Introduction

As an ideal, social work’s commitment to peace, social justice, and human rights grants the profession its legitimacy, and social work is conceptualized as a human rights profession (IASSW, 2018; IFSW, 1996; Healy, 2008; Wronka & Staub Bernasconi, 2012). While the relationship between social work and peace is inherent in the profession’s commitment to civil, political, socio-economic, cultural, and environmental rights, conflict resolution, and community well-being (Dominelli, 2024; Healy, 2008; IASSW, 2018; Sewpaul, 2015a), social work cannot lay a singular claim to these. Their salience is such that they ought be the concern of all of humanity. Social workers can play vital roles in creating the conditions for peace at individual, community, and societal levels. Defined as the core of their job, social workers unassumingly fulfil their responsibilities with the most oppressed and vulnerable groups of society and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015), including the pursuit of peace. However, this is largely done within remedial, needs-responsive approaches, rather than rights-based approaches.

While conflicts, wars, and structural violence compromise all of the SDGs, the corollary argument is that without reducing environmental degradation, patriarchal power, poverty, hunger, and inequality, there can be no peace. This means cutting to the chase of how social criteria such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, sexual orientation, and nationality intersect to reproduce exclusions, inequality, othering, and structural violence. Butler (2005), who sees dominant assumptions of these criteria as providing for the very possibility of war and of peace, in an interview with Jill Stauffer on 1 May 2003 asserted, “it’s precisely because we are capable of waging war, and of striking back, and of doing massive injury, that peace becomes a necessity. Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.”

Explosive inequalities, linked with neo-colonial imperialism — i.e., a contemporary form of economic, political, and cultural exploitation and domination of less powerful countries by more powerful ones (Nkrumah, 1965); neoliberal racialized capitalism that articulates the inter-connectedness between racist ideology, racial discrimination, and capitalism (Issar, 2021); gendered racism — where women of colour “are unable to separate the individual effects of each of their identities” (Blake cited in Sewpaul, 2013, p. 121); and unprecedent migration flows on account of conflict, poverty and climate induced disasters, reflect the world’s crisis of values (UNDP, 2020).

Spinoza’s 1670 popular refrain, Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justiceFootnote 1 frames peace as a moral condition. In the face of a choice between Gandhian non-violent resistance and Nehru’s justified retaliation (Sewpaul, 2015a), individuals must have the right to conscientious objection when a country chooses to go to war. Spinoza’s view links personal attributes and values to the macro states of peace, violence, and war. So does Mahatma Gandhi’s (2005) assertion that peace between countries rests on the foundation of love between individuals, Bauman’s (1993) call to being for the Other, and Mandela’s and Archbishop Tutu’s demonstration of how love, compassion for self and other, forgiveness, empathetic understanding and witnessing, and a politics of hope and of resistance can be transformed into broad socio-political forces of reconciliation, unity, non-racialism, solidarity, and peace (Mandela, 1995; Sewpaul, 2015a, 2021; Tutu, 2000).

There are contemporary women who have become global symbols of peaceful resistance and empowerment, who are Nobel Peace Laureates, such as Malala Yousafzai who, in the face of violence inflicted by the Taliban, advocates for girl’s right to education; Tawakkol Karman, a Yemini and co-founder of Women’s Journalists Without Chains, who played a prominent role during the Arab Spring; Nadia Murad, a Yazidi human rights activist, who is a leading voice for survivors of sexual violence in conflicts; and Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian social worker who co-founded the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement, which mobilized women to protest for peace and contributed to the eventual resolution of the Second Liberian Civil War. Amongst many other contemporary women peace activists is Arundhati Roy, an Indian author, activist and public intellectual who raises awareness about pressing social issues and advocates for positive, peaceful change at national and global levels. Roy, an outspoken critic of war, militarism, and state violence, calls for peaceful resolution to conflicts and emphasizes the importance of dialogue, negotiation, and non-violent resistance. In this volume, Zaviršek details the initiatives of groups such as Mothers Against War and Women in Black.

Social workers can leverage their skills, knowledge, and ethical principles to contribute to positive peace, i.e., the prosocial attitudes and values, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful co-existence (Institute for Economics & Peace, 2020). The key question then is: why this is not happening on a scale where the impact of the profession is felt and made visible? Indeed, some like Maylea (2020), discussed below, aver that the failures of the profession are such that it should be rendered obsolete. I argue that social work is constrained by the triad of neoliberal capitalism, science of the logical positivist tradition and managerialism, also framed as new public management (NPM), and that underlying this triad are the taken-for-granted common-sense assumptions that we hold as social workers and the deep ideological contestations that exist within the profession. In order to ensure its relevance, and perhaps its survival, social work requires a radical reorientation towards an emancipatory praxis.

