Education, Conflict, and Globalisation

Stephanie Bengtsson, Sarah Dryden-Peterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351358439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In 2009, Globalisation, Societies and Education published a special issue on globalisation, education, and violent conflict, in tribute to Jackie Kirk, a passionate researcher, educator, and advocate, who was killed while working with the International Rescue Committee in Afghanistan. This book is an opportunity to capture the promising new developments that have occurred within the maturing sub-field of education and conflict in the intervening years. It explores two critical dimensions of education amid conflict and in post-conflict settings: the increasingly protracted, non-linear and disjointed nature of conflict and the complex interplay between global and local forces in conflict-affected contexts.

Taken as a whole, this book represents a 'narrative of becoming' of the maturing sub-field of education and conflict. It traces and intertwines local and global histories of education amidst conflict, and puts them into conversation with the present. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

‘The fruit caught between two stones’: the conflicted position of teachers within Aceh’s independence struggle^†

Mieke T.A. Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the challenging situation faced by teachers as professionals and members of the community in Aceh, Indonesia during the province’s civil war. It reveals how teachers’ sense of agency during this period was deeply influenced by the economic/material, political and socio-cultural condition at that time – conditions and experiences which today have bearing on a place for teachers in the post-conflict peace-building process occurring in the province. During the conflict, teachers struggled to balance their strategic societal positioning – as civil servants and community members – and found themselves caught in the middle of a complex range of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces at play. This position of constraint, we argue, limited the ability of teachers to act as peace-builders during the conflict, and continues to influence teachers’ ability to function in such ways today.

Introduction

Teachers occupy a difficult position in conflict-affected and post-conflict societies. On one hand they are key representatives and conduits of the state apparatus, and serve an important role within this system in advancing state projects of modernisation, capital accumulation and nation-building through their professional roles and responsibilities in the classroom and community. On the other, they are members of particular religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural communities, and may have personal allegiances or ties that sit uncomfortably with their proscribed professional roles and responsibilities. Recent work by Smith, Koons, and Kapit (2014, 7) on behalf of the Global Campaign for the Protection of Education from Attack highlights how, ‘Teachers have risked their lives going to work…in the past decades…caught in the middle of political, ideological, sectarian, and military struggles in conflict-affected countries.’ As the title of this article suggest, metaphorically, it places them as a ‘fruit caught between two stones’, a metaphor that was evoked more than once in interviews with teachers in Aceh, Indonesia, conducted in various fieldwork visits by the two authors in 2013 and 2014.

The narratives and lived experiences of these educators and the ways in which they navigate this perilous terrain have only recently begun to be a topic of focus for research. Wilson (2000), in the context of Peru, documents how prior to and during the civil war, teachers throughout the country, particularly those in provincial areas, maintained ambivalent social positions within communities. On one hand, they were viewed with suspicion by such communities by ‘present[ing] a particular rationality, vision of modernity and concept of pedagogy that break with and oppose indigenous knowledge and wisdom’ (5). It positioned teachers as the conduits of a state ideology that actively promoted a prejudicial and disciplining social order. On the other hand, and particularly during the time of the military government, teachers were also seen as key local intellectuals, leaders at the community level of the popular struggle against the state. Having such conflicted, and simultaneous positions meant that teachers became, ‘…a kind of trickster alternating between being a community member, a representative of the state and aiding and abetting an intrusive party like Sendero’ (2). For the teachers themselves, the outcome was that they often acted strategically by taking up the critical discourse of the profession as a vocation and ‘adapting it to their own personal political projects and to the situations they faced in the communities where they worked’ (15).

