Education and Conflict

Complexity and Chaos

Lynn Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134408979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

First-place winner of the Society for Education Studies' 2005 book prize, Education and Conflict is a critical review of education in an international context. Based on the author's extensive research and experience of education in several areas afflicted by conflict, the book explores the relationship between schooling and social conflict and looks at conflict internal to schools. It posits a direct link between the ethos of a school and the attitudes of future citizens towards 'others'. It also looks at the nature and purpose of peace education and war education, and addresses the role of gender and masculinity.
In five lucid, vigorously argued sections, the author brings this thought-provoking and original piece of work to life by:
* Setting out the terms of the debate, defining conflict and peace and outlining the relevant aspects of complexity theory for education
* Exploring the sources of conflict and their relations to schooling in terms of gender/masculinity, pluralism, nationalism and identity
* Focusing on the direct education/war interface
* Examining educational responses to conflict
* Highlighting conflict resolution within the school itself.
This is the first time that so many aspects of conflict and education have been brought together in one sustained argument. With its crucial exposure of the currently culpable role of formal schooling in maintaining conflict, this book will be a powerful and essential read for educational policy makers, managers, teachers and researchers dealing with conflict in their own contexts.

Part I

The terms of the debate

Chapter 1

Introduction

The nature of conflict

There are no signs that the world is becoming a less conflictual place. Peace agreements are signed and conflict breaks out in another place, or resumes in the old one. The spread of international human rights conventions is barely able to contain the rise of various fundamentalisms, claiming rights to land as well as to ideology. Rewriting boundaries means new or resurgent ethnicities, and demands for recognition and autonomy. Violence against children may be legally prohibited in some countries, but domestic violence, school violence and child sexual abuse does not go away. Conflict is part of our lives, and it is difficult to foresee a time when there will not be a struggle for resources and when those seeking or maintaining power will not use some form of conflict in power interests. Highly ‘educated’ or qualified people have been responsible for major atrocities in recent human history – as with medical doctors in Nazi Germany as well as South Africa.

The nature of conflict is however shifting. As Eade points out, it is almost routine to begin the discussion of conflict-related emergencies by stating that contemporary wars are fought not on demarcated battlefields, but in the towns, villages and homes of ordinary people. Ninety per cent of today’s war casualties are civilians and four out of five refugees and displaced persons are women and children. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc are thought to have intensified these trends and ushered in the New World Disorder (Eade 1996). Some 7 million children worldwide were either killed or injured by conflict over the last decade alone, and more than 10 million are still affected by the violence they have witnessed or participated in (École et Paix 2001). Terrorism is claiming new victims and new martyrs, as well as generating the dangerous ‘war on terror’ heavily promoted by the USA.

Yet conflict resolution and prevention is grossly underfunded. In 2001 Britain was spending twenty times its contribution to OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) on continued military operations to ‘contain’ Saddam Hussein (Mathews 2001). NATO countries spend approximately $413 billion on ‘defence’, which is 215,000 times the OSCE budget. As Mathews points out, the result of such policies is that in conflict areas around the world, warlords have instant access to weapons, and attention is concentrated on the violent – while potential bridge builders and peacemakers have few tools and fewer resources. This book considers whether education can become part of these tools. Education spending is still less than defence spending in most countries of the world, but is nonetheless a sizeable chunk of the economy.

Landmines cost less than $10 each, but once laid cost $300–$1000 to clear. De-mining lags far behind the placing of new mines, so that there are now over 110 million mines strewn over past and current battlefields; their removal would cost over $33 billion (UNICEF 1997). Landmine education also mops up some of the education budget in affected countries, as will be discussed later. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, with supposedly a keen interest in peacekeeping, are also the main suppliers of arms, accounting for more than four-fifths of weapons sold (Rihani 2002). Arms sales are linked to foreign policy; the Middle East, a lucrative market for the USA and Europe, has, as Rihani points out, ‘the perfect mix of attributes: abundant oil money, leaders willing to start a fight at the least provocation and a long history rich with grievances’ (Rihani 2002: 221). New Labour’s promise to follow an ethical foreign policy with regard to the sales of British weapons abroad was forgotten soon after it won the election in 1997. Arms are marketed assiduously, with huge subsidies to foreign buyers.