Social Work: Tensions and Contradictions

From the time of its inception, social work has occupied contradictory positions in society. The Charity Organization Society of Mary Richmond, with the separation of people into the deserving and undeserving poor, and the diagnostic/medicalized approaches is contrasted with that of the Settlement House Movement, which has become synonymous with Jane Addams. Addams conceptualized personal problems against socio-economic and political conditions and advocated for structural changes (Healy, 2008). Addams, who was a pacifist and demonstrated the feminist ethic of care in action (Hamington, 2001), was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Healy (2008) cites examples of several social workers who were actively engaged as human rights and peace advocates, and the initiatives of the IASSW and IFSW in supporting peace and human rights. In South Africa, social workers, like the late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Helen Joseph, played major roles in the anti-apartheid struggles, outside the domains of professional social work.

Authors, such as Dominelli (2024), Denov and Shevell (2019), Kabeera and Sewpaul (2008), Frederico, Picton, and Muncy et al. (2007), and Bragin, Tosone, and Ihrig, et al. (2016), detail interventions by social workers in war and conflict situations and in post-conflict reconciliation and mediation. However, there are concerns about increasing securitization and the surveillance roles of social workers (Dominelli, 2024; Elsrud & Lalander, 2022; Guru, 2010; Ottmann, 2024) in the face the dominant discourse on threat related to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, terrorism, and Islamophobia. Elsrud and Lalander (2022) detail young migrants being pushed into extreme precariousness by social workers who support the interests of the nation-state, and warn about social work “becoming an exercise of authority without moral presence and awareness, and without moral accountability” (p. 87).

While Kreuger (1997), Powell (2001), and Schram and Silverman (2012) predicted the end of social work, for reasons such as the medicalization of the psychosocial; electronic therapies replacing human encounters; diminishing of Marxist/Socialist thought, and the market and social media dislocating societies, Maylea (2020) called for an outright abolishing of social work as conceptualized within Western liberal democracies. Maylea’s indictments rest on tensions where social workers “cannot achieve the respect and recognition of clinical professions nor the social change agenda we have set out” (p. 6); the professionalization of social work, which serves the agenda of the political right; social work’s historical legacies of control and abuse of power in perpetuating atrocities; and the failure of social work to deal with major contemporary concerns such as climate change, conflicts, racism, and sexism. Maylea (2020) asserts, “Social work as a profession cannot take credit for passion, compassion and effort … The work still needs to be done, but social work, as a profession, is not well-positioned to do it” (p. 2). Social workers who engage in human rights and peace initiatives tend to do this as volunteers, outside of organizational, particularly NPM constraints on their roles. While Maylea (2020) concludes that social work is “beyond repair” (p. 2), I challenge social work’s narratives of exceptionalism as a human-rights, peace-driven profession, and I call for an emancipatory praxis so that social workers can claim their position among other human rights and peace advocates.

Social work is hemmed in by the convergence of modernity’s triad of giants: neoliberalism, managerialism, and logical positivism, which are barriers to the politicization of the profession. I discuss the dangers of the normalization of this triad by using the example of the differences in responses to Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Palestine. Central to the discussion is the normalizing power of neoliberalism, positivism, and managerialism and their pernicious consequences. Emancipatory praxis is directed at challenging and undoing these normalizing influences that engender oppression, exclusion, inequality, poverty, and structural violence.

The Giant of Neoliberal Capitalism

Capitalism is one of the most defining features of modernity, having its roots in colonialism. In the words of Marx (1976):

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production (p. 915).

Neoliberalism’s central characteristics include trade liberalization, deregulation, and cut-backs on welfare expenditure and privatization, with profit taking precedence over people and the environment. Neoliberalism’s unfair rules of trade, undermining of national self-sufficiencies, outsourcing of labor to countries of least production costs with concomitant national de-industrialization, and under-employment and unemployment, have contributed to the destruction of lives and livelihoods, that do not augur well for sustainable peace (Caterino & Hansen, 2019; Dominelli, 2024; Garrett, 2021; Ottmann, 2024; Sewpaul, 2015b, 2024).

Caterino and Hansen (2019) view neoliberalism as “a social, political and economic process that blocks the very democratic expansion of rights and solidarities” (p. 108), which generates illiberal democracies. Ottmann (2024) argues that the neoliberal state “exhibits considerable punitive and authoritarian tendencies and the necro-political power to destroy” (p. 40). Contemporary events reflect the intertwined evils of nepotism, self-serving political and corporate elites, egregious corruption, kleptocracy, and neoliberalism across many countries. Neoliberal policies are linked with social fragmentation, with communities experiencing the erosion of social safety nets and public services, which contribute to conflicts, particularly in regions where there are existing geo-political, ethnic, religious, and/or cultural tensions, as highlighted by recurrent Israeli-Palestinian wars and conflicts.

