Educating for Peace and Human Rights

An Introduction

Maria Hantzopoulos, Monisha Bajaj

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350129740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Over the past five decades, both peace education and human rights education have emerged distinctly and separately as global fields of scholarship and practice. Promoted through multiple efforts (the United Nations, civil society, grassroots educators), both of these fields consider content, processes, and educational structures that seek to dismantle various forms of violence, as well as move towards cultures of peace, justice and human rights. Educating for Peace and Human Rights Education introduces students and educators to the challenges and possibilities of implementing peace and human rights education in diverse global sites. The book untangles the core concepts that define both fields, unpacking their histories and conceptual foundations, and presents models and key research findings to help consider their intersections, convergences, and divergences. Including an annotated bibliography, the book sets forth a comprehensive research agenda, allowing emerging and seasoned scholars the opportunity to situate their research in conversation with the global fields of peace and human rights education.

1

Peace Education

The Foundations and Future Directions of a Field¹

Chapter Outline

From Theory to Practice: The Development of Peace Education over Time

Major Pedagogical Influences in Peace Education

Mainstreaming the Field: Integrating Peace Education into Schools and Beyond

New Directions and Ways Forward: Critical Peace Education, Post-Structural Influences, and Decolonial Approaches

Conclusion

In the last several decades, peace education has become a recognized field that has emerged from the margins of educational policy and practice to become increasingly established in various educational settings worldwide. Once a rather obscure or unheard-of practice in mainstream educational circles, peace education is now commonly integrated into education and peacebuilding efforts adopted by international organizations, UN agencies, ministries of education, local and global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other types of educational institutions, including grassroots movements for community justice and activism. Overall, peace education is a wide-ranging field of practice and scholarship that is viewed as a vehicle both to undo violence in its various forms (e.g., direct, cultural, and structural) and to build conditions for sustainable peace (see also, Hantzopoulos, Zakharia, and Harris-Garad 2021). Considering its range and origins across the globe, peace education is understandably rife with plural and multiple interpretations and enactments. Informed by diverse philosophies, epistemologies, theories, traditions, and practices, peace education cannot be bound and reduced a singular definition (Bajaj 2008; Bajaj & Hantzopoulos 2016; Bar-Tal 2002; Danesh 2006; Hantzopoulos 2011).

Nonetheless, most scholars of peace education agree on some key tenets of theory and practice that ground the field, and there is general consensus that peace education is mainly concerned with both dismantling all forms of violence and considering ways to create and maintain a more just and peaceful world (Bajaj & Hantzopoulos 2016). Driven by the teleological concept of “peace,” peace education research and practice draws from the field of peace studies to consider and imagine a world in which all forms of violence are absent, and positive and negative peace fuse to form comprehensive peace (Reardon 2000). Though discussed later in the chapter, negative peace assumes the absence of direct violence like war or torture, whereas positive peace assumes the cessation of structural violence so that societal conditions allow for justice and equity to prevail (Galtung 1969). Peace education, therefore, in its distinct manifestations worldwide, considers how practice, theory, and pedagogy combine to develop the necessary skills and ideologies to envision and move toward a more equitable, just, and nonviolent future (Bajaj 2008; Hantzopoulos 2011; Reardon 1988). While the argument that education can help eliminate all forms of violence is a site of considerable (and essential) debate, peace education research and practice pulls from these varied robust repertoires to consider how to dismantle violent structures in a variety of contexts and domains.

The following chapter considers more closely the concepts that define the field and its development in both theory and practice across the globe. Specifically, we trace the foundations, the histories, and the pedagogies that have informed the field, and consider competing theories and debates within it. We examine the normative conceptions of peace that have undergirded the field since its inception as well as the decolonial directions that scholars have increasingly taken in the past decade. We look at how other fields have informed its trajectories and examine the ways forward, privileging the perspectives of critical theorists, practitioners, and scholars.

From Theory to Practice: The Development of Peace Education over Time

As a field of study, peace education can trace its roots back to the early nineteenth century, though it discursively emerged more prominently in the post–Second World War period. At this time, many Western nations and peoples sought ways to prevent the large-scale wars that they had just experienced in the first half of that century (Harris 2008). Despite this emergence as a named field, peace education was not necessarily new, nor was it Western. Many non-Western and Indigenous societies were based in religious and spiritual teachings and traditions that sought to educate and lead people to more peaceful and just worlds (Harris 2004, 2008). Though violence always existed alongside teachings of peace, there is no question that peace studies, and by proxy peace education, have been informed by these myriad traditions.