Similarly in Nepal, teachers have long been caught between the state’s project of using education as a tool for national integration and identity, and community resistance to what was seen as the reproduction of deeply entrenched structural conditions in society through schooling. Pherali (2013, 57) notes that some teachers had long participated in progressive social movements against the state’s project of forced integration, motivated by their own ideological positions. Others wholeheartedly endorsed the state’s project of nation-building through education. This led to what he describes as a ‘sensitive and cautious relationship’ between the state and teacher in the period prior to the civil war, and one where various political groups attempted to gain teachers’ support for their causes. During Nepal’s long civil war, teachers from both sides found themselves trapped in the middle of the highly politicised and polarised landscape. Teachers who were seen to support pro-monarchy and nationalistic messages were threatened, kidnapped or killed by the Maoist insurgency, and likewise teachers seen to be Maoist sympathisers and/or activists were arrested, tortured and killed by government security forces (Lawoti and Pahari 2010). Teachers were also often victims of financial extortion by Maoist rebels, because in many rural communities they were one of the few residents who had access to a regular government salary. Complying with such demands placed significant burdens on their financial stability, but also on their role as state employees. The government interpreted such financial support, whether it was done by free will or not, as a signal of complicit support for Maoist activity and led to teachers losing jobs or worse yet, being arrested (Pherali 2011, 2013).

In this paper we seek to further explore how teachers navigate such tensions in a different context, namely that of Aceh province, Indonesia. In Aceh, conflict was most active between 1976 and 2005, and led to the deaths of between 15,000 to 20,000 people, the dislocation of numerous families and massive destruction of public and private property (Miller and Bunnell 2010). Although a full conflict analysis falls outside the focus of this paper, the conflict was driven primarily by ethno-nationalist concerns that the distinct Acehnese identity was being lost to the Indonesian nation-building project founded on Javanese values. Promises from Jakarta of making Aceh its own province, and assuring autonomy of important elements of identity such as education, customary law and religion were broken. In 1976, the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) declared independence from Indonesia and over the subsequent 29 years, conflict ebbed and flowed between GAM and Indonesian military (TNI) and paramilitary forces (Aspinall 2009). In 2005 a peace agreement, brokered by international actors, was reached between GAM and the Indonesian government, bringing to an end violent regional insurgency. A key component of the peace accord was the designation of Aceh as a special autonomous region within the Republic of Indonesia, affording the provincial government much greater control over most matters of state, including educational provision (Shah and Lopes Cardozo 2014).

The work presented in this paper is based on exploratory, empirical fieldwork carried out through interviews and focus group discussions with representatives from government, civil society, donor agencies and teachers/school directors in Aceh in 2013. It is important to state at the outset that interviews with teachers/school directors were only conducted in Aceh Besar. This is the regency surrounding Banda Aceh, the capital of the Aceh province. This was largely a product of the limited time in which the authors had to complete fieldwork, as well as the existing connections local colleagues had into schools located in this area. Unlike Aceh’s northeast coast, which was the ideological heartland for the separatist struggle, and the epicentre of conflict between insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, the wider Banda Aceh region is one that is generally perceived to be less impacted by the conflict. That withstanding, this area was not immune to the impacts of conflict. The teachers we spoke to referred most often to events between 2000 and 2004, when following the fall of Soeharto, GAM increased its reach and recruitment into new regions, including Aceh Besar. The lack of a strong ideological commitment to the separatist struggle in places like Aceh Besar, meant that alliances were more easily bought and sold, leading to more unpredictable, volatile and shifting conditions for civil servants and community leaders to navigate (Good et al. 2006). It was during this period as well that schools were increasingly the target of attacks by both GAM and the TNI (Noble et al. 2009). The case of how a small sample of teachers navigated such circumstances from a particular region of Aceh is highlighted within this paper.

We begin by presenting the theoretical framework that we have developed to understand teachers’ sense of agency through times of conflict. We then analyse the fieldwork data within the parameters of the broader context of the Indonesian education system at that time, and the nature of the conflict within the community setting. This allows us to identify how teachers’ sense of agency and purpose interfaced with such conditions to establish a particular field for action during the period of conflict. This sense of agency, firmly established during the protracted period of conflict, has important ramifications for the post-conflict period which Aceh finds itself in today, and particularly for teachers’ prospective role as ‘peace-builders’ during a period of marked social, economic and political transition. We argue that the rather limited space for manoeuvre which teachers faced during the conflict challenged their roles as peace-builders then, as it does now, in Aceh.