Palestine is characterized by a unique blend of settler colonization, illegal occupations, expropriation of their land by Israel, racialized neoliberalism with Palestinian dependence on Israel, displacement, dispossession, unemployment, and inequality (Clarno, 2017; Johnson, 2019), with both Israel and Palestine experiencing repeated attacks and counter-attacks. “Palestine is dying,” wrote Johnson in 2019, in the hands of the USA and Israel, which “utilize neoliberal policies of privatization and security” (p. 2) to legitimize Israel’s occupation and the violation of the rights of Palestinians. Johnson (2019) concludes, “Israeli control over Palestine is thorough: from settlements, surveillance, checkpoints, permits, and private prisons to political assassinations and U.S.-Israel comradery” (p. 10). Clarno (2017) argues that, “Colonization, constant repression, and neoliberalization have exacerbated the suffering of the Palestinian poor, intensified the class divisions within Palestinian society, and enhanced the conditions for popular resistance” (p. 107). Palestinians now occupy only 22% of historic Palestinian land (Eid, 2023) and Israel is currently seizing a further 64,000 m2 of land to establish an illegal industrial settlement and adding 3500 illegal settlement houses in the occupied West Bank, thus rendering a two-state solution almost impossible.

Neoliberalism and positivism perfected the arts of classification and categorization, which are accepted as normal features of everyday life, supporting discrimination, exclusions, and inequalities. Social work is operating in an environment where there are numerous conflicts, including civil unrest, terrorist attacks, and wars — the most reported on currently being the Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Palestine. In the face of resistance to capitalist violence, order is established through repressive state apparatuses and profit is maximized through the “social production of difference, of restrictive particularity and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender” (Lowe, cited in Virdee, 2019, p. 9). Virdee (2019) argues that capitalism’s success rested on colonial invention of racism, and “the extinguishing of the emancipatory visions of subaltern populations” (p. 10), best exemplified by Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestine, the subjugation of Palestinians, and the current Israeli war on Palestine.

The Giant of Science of the Logical-Positivist Tradition

Born within the period of modernity, social work began to take on the omniscient voice of science. It is within the positivist paradigm of classification, categorization, cure, and control that social work saw its most pronounced development, which is a double-edged sword (Sewpaul & Hölscher, 2004). Modern science, with it claims to scientific objectivity and universal truths, lent credence to colonization and capitalism as the “colonial conquest became a live data-set, a human zoo from which they distilled their magical theories of scientific racism” (Virdee, 2019, p. 18), where some scientists and universities engineered race thinking and practices (Sewpaul, 2021; Wilkerson, 2020). Similarly, science is used to naturalize and normalize gender stereotypes. According to Rossiter (2011), “the very idea of social work is structured by historical and ideological forces that animate the normativity of the white, bourgeois, heterosexual subject” (p. 981).

Volz (cited in Sewpaul & Hölscher, 2004) asserted, social work “[learned] the language of the powerful, those who matter and create identities, and [inscribed] itself into the legitimate and legitimising narratives of ‘science’ [and] progress” (p. 31). Sewpaul and Hölscher (2004) argued that “social work adopted with the language of ‘skills’, ‘techniques’ and ‘diagnosis’ a modern conceptualisation of its relationship with its clientele as one between the expert subject and his or her object” (p. 31). Within the positivist paradigm, alternative forms of tacit, Indigenous knowledges are marginalized (Sewpaul & Henrickson, 2019).

Levinas (1985) cogently argues against privileging knowledge above ethics. Professional knowledge often reduces people to homogenous categories and sameness, rather than view people in all their complexities and fullness: their “infinity” in the words of Levinas. Levinas’ argument is that our a priori and presumed knowledge of people blocks authentic engagement and knowing. Social work’s dominant notion of professionalism derives from positivist embracing of detachment in “social worker-client” relationships, neutrality, the social worker as expert, experimentation, universal laws, and the separation of the professional from the personal (Rossiter, 2006; Sewpaul & Henrickson, 2019), which cohere with NPM practices.