The proliferation of peace education in Western Europe paralleled both the growth of peace movements and the realities of increased intra-nation strife and class conflict at that time (Harris 2008). For instance, in the nineteenth century, the development of peace movements within civil society was in direct response to increased armament (from the wars that defined that century), mass industrialization (resulting in wealth disparities and class conflict), and eventually the rise of the nation-state (which led to internal civil strife, alliances, and borders among nations). Further, Europe was also engaged in inhumane violence outside of its “borders” through the colonization of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and its active and continued participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In other words, the growth of peace movements in parts of Europe concurrently surfaced during some of its da rkest and most violent times (Hantzopoulos & Williams 2017). Moreover, in other regions of the world, peace movements and related educational approaches developed and flourished in their localized contexts often in direct opposition to European imperial brutality (see also, Hantzopoulos, Zakharia, & Harris 2021).

While the development of peace education in the twentieth century takes multiple forms and pathways contingent upon specific geographical and historical contexts, the contradiction of looming and increased direct, structural, and cultural violence worldwide continued to thrust peace studies and peace education forward as fields. According to Harris (2008), the period before and immediately after the First World War (WWI) brought forth more peace activity from macro-level entities through the establishment of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1895 and the formation of the League of Nations in 1920. Paradoxically, this peace activity occurred during an era when much of Europe not only remained committed to maintaining colonial power beyond its borders, but also was contending with the steady rise of fascism from within. Within Europe, segments of the population questioned the dominant realist frameworks of “peace through war or armament” that framed the previous century and led to a colossal war, and began to consider how peace might be achieved through justice, nonviolence, and equality. It was during this time that disarmament movements and societies started to form, and in some cases, peace education began to be integrated informally and formally in schools. Specifically, teachers started to adopt a more global lens by interweaving international relations within the social studies curriculum, explicitly considering with students how inter- and intra-national cooperation might contribute to a more peaceful world order (Harris & Morrison 2003).

Progressive educational theories, developed and influenced by educational and social activists like Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, also emerged more distinctly during the early twentieth century and in this intra–World War period. While schools historically had generally inculcated narrow nationalist views that reified a perceived “Other,” these theories explicitly began to view schools as potential sites to promote shared humanity instead. By emphasizing shared community, democracy, and interdependence over individualism and self-interest, and transcending national and regional borders, these theories sought to prevent marginalization, violence, and wars through education. Unfortunately, the Second World War (WWII) ushered in the worst of rigid nationalism; yet, there was a renewed commitment to world peace and global citizenry in its wake. This push was most obviously evident in the formation of the United Nations in 1945 and bolstered by the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 as a foundational document of the new global organization (Harris 2008; Reardon 2000). The UDHR’s preamble integrally links human rights to peace, stating that “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (1948).

The development of peace movements, nonviolent approaches, and peace education was greatly influenced by the heightened visibility of global movements for decolonization, freedom, liberation, and self-determination in both the Global South and among marginalized populations in the Global North at this time. In India, Gandhi honed his theories and practices of nonviolence that ultimately led to Indian independence from British rule, inspiring others globally to fight for liberation through nonviolent tactics and launching an entire field known as Gandhian studies (see Bajaj 2016a). Anticolonial uprisings worldwide followed similar paths. According to Hantzopoulos & Williams (2017):

From the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to anti-apartheid organizing in South Africa, many movements began to adopt non-violent, direct action approaches as a central tool for decolonization and liberation. While not all movements against colonial, neo-colonial, settler-colonial and imperial empires at the time were non-violent, many of these uprisings resulted in more socially just practices under new regimes that emphasized positive peace through literacy campaigns, social and national welfare programs, public health and equitable housing policies. (p. 2)

Peace education research and practice was truly indebted to these radical visions and considerations of alternative ways of being and living more justly in the world.

The emergence of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and the threat of nuclear war between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States (US) in the 1970s and 1980s launched new peace movements globally that were centered on nuclear disarmament. Geopolitical and international relations at the time were still grounded in realist notions of world order, and the interests of the nation-state to provide security and protection of citizens within their respective borders served as the catalyst and rationale for state-decision-making. The nuclear arms race and the threat of nuclear war between the USSR and the United States (and the involvement of allied nations on either side) was a direct result of such realist political thinking. However, this was in direct conflict with cosmopolitan beliefs that considered a more global approach to human (rather than national) security that is grounded in morality and ethics. Snauwaert (2008) argues that realist notions of peace, like those that were defined during the Cold War, are bereft of morals, whereas comprehensive peace is contingent upon a cosmopolitan moral order in which all human beings—regardless of constructed borders—view and accept the inherent dignity of the other.