The figures show clearly that the expenditure on arms has not promoted peace. In 1994 it was calculated that 4 per cent of the sum spent by developing countries for military purposes would have been enough to achieve universal primary education, cut adult illiteracy by 50 per cent and educate women to the level of men (UNDP 1994). It is probably an even smaller fraction now, with the increasing sophistication and cost of weapons. The sale of arms is of course a very complex web across a range of buyers and sellers, so that arms sold by one country can in the end easily be used against them, an irony not often admitted. UN peacekeeping forces die as a result of arms produced by the West. With arms easily accessible, internal conflicts are militarised; when wars break out they are prolonged; when wars end, peacekeeping operations are endangered, and the burden of peacebuilding is exaggerated by the need to try to collect millions of small arms that have been infused by western arms-dealers into the prevailing social and political disorder (O’Sullivan 1999).

This book examines the relationship of education to such conflict and such contradiction. It does not paint a picture of schooling as a rescue operation, nor work on the premiss that a continuation of our present education systems will of necessity eventually lead to a more peaceful and collaborative world. There is little evidence so far that the formal systems that we have had in place for over a century in many parts of the world have directly made the world a more ‘rational’ or ordered place. The people making the decisions on both sides of a conflict – whether in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland – have been ‘educated’ in the sense of ‘schooled’, but will still see armed conflict as a solution – sometimes the only solution – to territorial claims. The fact that it is in the interest of many economies that other countries live in perpetual tension so that they purchase arms is not something that appears on the school curriculum. It is not just that schools do not all do ‘peace education’, but they do not tackle the uncomfortable economic and political issues which might enable the next generation to demand a more ethical foreign policy. This book argues that there are grave omissions – or contradictions – in the curricula of both stable and conflictual societies, omissions which contribute to a continued acceptance of war. There are also elements of the process and ethos of schooling which foster a lifelong predisposition to hostility – also often glossed over.

The World Bank Report A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has a section on ‘Extensive Armed Conflicts’. This documents the brutal facts of one African in five living in a country severely disrupted by war, a growing number of perpetrators of violence being children, and conflicts destabilising the region as a whole, eroding investor confidence, disrupting trade routes, accelerating the spread of HIV/AIDS and sending refugee populations into neighbouring countries (World Bank 2001a: 25). The report is then curiously silent on how or whether education should respond to this. Instead it focuses on the conventional areas of universal primary education, alternatives to existing service delivery, cost-sharing, language of instruction, physical infrastructure, teacher–pupil ratios, health education, locally produced textbooks, technology, vocational training, education of nomads, teacher training and teachers’ conditions of service – it would seem everything but any direct attention to conflict and peace. This is extraordinary. The section on ‘measuring progress’ does not even hint at progress towards peace, relying on indicators of reading ability. The gender/equity sections discuss access to schooling, but have nothing to say about the role of education in combating gender-based violence. There is a mention of Colombia’s aim ‘to develop citizen skills’, and conflict is mentioned in terms of problems of violence between nomads and farmers, but basically, conflict is seen as a contextual (a diversionary?) issue rather than one to be addressed head on through the education system. Given that this text is within the ‘human development’ series, it is a great pity that a body as influential as the World Bank does not appear to want to take a radical stance in prioritising peace.

Nonetheless other bodies and arenas are acknowledging the centrality of the issue. By the time of the 1990 World Conference on Education for All in 1990, in Jomtien, a connection had been made between declining school enrolments and armed conflict, although the actual Jomtien Declaration and Framework made only limited reference to such armed conflict. The Amman mid-decade review in 1996 devoted one of its round table sessions to ‘Education in Emergencies’, identifying escalating violence caused by growing ethnic tensions and other sources of conflict as an ‘emerging challenge’ for education (Tawil 2001). The World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 introduced into the Dakar Framework for Action that EFA initiatives must take into account the needs of children and adults affected by armed conflict.