The Giant of New Public Management

New Public Management (NPM), the operational arm of neoliberalism, and linked to modernist science, saw the introduction of business and management practices into social work education and practice. The managerialist onslaught in social work is manifest in an increasing production of quality standards, codes of conduct, procedural manuals, standardized assessments, check-lists, quantification, measurement, narrowly defined outcomes, bureaucratic control, and efficiency, which — within the neoliberal paradigm — means doing more with lesser resources within the shortest period of time. These have contributed to shifts from constructionist, emancipatory, and radical approaches to resource management, cost-efficiency, and administration. Managerialist practices erode the autonomy of social work educators and practitioners and de-politicize social work (Sewpaul & Hölscher, 2004; Weinberg & Banks, 2019; Munoz-Arce, 2019; Reininger et al., 2022).

There is a misfit between our stated visions and macro-level goals and the localized structuring of social work into specific fields of practice and specialized areas, with a narrow conceptualization of roles, the preponderance of care management approaches, the domination of social work by budgets, and the de-skilling of social workers (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2016). Social work education has not escaped the onslaught of managerialism as tertiary institutions race to the top for rankings and ratings (Flem et al., 2021; Sewpaul, 2014, 2021). Sewpaul (2021) details the totally uneven playing fields across universities, which accentuate the divide between the Global North and the Global South on account of managerialist and neoliberal emphases on quantity over quality, grant acquisitions, and publication in open-access, fee-paying journals. She cites UNESCO that concluded, “In all the mania of university rankings, what students can actually do with the knowledge they acquire, upon graduation, can be easily forgotten” (pp. 159–160).

Codes of conduct abound in social work, with a taken-for-granted assumption that they constitute the cornerstone of professionalism. Sewpaul and Henrickson (2019) distinguish between codes of ethics — that provide broad, non-prescriptive guidelines — and codes of conduct, arguing that “with the increasing influence of new managerialism and neoliberalism … and the ever-increasing emphasis on risk aversion, litigation and disciplinary procedures, there have been shifts from codes of ethics to codes of conduct” (p. 473), the latter representing technologies of power, aimed at the policing of social workers (Webb, 2006).

The claim to being an ethical profession by virtue of subscribing to a code is one of social work’s quintessential narratives of exceptionalism, based on a flawed premise. Reliance on dogma, codes, and rules detracts from individual responsibility, which might produce more harm than good (Bauman, 1993; Sewpaul & Hendrickson, 2019; Weinberg & Taylor, 2014). Rossiter (2006) avers that this “occludes questions about the social construction of our innocence … the telos of conventional ethics is perfectly ethical social work … is also the promise of ethical death” (p. 139). The more prescriptive the codes become the greater the fear among social workers, and the greater the fear, the more the deference to the rules (Sewpaul & Henrickson, 2019). The more we rely on external codes, the less likely are we to rely on our own moral reasoning, thus making us less likely to struggle with complex ethical dilemmas, and less likely to become involved in broader structural change and peace initiatives. Yet, as Bauman (1993) asserts, it is “personal morality that makes ethical negotiation and consensus possible” (p. 34).

The Largest of Obscurant Giants: The Enemy Between Our Ears

Underlying this triad is the largest of obscurest giants — the taken-for-granted assumptions and blind spots that we hold as social workers, and our inability or unwillingness to acknowledge our complicities in reproducing the prejudices, discriminations, exclusions, and oppressions that we explicitly abhor. The real danger is the extent to which we, as social workers, normalize these giants and see no alternatives to neoliberalism, managerialism, and positivist science, which are at odds with positive peace efforts. On the dynamics of the normalization of injustice, discrimination, and oppression, Wilkerson (2020) says, “The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be” (p. 16).

There are innumerable declarations, treaties, and conventions proclaiming the importance of human rights, peace, and sustainable development. Failure in their realizations rests on multiple interacting socio-economic and geo-political factors, but underlying these are formidable ideological barriers to peace. These include nationalist politics; religious extremism; beliefs in ethnic and racial superiority that manifest in racism and xenophobia; the glorification of military might and violence; political-economy polarization across the liberal/neoliberal-socialist/communist divide; and revanchism, where a nation or group seeks to reclaim lost territory, often driven by historical grievances and actual or perceived injustices, which perpetuate attacks and counter-attacks. The world is currently witnessing these ideological barriers in relation to Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Palestine which, in addition to the wanton deaths, destruction, and suffering, exacerbate planet-warming pollution (Dominelli, 2024), which is violence against the Earth and all of its species. Social work’s ideological barriers to peace are bound with broader ideological barriers.

