Conviviality,ego, team and theme behavior in transrational peace education

ABSTRACT

The Innsbruck School of Peace Studies is known for its innovative academic teaching methods under the title Transrational Peace Philosophy. This essay introduces the epistemological fundament of this approach to peace education. It presents the didactic principles for its Strategic Capacity and Relationship Building, combined with Strategic Leadership Training. They are based on the conviviality of students and a curriculum that follows the stages of groups’ task behavior and individual learning by `peeling the onion´ of the Ego. It describes how the didactics are designed for the international, intercultural, interreligious and interdisciplinary groups of students. It demonstrates the five stages of Ego, Team and Theme Behavior during a semester and how the curriculum places courses for best learning results. It discusses the main presumptions on convivial learning processes for academics. The focus is on students who want to work later in a broader field of conflict transformation.     

Shining light into dark shadows of violence and learned helplessness: peace education in South Korean schools

The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of direct and indirect violence through iljin (a group of students who are considered key perpetrators of school violence); a colonized false ideology and resistance to social justice. More positively, findings are also used to generate possibilities for pedagogical change based on peace education – an approach that proves useful both as an analytical frame for examining peace-violence relations in education and society and as an essential pedagogy for progressing towards peace in South Korean schools.     

History education in schools in Iraqi Kurdistan: representing values of peace and violence

The Kurdistan Regional Government has implemented a wide range of reforms in Iraqi Kurdistan’s education system since its establishment in 2003. This qualitative study utilises critical discourse analysis to investigate the content of History Education (HE) textbooks (grades five to eight) and to assess how far peace education values and principles have been integrated into the curriculum. The ME’s top-down approach has faced significant resistance from teachers and it fails to consider the importance of hidden and null curricula. It focuses on the history of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Islam, glorifies war, excludes different narratives or interpretations, and fails to foster critical debate or enquiry. The curriculum appears to encourage violence and foster divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the null curriculum is regulated to maintain the dominance of the group in power.     

Decolonisation,dignity and development aid: a judicial education experience in Palestine

Abstract

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse.     

Evangelical violence: Western Christianity and the use of force against the Third World

Abstract

Recognising the impact of religion on state action, this article identifies two variables that interact to affect the type and level of violence employed by Western states against Third World targets. First, variation in the degree to which the prominent Christian denominations and organisations within these states view evangelisation as either an individual-level or national-level process – Christian individualism vs Christian nationalism – has determined church support for using violence as a tactic. Second, the level of influence that churches and missionary organisations have over their home states affects the ability of Christian actors to directly impact state actions. Western violence against Third World peoples is expected to be lowest when churches and Christian organisations view evangelisation in primarily individualistic terms and have significant influence over the state. The article examines the relationships between concepts of evangelisation, Christian influence over state policies, and levels of violence against the Third World by examining British, French and German colonialism during the late colonial period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Corporate power,US drug enforcement and the repression of indigenous peoples in Latin America

Abstract

The question that motivates this article is: what are the mechanisms through which the prosecution of the drug war in Latin America lead to human rights repression? In answering this question, I theorise that drug enforcement is a coalition of actors that facilitates domestic and international consensus around prohibition as a mechanism for corporate expansion. Drug war infrastructure financing is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. And, in response to indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with private security firms and paramilitary organisations to repress and eliminate indigenous resistance. In the process of accumulating capital in Latin America, transnational corporations, domestic security, and paramilitary organizations are the drug enforcement coalition’s mediators of terror.     

Learning peace (and conflict): the role of primary learning materials in peacebuilding in post-war Afghanistan,South Sudan and Sri Lanka

Post-war education is usually considered a positive contributor to peacebuilding; however, it can also reinforce divisive perspectives. Textbooks and learning materials can be instrumental in maintaining or exacerbating existing inequalities. This paper uses case study literature reviews of Afghanistan, South Sudan and Sri Lanka to explore the ways in which primary learning materials extend existing challenges of post-war education and potentially create new ones. An analysis of the literature on learning materials from these countries reveals that textbook development and uses are intertwined with larger national and international political and social power structures. We draw from Bourdieu and Giroux to consider how learning materials contribute to the reproduction of cultures of hostility, violence, divisiveness and silence or to transformatory cultures of peacebuilding, inclusivity and critical thought. Our resulting conceptual lens highlights how education can take on the role of being a victim, accomplice or transformer of conflict – roles that are often overlapping. Each case study country is taking steps towards peacebuilding through their primary learning materials; however, there are many elements of the textbook design, development, production and distribution process in each country that also reinforce contributing factors for conflict.     

School-based linguistic and cultural revitalization as a local practice: Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk,Russian Federation

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic.