Keywords

For someone who over the years has expended considerable time and effort in grounded armed conflict analysis and university teaching on conflict prevention and resolution in settings as diverse as Colombia, Haiti, Bolivia, Kosovo and Nigeria, among other violence-inflected countries, it would appear that peace education cannot be anything but an inherently valuable and worthwhile undertaking. However, as much as I would like to see education on and/or for peace contribute to making the world a “better, more humane place” (Bar-Tal 2002: 28) the odds are that this is not really happening—or at least we cannot be sure to what extent it is happening.

Working for most of the 2000s out of Bogotá with the International Crisis Group, a global armed conflict prevention and resolution organisation, taught me that (armed) actors’ disposition to negotiate and find some middle ground to address entrenched contradictions and/or incompatibilities seldom is fully absent. This notwithstanding, strategic realism and the use of force often trump or are perceived as a necessary precondition for political approaches to ending violent confrontation and, in the best of cases, achieving a state of “passive peaceful co-existence” or “negative peace” (Galtung 2017: 13). Likewise, lecturing throughout the second half of the 2010s at a private university in Cali, one of Colombia’s most violent cities, with a remit of teaching peace, conflict and governance studies and International Relations I observed that students were interested in exploring diverse ways to achieve, safeguard and sustain peace in their country (Focus Group 2020). Although removed from their first-hand experiences and social and cultural environments to which course participants would frequently refer when addressing specific issues in the classroom,Footnote 1 I was struck by the commitment and openness with which they would respond to my offer to examine Colombia’s challenges by comparing them to other peace processes in, for instance, Central America, the Western Balkans and Sub-Saharan Africa .

But there were invariably also those students who would not see much of a problem in advocating violent policy responses to complex political and social problems, such as charting a way out of Venezuela’s severe crisis of governance under the embattled Chavista administration of Nicolás Maduro (2013 to present) or addressing street crime and its alleged relationship to homelessness in Cali.Footnote 2 When analysing Colombia’s protracted armed conflict and touching on the state’s responsibility for atrocious crimes , such as pressuring, incentivising and motivating members of the security forces to commit unlawful killings of civilians (UN General Assembly 2010), I would note confusion in the classroom as to what the difference was between security and peace. And why in a democratically constituted state like Colombia security should never come at the expense of the protection of human rights and citizens’ fundamental liberties.

This unawareness of—or disenchantment with—some of the basic aspects of social and political life in peace struck me as quite remarkable, although it appears not to be an uncommon feature among Colombian higher education students (Focus Group 2020; Girón 2016). After all, the country’s schools and universities have long been invested in ethics and democratic citizenship education, which at different critical junctures in Colombia’s Republican history also included a focus on peace education (Rodríguez 2016). Today, university students from across disciplines and faculties, ranging from the social sciences and law to the natural sciences, engineering, business administration and medicine, are required to obtain a certain number of core curriculum credits in these broad fields of knowledge and practice (Focus Group 2020; Salas et al. 2019). The degree to which they have gained the relevant competences is measured regularly as part of state examinations that students present prior to entering university and during the final semester of their study programmes (Pardo and Medina 2020).Footnote 3 Operational and other difficulties aside, I believe that my observation of the existence of a chasm between what Colombian higher education students are asked to “learn” and the ways in which they relate to one another and wider society—and employ, or not, the acquired skills to address intricate real-world problems, such as violent conflict —points to a deeper set of issues.

Comparable to other violence-inflected states and societies, Colombia too is historically torn between “legitimacy and violence” (Palacios 2003a, b). What the noted Colombian historian Marco Palacios seeks to convey with this expression is that in Colombia there are islands of legitimacy where the state and civil society tend to function rather more than less according to democratically established and collectively binding institutions and norms. These select geographical areas and institutional environments are surrounded, however, by a large sea of violent clientelism, self-interested opportunism, organised crime and, as I would add, crimilegality (Schultze-Kraft 2016a, 2017, 2018, 2019). Several years after the signing of the final peace accord between the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in Spanish) in November 2016, a previous version of which had been rejected in a referendum a few months earlier (Schultze-Kraft 2016b), the country remains mired in what Roger Mac Ginty calls a situation of “no war, no peace” (Mac Ginty 2006) and which Colombian analysts refer to as the “armed post-conflict (author’s translation)” (Vargas 2015) or “post-accord phase (author’s translation)” (Cepeda 2016). This situation is characterised by persisting political, criminal and other forms of direct, structural and cultural violence, including armed groups’ targeting of social and civic leaders and conflict victims in rural regions, which negatively condition the feeble implementation of the peace agreement with FARC (Schultze-Kraft et al. 2021).

In a Colombian higher education environment, this challenging societal context may at times translate for learners (and teachers) into something like appearing rather than being; embracing—both wittingly and unwittingly—violent solutions to socio-political problems rather than seeking non-violent conflict resolution and transformation; taking essentially unjust and violence-inflected hierarchies as a given rather than standing in for social justice and the protection of fundamental rights and liberties of all citizens; seeking individual advancement at all cost rather than furthering the common good, and so on. Even if stylised and without any claim to being generalisable, this catalogue of personal classroom impressions is not as far from reality as it might seem. Recent research on the added value of education in citizenship competences at Colombian higher education establishments in the period 2011–2017 shows that it ranges from “quite modest to nil” (Pardo and Medina 2020: 83)—a fact that would not surprise Colombian influencer Santiago Rivas, who in a recent account chastises value-oriented education as being nothing but an elite smokescreen for covering up profound social cleavages and inequalities (Rivas 2018). It thus appears that for the purpose of framing peace education in Colombia there is not all that much that can be learned from education in ethics and citizenship competences.

Yet what would be more effective ways to approach education on and/or for peace in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, protracted violent conflict? Galvanised by the Santos administration’s institution of the Cátedra de la Paz (Peace Chair) in 2014–2015, in the past few years Colombia has seen a string of forums and conferences at higher and vocational education establishments, and the creation and/or further development of university centres and specialised study programmes on peace education and peacebuilding. At the university in Cali I was privy to some of these activities and processes. In my double role of international political science lecturer and graduate programme coordinator with a strong background in grounded policy analysis in armed conflict-affected countries in Latin America and other regions I was keen to contribute to the valuable endeavour of educating on and for peace in Colombia. The problem was, it appeared to me, that everyone whose work was somehow associated with this broad field seemed to have a more or less vague idea about what they thought peace education was and how it could be taught at higher education institutes as well as schools. Yet speaking on the basis of my own experience, in reality, there was little concrete knowledge on peace education as a pedagogical field, including a deeper knowledge of the international but also local debates and discourses, and also little institutional guidance from university authorities. Unsurprisingly, the result was that creative experimentation with study course contents and pedagogical-didactic strategies has been the order of the day (see, for instance, Gómez-Suarez 2017).

This situation struck me as quite unsatisfactory. Rather than continue testing bespoke approaches to peace education in the classroom in a trial-and-error fashion I thought it wiser to take a step back to reflect on my teaching experience and examine the strengths and weaknesses of what I call the conventional and critical approaches to, or schools of, peace education. Furthermore, having had the opportunity to participate between 2015 and 2018 in some aspects of Colombia’s impressive historical memory work and harbouring a deep, praxis-informed interest in peacebuilding—in Colombia and beyond—I decided to take a closer look at the relationship between peace education, historical memory and the sustaining peace agenda, recently fielded by the United Nations (UN) in close alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus the idea of this book was born.

1.1 Aims, Questions and Methodology

This book presents an account of the relationship between education on and/or for peace, the recovery and preservation of historical memory, and the new, UN-led sustaining peace agenda geared towards replacing hitherto dominant yet increasingly questioned international peacebuilding models with a less interventionist, prescriptive and universalising approach aligned with the SDGs. While there are substantial literatures in the fields of peace education, historical memory and peacebuilding, to my knowledge no attempts have thus far been made to draw them together in one single narrative. For several reasons, such an endeavour is of relevance.

Particularly in violence-inflected countries, education on and/or for peace at higher education institutes and schools is a highly challenging undertaking with uncertain outcomes. In this respect, I posit that both the conventional and critical approaches to peace education of the past four decades or longer and their contemporary practice are of limited help. Conventional peace education is often formulaic, normative and morally appellative in outlook and application, failing to address the historical root causes and drivers of conflict and the question of how desired changes at the micro-level of learners’ individual attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and values can support pro-peace change at the macro-level of institutional and social structures. Critical peace education, in turn, is more attuned to the thorny issues of power and exclusion but faces the challenge of showing how the empowerment and emancipation of the marginalised and oppressed through formal and informal education for peace can lead to broader institutional transformation that respects the freedoms and rights of all members of communities.

Regarding historical memory, efforts towards recovering and preserving the individual and collective memories of a violent conflict are considered to be “at the core of processes of healing and reparation following long, violent conflicts or sustained periods of authoritarian rule” (Corredor et al. 2018: 169). Yet such efforts often are not given the centrality they deserve in war-to-peace transitions. Furthermore, not dissimilar to truth commissions entrusted with establishing who-did-what-to-whom with the goal of contributing to restorative justice, victim reparation and reconciliation, historical memory work too faces the challenge of not connecting with broader social and educational dynamics and sectors. At the same time, historical memory work risks cementing deep-seated antagonisms between former adversaries (Bull and Hansen 2016), thus not harnessing its potential for contributing to peacebuilding and the emerging sustaining peace agenda promoted by the UN secretary-general since the mid-2010s.