Western leaders were quick to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stepped up military aid to Ukraine, and opened borders to Ukrainian refugees, which are laudable and should serve as the moral compass of the world for those fleeing conflicts and violence. Unfortunately, this is not so. The construction of Ukrainians, blue-eyed and white — as “one of us” in the media — has much to do with the receptivity and empathetic responses. Such responsiveness is also manifest in the global social work bodies explicit support for Ukraine, where neutrality was not conceived of as an option. In June 2022, the IASSW issued the following statement:

IASSW condemns the current attack on Ukraine and the needless loss of life, destruction to housing and other built infrastructures, and cost to the environment […] IASSW calls on the international community throughout the globe to come together to insist that President Putin cease this attack immediately and engage in dialogue where Ukrainian people’s voices will be heard and their sovereignty upheld. President Putin’s contravention of international law, the stability of societies living with each other in peace needs to be fully addressed. Also, President Putin must be held accountable for his actions in this and other similar scenarios.

In contrast with this was IASSW’s claim to neutrality in relation to Israel’s war on Palestine. On 8 June 2021, the radically oriented — Social Work Action Network (SWAN), International — submitted the following to the IASSW:

It is incumbent on us as social workers opposed to all forms of oppression to join our voices with solidarity movements around the world who are seeking to put pressure on their governments to stop supporting Israel politically, to stop funding and arming it and to demand justice for Palestine. We therefore call on the IASSW to issue a clear statement expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people and with our Palestinian social work colleagues and calling for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories … and to the ongoing systematic discrimination faced by Palestinians.

IASSW issued an impartially worded statement on 14 June 2021, part of which reads as:

… we support constructive ventures of social work and social development in Palestine and Israel and for IASSW to engage social work educators in Palestine and Israel to take actions towards peaceful resolution of the conflict. The proposal and strategies for human rights and social work development, should ideally be grounds up involving consultation and participation of Palestinian and Israeli colleagues.

The atrocities inflicted by Hamas on civilians on 7 October 2023, with 1139 people killed in Southern Israel, and the capture of 240 hostages, 134 of whom were in captivity as of April 2024, are wholly condemned. However, they are no justification for the inordinate force used by Israel, with over 39,363 civilian deaths, including over 16,171 children and 9000 women, over 90,363 injuries and over 2 million displaced in Gaza — some with multiple displacements, as of 30 July 2024 since 7 October 2023. Additionally, 9855 Palestinians have been detained and 592 killed in the occupied West Bank (30 July 2024) since 7 October 2023. Despite the horrors and the genocide unfolding before us, and the pro-Palestinian protests across the world, the IASSW (15 October 2023) and IFSW (30 October 2023), in their appeal for peace, remained neutral with the International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW) remaining silent. While the IFSW’s October Statement said, Palestinians have the right to live without occupation and to be able to build their independent state, it fell short in joining the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, Save the Children, and the South African Government that submitted a formal complaint to the International Court of Justice, other rights-based organizations, and the innumerable journalists and ordinary people across the world that denounce Israel’s apartheid treatment of Palestinians, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the razing of Gaza to the ground, and the genocide.

The stance of the IASSW, IFSW, and ICSW is, to say the least, unfortunate, as these bodies hosted the Social Work and Social Development conference (4–7 April 2024) in Panama, with the theme: Respecting diversity through joint social action. Given the profession’s commitment to the inter-related goals of co-developing reciprocity, co-building peace, co-living with nature, co-creating social justice, and co-realizing equality (IASSW/IFSW, 2022), this was a missed opportunity to mobilize a global community of social work and social development educators, researchers, and practitioners into joint action to be a part of the mass movement to reconstruct Palestine and Israel to prevent the erasure of Palestine. I addressed the issue in my opening remarks, in my role as World Coordinator of the 2024 SWSD conference, calling upon the delegates to deliberate on how we might mobilize into collective action against injustice. Given that Latin America is the birthplace of emancipatory praxis, it was unsurprising that delegates from the region developed a pro-Palestinian declaration, which was presented and well-received during the closing ceremony. Palestine-Israel remained silent during the IASSW board meeting and General Assembly, and the presidents of IASSW, ICSW and IFSW, disappointingly, made no mention of it in their addresses. This might go down as a bleak moment in the history of the global social work bodies. It must be noted that pro-Palestinian is not antisemitism. The struggle is not against Jews and the people of Israel; it is against Zionism and the dehumanization of Palestinians (“we are fighting human animals,” said Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant); it is a call for peace for both Israelis and Palestinians; and a realization that as long as Palestine remains occupied there will be no peace for Israelis or Palestinians.