Conceptual framework for teachers’ agency in conflict and post-conflict periods

For this paper, we specifically highlight two theoretical inspirations that have formed the backbone to our analysis on teachers’ agency in situations of conflict: the Strategic Relational Approach (SRA) and our interpretation of what we understand peace-building to look like in the post-conflict period. What we present here is a framework in which we view teachers as both strategic and political actors whose agency exists in a dialectical relationship with the broader cultural, political and economic (post) conflict environment. It is based on a broader theoretical and conceptual framework we have developed in earlier work (see e.g., Lopes Cardozo and Shah Forthcoming). In doing so, we start from a critical realist ontology, that supports a stratified understanding of reality that includes the visible, lived experiences, and the invisible, underlying causal mechanisms driving and influencing such outcomes. The SRA, developed by scholars working in the broader field of sociology/political sciences, builds on this understanding and provides a heuristic tool for exploring the dialectical relationship between structures, agents and agency, as further detailed below (Jessop 2005; Hay 2002a).

Research from conflict-affected contexts makes clear that teachers’ space for manoeuvre (i.e., their personal and professional agency) is bounded and framed by the conditions that conflict creates (Vongalis-Macrow 2006, 2007; Lopes Cardozo 2009, 2015; Shah 2012; Lopes Cardozo and Hoeks 2014). Using ideas from the SRA, we acknowledge that the strategically selective context within which actors (such as teachers) operate is based on structural and institutional conditions, that can reinforce the motivations, actions or strategies of particular individuals, and work against others; creating both opportunities and constraints for specific courses of action (Hay 2002a, 2002b; Jessop 2005). In response, actors at the various scales make conscious and unconscious choices based on the knowledge they hold of this context to realise particular outcomes or objectives. A significant point of SRA is that in any moment the way in which actors understand and respond to their environment can greatly vary, as can their motivations and intentions for action, leading to a plethora of potential outcomes. Thus, both the structured context within which action occurs, and the types of agency which actors exhibit, have a bearing on the outcomes observed.

In this paper we aim to adapt and apply SRA ideas to study the field of education. We assert that teachers’ exercise of agency is based on an interpretation of and reflection on their context, counterbalanced by their own value commitments, personal background and sense of professional expertise (Jansen 2001). The employment of agency must be understood as strategic and selective in response to specific structural and material constraints (Hay 2002b; Vongalis-Macrow 2007). As Lopes Cardozo (2009, 412) contends, while teachers may act according to their reflexivity, rationality and motivations, their actions are embedded in a strategically selective context that creates both opportunities for and constraints to teachers’ level of agency and the choices they make. The current time, place and space within which schooling occurs ‘selectively reinforces particular forms of action, tactics or strategies’ and provides a place within which teachers ‘can be reflexive, can reformulate within limits their own identities’ (Jessop 2005, 49). The SRA helps to move away from analyses that view teachers’ actions as divorced from context, or simultaneously limits teachers’ agency within tight structural parameters.

The SRA establishes a more nuanced and multi-layered understanding of teachers’ complex, sometimes contradictory, strategies in relation to their wider socio-political, economic and cultural contexts. Specifically, teachers may have intentions and preferences, but these are not fixed but actively formed and reformed in processes of structured coupling with current cultural, political and economic realities (Jones 2010, 29–30). As Miller Marsh (2003, 8) notes, teachers are ‘continually in the process of fashioning and refashioning [their] identities by patching together fragments of the discourses to which [they] are exposed’. As a result, teacher identities are not fixed, but rather are ‘a complex matter of the social an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• ‘Introduction: Education, conflict, and globalisation
• 1. ‘The fruit caught between two stones’: the conflicted position of teachers within Aceh’s independence struggle
• 2. The global–local negotiation: between the official and the implemented history curriculum in Israeli classrooms
• 3. The right to education in protracted conflict: teachers’ experiences in non-formal education in Colombia
• 4. Cross-border transitions: navigating conflict and political change through community education practices in Myanmar and the Thai border
• 5. Fleeing through the globalised education system: the role of violence and conflict in international student migration
• 6. Higher education as the catalyst of recovery in conflict-affected societies
• 7. The changing role of education in the Iraqi disputed territories: assimilation, segregation and indoctrination
• 8. Educational change in post-conflict contexts: reflections on the South African experience 20 years later
• Index