Although the notion of sustaining peace is still not sufficiently elaborate and theoretically substantiated to serve as a compass to re-orient efforts to promote peaceful conflict management in violence-ravaged countries, it nonetheless offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways in which we approach our applied, everyday work on and/or for peace in the classroom and beyond. There is merit in adopting the less prescriptive, value-laden and universalising and, at the same time, more indeterminate, normatively restrained and humble elements that set the discourse on sustaining peace apart from that of conventional international peacebuilding. And while historical memory education as a pedagogical field is still in its infancy and needs to be developed further (Corredor et al. 2018), I suggest there is scope for it to play a role with respect to sustaining peace in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict.

Needless to say, this is no small feat. As stated, the recovery and preservation of the memory of a violent conflict face many pitfalls. Historical memory-oriented peace education may thus appear to be a risky, even reckless undertaking. Not underestimating these challenges, this book puts forward the argument that incorporating a focus on historical memory into peace education can help enhance learners’ (and teachers’) competences and skills to come to grips with achieving positive, peace-sustaining change at both the micro (individual) and the macro (social and institutional) levels and develop concepts and practices of effective and legitimate alternatives to violence and war. Helping to address the shortcomings of the individualising outlook of conventional peace education as well as the potentially antagonising aspirations of critical approaches, didactic tools such as narrative, oral history, remembering and futures visioning are suited to enable learners (and teachers) to work towards healing past trauma and recognising the “other” as a moral agent, opening up space for the surfacing and expression of emotions. In this vein, historical memory-oriented peace education can help promote reconciliation through the generation of more cooperative, trusting and harmonious relationships among individuals and collectives on the basis of new identities shaped by experiences of having witnessed and listened to the suffering of the “other.” Strengthening such relationships through historical memory-oriented education on and for peace is of importance for building the resilience of individuals, communities and their wider social and institutional environments vis-à-vis endogenous and exogenous shocks associated with different forms of violence and injustice, thereby contributing to the SDG-aligned sustaining peace agenda.

In line with the above, the presented narrative is guided by the following questions, each of which is addressed in one of the three subsequent chapters that constitute the main body of this book: (1) What are the core tenets, claims and problems of what I call the conventional and critical approaches to peace education? (2) What are the challenges of recovering and preserving historical memory in countries affected by violent conflict? (3) Why and how should historical memory be made part of peace education and what is the relevance of historical memory-oriented peace education for sustaining peace in countries emerging from violent conflict?

Given my relevant professional experience and access to illuminating, hitherto untapped primary and secondary data/sources in Colombia, throughout the book I work with the South American country as a relevant case study to inform and illustrate the presented narrative. Colombia has a long and impressive record of historical memory work dating back decades. The work of the Historical Memory Group (GMH in Spanish) began in 2007 and in 2011 the National Centre for Historical Memory (CNMH in Spanish) was established as an entity ascribed to the presidency. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, since 2016 Colombia has been witnessing a complex war-to-peace transition in which peace education figures as one among various other areas of engagement for the building of sustainable peace. As I write, all three domains addressed in the book’s narrative, that is, peace education, historical memory and sustaining peace, are dynamically unfolding.

In terms of methodology, I draw not only on the Colombia-specific debate, much of which has been published in the Spanish language, but also on international research that due to the language barrier has not yet sufficiently been considered in the Colombian context. Further, the book is informed by my own experience as a higher education teacher in the “frontline classroom” at a university in Cali as well as by the insights gained from my work with a focus group of five former Colombian and international students and teaching peers and my participation in Colombia’s historical memory process between 2015 and 2018.Footnote 4 The literature review for this book was conducted at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media between January 2020 and July 2021. Not designed as a systematic review, which would have been beyond the scope of this work, the search focussed on tracing the history of, and seminal as well as recent contributions to, the field of peace education published in English, German and Spanish. It also sought to establish an overview of the conventional and critical schools of peace education, including research on cultures of peace education, as well as a search for research on tertiary peace education and peace education in armed conflict -affected countries, including Colombia. Regarding the latter two fields of knowledge, the review revealed significant lacunae in the extant scholarship.

1.2 Structure of the Book

The book is organised in the following way. Chapter 2 discusses the core tenets, claims and problems of what I call the conventional and critical approaches to, or schools of, peace education. Chapter 3 examines the ambivalent and contested concept of historical memory and the challenges of applied historical memory work in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict. Chapter 4 contains my argument in support of historical memory-oriented peace education against the backdrop of the new, UN-led sustaining peace agenda. Chapter 5 contains a brief summary of the presented narrative on education for sustaining peace through historical memory and offers a succinct outlook on future research in this demanding field of scholarly inquiry and educational praxis.