Both IASSW and IFSW offered to bring Israeli and Palestinian social workers into dialogue, which was rejected by Palestinian colleagues. In a response to the IFSW in respect of the Israeli Union of Social Worker’s (IUSW) call for dialogue — which was posted on the IFSW website — the Palestine Union of Social Workers and Psychologists (PUSWP), in August 2022, expressed their disdain, asserting that:

Any ‘dialogue’ that denies the founding violence of the state, and its un-ending dispossession and any ‘dialogue’ that refrains from declaring clearly a commitment to ending colonization and recognizing the Nakba and its impact on the Palestinian people in the past present and future will just add insult to injury. Dialogue requires an equal footing and a maintenance of symmetries of power, otherwise it will be another mode of systematic violence that deviate the attention of the international community from what is happening on the ground and will whitewash the crimes of the colonization regime.

They conclude that the IFSW and IUSW must call for the end of the colonization, recognize Israel for what it is, and advocate for Palestinian rights including our right to self-determination and our right to return, a call affirmed by Raed Amira, a Palestinian social worker and human rights defender who, on 2 November 2023, expressed his disappointment with IFSW’s neutrality in respect of the current war. He said:

You are the ones who told us that you are committed to the United Nations and its institutions, the Security Council and its resolutions, human rights, international law and so on, which all call for the illegality of the occupation and the Palestinian rights to self-determination and resistance. Today, you are called to be the owners of a real cause and to take a clear position, otherwise, there is no need for your words and sermons.

On 27 February 2024, without denouncing the genocide, the IFSW, perhaps on account of such criticisms, advocacy by social workers and the growing untenable circumstances in Palestine, issued a more strongly worded statement in support of Palestine, part of which reads as, “The escalation of violence following the attacks on 7 October has led to a preventable humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale, with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, orphaned, killed, injured or permanently disabled, and more than three-quarters of the population displaced, facing life threatening shortages of food, water, sanitation, and healthcare.” It re-asserts that, “the continued occupation of Palestine is the main barrier to finding sustainable peace solutions, as all people must be free from military threat and human rights violations.”

The PUSWP’s observations and calls are a reminder of Nelson Mandela’s refusal, in 1985, to accept the apartheid government’s offer of dialogue with the promise of release from prison. Mandela told the people of South Africa, at that time, “I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free … your freedom and mine cannot be separated” (Parks, 1985), and his demands were unequivocal. He would engage in dialogue only under the following conditions: the government should legalize the African National Congress, release political prisoners, allow exiles to return, permit free political activity, and commit itself to end apartheid (Mandela, 1995).

Formally constituted social work bodies have largely remained silent on Palestine-Israel. Pointing to the gap between social work ethics and practice, Camille Karizamimba, on 29 January 2024, called out the National Association of Social Workers and the Council on Social Work Education (USA) for their silence on Gaza. Some social workers, as individuals or as part of a collective (including SWAN, South Africa), stand for Palestine, and engage in pro-Palestinian webinars, demonstrations, and social media postings. Ballentine (2019) writes of his activism in relation to Palestine as a volunteer, outside of his professional work space, and Guru (2010) frames social worker’s use of activism and consciousness raising as being “beyond the professional domain of social work” (p. 283). It is noteworthy that colleagues in Australia and the UK launched the Social Workers for a Free Palestine network. Social Workers for a Free Palestine, UK held a webinar on World Social Work Day, 19 March 2024, where social workers from Palestine shared their experiences of working, even as they struggle for their own survival, under conditions of bombardment of service organisations, displacements of themselves and others, and losses of family members, colleagues, and service users. Raed Amira again criticized the neutrality of the global social work bodies and Munther Amira spoke of his dehumanizing ordeals during imprisonment.

While the calls to the IASSW board for pro-Palestinian support went unheeded, a board member who was coordinating an effort to facilitate Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, during the height of the controversy and in the midst of the war, hosted a webinar on 16 November 2023 in the name of the Social Service Institute, with one of the three “esteemed speakers” being an Israeli, with pro-Israeli views, on the IASSW board. This was despite prior attempts by some members, including myself, to get IASSW to commit that if Israel is given a public platform Palestine must be included as well. This was a slap in the face to pro-Palestine members, and the openly pro-Israeli stance — from a member coordinating the Palestine-Israel peace effort — was inimical.