In response to such developments and the real threat of global annihilation, academics and scholars began to establish peace research projects, framed by opposing concepts of peace and violence, that helped codify peace studies as an academic field. Specifically, it was during the Cold War and in the wake of the Korean and Vietnam wars when Norwegian sociologist and leading peace theorist Johan Galtung (1976) began to distinguish between and among different forms of violence to conceptualize various types of peace (Harris 2004). Initially, peace research focused on direct violence, both personal and large-scale, defining peace as the absence of violence and war. This type of peace—negative peace—was explicitly concerned with security, or stopping violence from happening. In other words, negative peace is in response to direct violence with an identifiable perpetrator. This includes actions like a ceasefire after a war, treaties among nations, or the development of security or defense apparatuses, or interpersonally, preventing physical or behavioral violence toward one another.

Peace research, however, began to shift at this time to reflect on the roo t and structural causes of violence. This turn led to more nuanced understandings of violence beyond its obvious direct and physical forms to consider how a genuinely peaceful world might be realized (Galtung 1969). For instance, while the concept of direct violence included how physical, behavioral, or direct violence affected individuals, groups, or nations, Galtung explored other dimensions of violence, including structural, cultural, and political, to shed light on the obstacles to truly achieving peace. For instance, structural violence considered how social and economic systems produced inequity in societies and communities; political violence considered how opposition forces are silenced, marginalized, and abused; and cultural violence examined how groups of people are “denied dignity, rights, and opportunities based on their ascribed identities to bolster racism, patriarchy, militarism, classism, and other forms of systemic oppression” (Hantzopoulos & Williams 2017: 3).

While all these forms of violence are interrelated and often overlap, distinguishing among them led to more robust definitions of peace. By centering systemic forms of violence, peace researchers introduced the concept of positive peace, which relies not only on the absence of direct violence but also the pursuit of justice, human rights, and societal well-being. Thus, comprehensive peace could only be attained through the pursuit of both domains—negative and positive peace (Reardon 1988, 2000). Galtung (1976) further identified five large-scale problems that interfered with the attainment of comprehensive peace, which included (1) direct violence or war, (2) inequality, (3) injustice, (4) environmental degradation, and (5) alienation. He argued that a genuinely peaceful world could only be attained when nonviolence, economic welfare, social justice, ecological balance, and civic participation were realized.

Peace research was also greatly strengthened by feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that examined the inextricable relationships among violence, militarism, and patriarchy. Scholars like Birgit Brock-Utne (1989) and Betty Reardon (1985, 1988, 2000) produced groundbreaking work that argued that peace—both positive and negative—necessitated a gendered lens that aimed to dismantle patriarchy, and subsequently eradicate enduring direct and structural violence. Their analyses led to the importance of education, and specifically peace education, as a key component in helping to resocialize people and communities away from masculine ideals of militarism, war, competition, and violence toward more trusting, collaborative, peaceful, just, and sustainable futures (see also Harris 2004).

By the 1980s, peace education became more recognized and legitimized as an academic field, and the connections among peace research, peace movements, and peace education became stronger. Like its parent field of peace studies, peace education developed as a way to grapple with and work toward dismantling growing worldwide poverty alongside extreme wealth, the destruction of the environment, the persistence of violent conflicts, the increase in terrorism (including state-sponsored forms), and rampant racism, sexism, and xenophobia (Hantzopoulos & Williams 2017). Scholars and practitioners began to lay out frameworks and pathways to transform populations and societies from violent to peaceful. For example, scholars like Hicks (1988) outlined approaches to peace education through various realms, such as government strength, conflict mediation and resolution, personal peace, world order, and as power relationships. Reardon (1988) laid out the three conceptual pillars of the field: planetary stewardship, global citizenship, and humane relationships, as the basis to educate for peace. Together, these scholars began to identify the ways in which skills, knowledges, and attitudes, influenced by concepts identified in peace research, coalesced to form an interrelated foundation for peace education.

Major Pedagogical Influences in Peace Education

Peace education pedagogy, in relationship to its development as an academic field, was inspired and influenced by the works of many prominent educational theorists, like John Dewey (1916) and Maria Montessori (1949), already briefly mentioned, and Paulo Freire (1970/2000), whom we also discuss briefly in the introduction (Bajaj 2008, and Hantzopoulos & Williams 2017).² Their pedagogies and education approaches were not only less hierarchical and more student-centered and directed but also reflected broader visions for ways in which humans should interact with the earth, each other, and their broader communities more generally. For instance, Dewey’s (1916) progressive and experiential educational pedagogy mainly focused on meaning-making, learning by doing, reflection on the experiences of learning, forging connections across disciplines, the consideration of context, and applicable and collaborative problem-solving. Yet, these approaches were also rooted in broader progressive ideals about democracy, society, and the world. Philosophically speaking, he was an instrumentalist who believed that ideas coul...