education for girls) called for changes beyond
the scope of the reform package (Paulson 2006). The TRC recommended that the content of
the final report be incorporated into curricula in primary, secondary, and tertiary education, but
this has not happened so far. However, the UN has been working with the Ministry of Education
to incorporate human rights training in school and university curricula, which opens the door
to also adding information contained in the TRC report (Dugal 2014). The Commission made
a decision to produce versions of its report for children and secondary school students. This
was an important innovation, although the take-up has been patchy.
In Peru, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comision de Verdad y Reconciliacion
(CVR)) engaged more explicitly with education—its role in conflict and post-conflict—than
many other truth commissions that preceded it throughout the world. The recommendations
stressed the importance of intercultural and bilingual education, linkages with other sectors in
addressing the needs of the most vulnerable children, the need for scientific education and a
move away from dogmatic teaching (especially given its linkages with Shining Path), early
childhood education and local educational management, and a literacy plan with priority for
adolescent girls and women. However, in 2008 people felt there was very little progress made,
mentioning a lack of political will as well as a fragmented Ministry of Education, and ministerial
elites with power (Paulson 2011). Initiatives to insert the CVR’s narrative of Peru’s conflict (the
‘truth’) into curriculum also did not work: in one instance, conflict-related educational materials
were proposed to be introduced in communities prone to conflict—implying blame for the
conflict on poor, rural indigenous communities. The Ministry maintains intact group distinctions
and stereotypes. Elsewhere party politicians called the CVR narrative an ‘apology for terrorism’
(particularly those that highlighted armed forces and political responsibility) and attempted to
silence the history curriculum. One key problem is that the CVR had no legally binding
mechanism to enforce its recommendations.
Discussions of TRCs underscore the intensely political processes that peace-based initiatives
in schools encounter once they expand from inter-cultural meet-and-greet programmes and
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
19
tackle the complex, structural causes of conflict. Peace education policy has to be cross-
sectoral, examining disadvantage, access to resources, and vulnerability, as well as how
people communicate about these. The sequencing will not be linear, nor smooth, and has to
be sometimes opportunistic, finding peoples’ agendas and spaces for intervention.
In Chile, the National Corporation on Reparation and Reconciliation, established in 1992 to
follow up the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had among its
major tasks the mandate to implement an ‘Educational and Cultural Promotion Programme’
understood in terms of prevention and guarantees of non-recurrence. The programme, which
targeted both the formal and non-formal sectors, focused in the creation of tools to consolidate
a human rights culture in Chile. To this end, it worked in six different areas including the
promotion of knowledge creation of human rights, the qualification and training of education
actors, the production of didactic materials to teach about human rights, support of research
projects about education and human rights, support of the creation of spaces for reflection and
debate, and support of activities to promote human rights. This highly participatory programme
constituted a genuine effort to incorporate the topic of human rights in the education system,
both in schools and universities. Once the commission was dissolved in 1996, the programme
was taken over by the Ministry of Education.1
8. Conclusion
If we try to summarize all the educational possibilities, the key question is whether there can
be any general recommendations about timing and sequencing or whether everything is
country or case specific. The first point of departure relates to how education was—or still is—
implicated in the conflict. If it was directly contributory, in terms of real grievance about
educational opportunities, then there is urgency in reform. Structural change can be symbolic
as well as real, showing commitment to a new, more equal future. Immediate, case-specific
changes are Accelerated Learning programmes and reintegration of child soldiers; larger
programmes can be relatively immediate (the dismantling of apartheid education) or are linked
to longer-term curriculum change (language or recognition of cultural minorities).
If conflict was about manipulation of ethnic hatreds, then the educational contribution may be
indirect—we do not actually know what the influence of curriculum and textbooks are in the
way ‘others’ are portrayed. It is good to reform them, but they may be a symptom, not a cause.
Is the more pressing issue that of the normalization of violence and the use of violence to
1 See, http://www.ddhh.gov.cl/historia_programa.html.
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achieve ends? We have seen from the above discussion that timing in terms of curriculum
reform is highly case specific—the sensitivity of a new history curriculum being a prime
example. But an international project such as Facing History and Ourselves can at least
stimulate debate and provide legitimacy. Sequencing depends on what is already in the
curriculum—in Sri Lanka for example, human rights was mandated by the LLRC, but is already
there, and accepted, but needs to be strengthened and linked to the specific findings and
recommendations of the LLRC with regard to cohesion. Completely new curriculum areas need
a long time for consultation and then training of teachers to use them. This would be particularly
true of any critical religious education.
Teacher education has therefore been cited as a key precursor of much other change, whether
in curriculum or a rights-based, non-violent school culture—yet the sequencing question is who
trains the trainers? In many countries, teacher educators do not undergo any specific training
for this role (and in some countries may never have even taught in schools). So first step is
(re)training of teacher educators on teaching controversial issues, rights, democracy, and
alternatives to humiliating punishment, so that they can implement with teacher trainees what
they have learned and practised in their own in-service orientation. Murphy (2014) argues that
bringing the truth commission and apartheid into classrooms as subjects while the commission
was still operating would have been too soon to benefit and to avoid damaging students, but
temporal distance made it easier to consider the role that the past can play in schools. Indeed,
it took ten years of revisions to the national curriculum after apartheid to develop a document
that requires a human rights focus in addressing the past. In Argentina, the teaching of the
past only became a state policy with the approval of the General Education Law No. 26,206 of
2006, which was later reinforced by the five-year compulsory Education and Teacher Training
Plan (Rodino 2014). In Bangladesh, in 2001, the Liberation War Museum began developing
programmes aimed at children and youth to learn about the mass atrocities that occurred
during the country’s 1971 war for independence—thirty years after the fact (Hoque 2014).
An underpinning area then is legal or quasi-legal policy change: these include policy directives
on codes of conduct for teachers, or the provision of student councils in schools, some of which
can be drawn up relatively swiftly if they are not controversial. But laws and policies will not be
effective unless there are specific bodies set up to implement them, with trained personnel.
International pressure, particularly if linked to a security agenda, can speed up processes, but
it takes time to create functioning departments with clearly understood mandates.
In the end few generalizations are possible, in that change is not linear in the way that the
notion of a ‘sequence’ implies. The development of an education for peace and non-violence
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
21
requires a multi-faceted approach, sometimes simultaneous, sometimes sequential, but with
mutually reinforcing aspects. There can be incremental, experimental small steps—a
workshop here, a new resource there—but sustainability will probably require some semi-
permanent institutional or legal features. Yet the nature of potential conflict means the nature
of potential peace is equally unpredictable, and even the structural features will require revision
and rethinking. One thing is clear, and that is that teachers remain central. Their training and
their buy-in are at the heart of any successful education for peace.
CRPD Working Paper No. 32
22
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