Farber and Fram (2024) issued a decidedly pro-Israeli, anti-Palestine commentary in a social work journal, while condemning the support that some social work organizations extend to Palestine. There are deep divisions within the profession in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian war. The perceived just punishment of the Palestinian people and support of Israel’s narrative of its right to self-defense, as opposed to the undeserving suffering of Ukrainians, and the marked differences in the historical antecedents and dynamics of the wars are factors that influence the differential responses. However, social work is committed to promoting peace and justice and to the alleviation of suffering, and it must respond, as the IFSW asserts, to this current preventable humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale. While the situations surrounding the two wars are not equivalent, social work has a moral responsibility to respond to the suffering, death, and destruction that wars engender whether in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Ethiopia, Sudan, or anywhere else. While all too often linked with the infra-politics of power, suffering has no color, no gender, no nationality, no religion, no language, nor any other criteria by which we, as human beings, create hierarchies of discrimination. We cannot conclude that the Palestinian civilians, including the thousands of children, deserve their starvation, deaths, losses, injuries, and disabilities — for reasons related to the atrocities of Hamas — and thus do not warrant empathetic social work responses. To achieve the ends of positive peace, social work must overcome the ideological barriers to peace.

Overcoming Ideological Barriers to Peace: Emancipatory Praxis

Overcoming ideological barriers to peace requires efforts to overcome ideological barriers to neoliberalism, managerialism, and positivism that serve as disincentives to engaging in politically oriented social work. Logical-positivism, neoliberal market-oriented developments, and NPM pose a risk for essentializing discourses in social work by individualizing, medicalizing, culturizing, and depoliticizing social problems. Overcoming ideological barriers to peace also requires that we foster understanding, promote respect for diversities, and create spaces for open and respectful dialogue. There is, as Mandela demonstrated, enormous power in dialogue, but the dialogue must meet some core conditions and be informed by a transitive consciousness, as opposed to a naïve consciousness, which can reinforce discrimination, oppression, and nationalism (Freire, 1973). This is the message that PUSWP colleagues are sending to the IASSW and IFSW.

Drawing on their knowledge, skills, and values, there are many pragmatic ways in which social workers can contribute to positive peace, such as engaging with communities affected by violence and working with people to participate in peace-building activities; facilitating dialogue between conflicting parties, helping them understand each other’s perspectives and work towards peaceful resolutions; and providing trauma-informed care, support, and counselling to individuals and communities to address the psychological and emotional effects of violence and conflict. By addressing trauma, social workers contribute to healing and reconciliation processes, laying the foundation for sustainable peace. Social workers can also work with policymakers to develop and implement programs aimed at addressing the root causes of conflict, such as poverty, inequality, and discrimination, and raise awareness about the importance of peace-building and conflict resolution within communities, schools, universities, and work settings. Social workers often work with people in vulnerable circumstances, such as refugees and migrants, internally displaced persons, and survivors of violence. By providing essential services and support, they can contribute to building resilience and promoting peace and stability, and they can conduct research to better understand the underlying causes of conflict and violence, as well as the effectiveness of peace-building interventions.

Peace initiatives must be approached holistically to incorporate understanding of complex, multi-factorial etiology, conflict resolution, and mediation within locally specific historical and contemporary contexts with cultural sensitivity and responsiveness, and the broader national and global contexts of structural violence, poverty, environmental degradation, oppression, inequality, and human rights violations. In the face of mis- and dis-information, social workers can leverage the power of the media and digital technology to challenge discriminatory beliefs (Sewpaul, 2024) that are deep-seated obstacles to achieving the SDGs, including peace. Social activism and consciousness raising, must be the heart of social work, and not seen to be “beyond the professional domain” as claimed by Guru (2010). While we advocate for structural changes to ensure that our Ubuntu (an IsiZulu concept, the aphorism of which is: “I am because we are”) ideal is realized, we must begin with ourselves. Central to emancipatory praxis is understanding and undoing the normalization of oppression and of privilege, and acknowledging how we may intentionally or unintentionally perpetuate inequality, exclusion, poverty, and structural violence (Sewpaul, 2013, 2021).

Wilkerson (2020), in her treatise on race and caste, makes a cogent observation: “Perhaps it is the unthinking acquiescence, the blindness to one’s imprisonment, that is the most effective way for human beings to remain captive. People who do not know they are captive will not resist their bondage” (pp. 33–34). On account of ideological control of consciousness, Althusser (1971) argued that we must shift from being the subjected being to being a free subject by recognizing capitalist, political, and cultural hegemony and by transforming common-sense, taken-for-granted assumptions into good sense (Gramsci, 1977). This is now incorporated as a core ethical requisite (see principles 4.7 and 4.8) for social workers by the IASSW (2018). If we ask the eight billion people in the world are you casteist, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, etc., the answer is bound to be “no – not me. I am innocent; prejudice and discrimination belong to other people!” The majority would not be lying; they genuinely believe it. The next logical question must then be: If none of us owns them, how do they perpetuate from one generation to the next?

Butler (2005) writes of responsible people knowing the limits of their knowing. To take one’s obscurity to one’s self seriously one must be critically reflexive about the social world that shapes the self. Similarly, Hägglund (2020) asserts that we are born into socio-cultural, political, and historical norms that influence us before we can do anything about them, but he concludes, “I am not merely causally determined by nature or norms” (p. 12). “The authority of our norms,” he argues, must be “called into question, contested, and revised … we are responsible for the form of our shared life” (p. 16). The role of ideology is critical to the extent that it has the potential to reveal truths by deconstructing historically conditioned social forces or to reinforce the concealing function of common sense (Althusser, 1971; Gramsci, 1977; Sewpaul, 2013). A heightened consciousness, informed by Freireian forms of praxis, is the first step towards self-emancipation and the emancipation of society (Freire, 1970, 1972, 1973).

Responding to the Socratic call to “Know thyself” is not easy. Anyone who has suspended belief and challenged dominant societal norms knows the pains and fears of swimming against the stream (Sewpaul, 2021). In the case of Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of South Africa’s chief apartheid architect, it was breaking free from seeing the world in black and white in a literal sense. He grew up where white was, in his words, “the measure of being human” (Verwoerd, 2019, p. 66) and he was socialized into the Dutch Reformed Church’s puritanical values of White Afrikaner supremacy and heteronormativity. When he left South Africa to study in the Netherlands, with exposure to alternative experiences, he began to see his world differently. Verwoerd writes about the realization of his “political home also being built on sand” (p. 51), and of the “darkness of facing one’s capacity to dehumanize, the heaviness of truly accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s action” (p. 28). He used his awakening to engage in reconciliation and peace efforts in South Africa and Northern Ireland. His book speaks to the politics of oppression, privilege, despair, and hope. The idea of acknowledging unconscious bias and having uncomfortable conversations is not to keep us immobilized by guilt. The aim is for each one of us, by acknowledging these, to see ourselves as part of the solution, and to use our transformed consciousness in the interests of just, peaceful societies.

At the heart of emancipatory praxis lies the dialectical relationship between self and society, the transformation of societies through politicization of the self, characterized by a shift from ego and ethnocentric to an evolutionary cosmocentric consciousness that recognizes inter-connectedness, and the inherent divinity of humanity, unity, and divine oneness (Nhat Hanh, 2018; Sewpaul, 2021, 2024; Wilber, 2020). While this may seem strange from a Western point of view, it is commonplace in many Indigenous philosophies and practices. There are widespread calls to decolonize social work education and practice and to counter Eurocentrism. This can only be done by recognizing and accepting Indigenous knowledges as being equally valid and important as Western knowledges. However, this idea does approximate Jane Addams’ call for an international cosmopolitism — an expanded human consciousness, and the “spiritual force of positive peace” (Pettegrew, 2012, p. 236). Levinas (1985) and Bauman (1993) assert that the moral self accords the unique Other that priority assigned to the self. The justification for the self begins with the Other; our responses to the call of the Other define ourselves.

Acknowledging the self and Other as one means that we live the core values of equality, human dignity, and non-discrimination; do not engage in othering; and that we do not take up arms against the Other. Virtues like personal integrity, love, care, compassion, and forgiveness must serve as the foundation for building bridges of empathy that stimulate challenges to structural barriers to positive peace.

Conclusion

Social work, informed by an emancipatory praxis, has the potential to be politics with soul (Sewpaul, 2015a). However, the noble values of the profession are marred by neoliberalism, managerialism, and positivism, which contribute to prejudices and discriminatory practices that underlie poverty, inequality, oppression, and structural violence. The greater danger is the normalization of this triad. Social work is, in many instances, complicit in reproducing geo-political patterns of power that sustain structural violence. As we are products of our world, it is important that we become aware of cultural, political and capitalist ideological hegemony, and use our heightened consciousness and voices to contribute to sustainable positive peace.

Given the complexities of the twenty-first century and the ideological fragmentations within the profession, there is no foolproof ethical code to guard against structural violence, except for authentic dialogue, openness to new experiences, reasoned debate, willingness to resolve dissent in constructive ways, and, when necessary, non-violent non-cooperation. The power of digital technology can be harnessed to awaken an evolutionary, cosmocentric consciousness. There is a likelihood that by recognizing the inherent divinity of humanity and making the Ubuntu, being for the Other principle the normative in social work, the profession would contribute to positive peace. Moral authority and integrity must be combined with a willingness to build alliances across similarities and differences; mobilize others into a shared vision; and support for global social movements that work towards peace, justice, deepened social democracies, planetary well-being, solidarity, and respect for human dignity.