How exactly should this be ‘taken into account’ though? Tawil asks these questions:

If one of the principal functions of education is to ensure social cohesion, what do violent breakdowns of social cohesion tell us about the content and function of formal education? How does formal education contribute to the breakdown of social cohesion and the outbreak of internal conflict? Conversely, in what ways can formal education contribute to the reinforcement or rebuilding of social cohesion?

(Tawil 2001: 294)

I would add some further puzzles. Why do some schools remain resilient in the face of war, while others collapse? How can a school simultaneously seem to be a force for good and a force for evil? How can religious education do likewise? Are the ways of doing peace directly opposite to the ways of doing war? What are the ‘rules of engagement’ for peace? Can a country declare peace on another country, and can schools help in this declaration?

These are all the questions for this book. As the above discussion has implied, the relationship of education to conflict is not just about conflict societies – it is a global issue in which stable countries are also implicated. And conflict within the school occurs in any political context, with increasing concerns about violence and disaffection among students. These two arenas are intricately interlinked, as I will try to show. On one level, of course, all life is conflict, and it may be difficult to know where the boundary falls between the inevitable everyday cut and thrust and the full-scale war – or whether to talk of a boundary at all. In parallel with the concern about armed conflict and violence, this book also advances the notion of ‘positive conflict’ – the necessary way in which social progress occurs and challenges are made to injustice.

My aims in this book are fourfold:

(a) to demonstrate the crucial contemporary importance of an analysis of the relationship between education and conflict

(b) to trace connections between wider conflict and school-based conflict

(c) to provide a theoretical framework for understanding which can also be used in practical ways

(d) to advance the use of positive conflict and interruptive democracy in education as a way to allow the emergence of more appropriate learning.

It can be seen that I hope for multiple audiences. I do think that the link between conflict and education is a grossly under-analysed area. This is not surprising, as it is uncomfortable for policymakers and curriculum developers. It is safer to focus on literacy and numeracy, on the number of desks and the achievement of measurable targets. It is significant that much of the curriculum work and materials on rights, non-violence and peace education comes from NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) outside the main state frameworks. I want to see conflict brought into the mainstream, to encourage both risk-taking and networking. The aims and range of this book are in some ways hopelessly ambitious, but what I attempt to show is that everything is interlinked, that you need a robust sociological theory as well as examples of good practice, and that you need some sort of vision as well as descriptions of everyday ‘reality’. A central position of the book is that we all have agency, but that we need a range of alliances to sustain real change. If the book has multiple audiences, it is because we need multiple connectivities. As a teacher educator, I like Murphy’s (1999) idea of ‘an open conspiracy’. If we are to do anything about conflict, it will need an open conspiracy of a large range of people in and around education.

I should at this point reveal where I come from in this book. It is from a history of working around deviance, around gender issues, around democracy and around education management – all within international contexts. Pupil deviance, teacher deviance and government deviance are closely intertwined in most parts of the world. Short periods of work in Kosovo, Bosnia and Palestine over the last few years have given me practical insights into responses to conflict, and certainly will have underpinned the interest in complexity. Management training with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) officials in UK and Jordan has also been a learning experience, as is teaching human rights education and citizenship education to experienced international participants. Theoretically I often come at conflict from a feminist standpoint and have been influenced by feminist writers and researchers on conflict and masculinity. However, to arrive at complexity theory means an eclectic mix of feminist theory, deviancy theory, management theory and development theory. Friends ask whether this book is my life’s work, and in some ways it is. But it is a life bombarded by other lives, other rationalities, other absurdities. I acknowledge debt to them all.

Structure of the book

The ordering of this book has been difficult, because of the overlapping nature of all of the discussion and the predicament of fitting a non-linear subject into a linear framework. Nonetheless, I do want to try to build an argument, and isolate some areas before reassembling them. After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sets out the framework of complexity theory which will underpin the book. Part II focuses on the roots of conflict and their implications for education. This is somewhat artificially carved up into the three areas of economic/class relations, gender, and ethnicity/identity, acknowledging their interconnections but arguing that there are distinctive contributions that each ‘field’ makes to the conflict debate. Analytically it is necessary to tease out such contributions, if only to avoid the paralysis that comes from seeing everything as inexorably linked. The irony or paradox of complexity theory is that the sum is not reducible to its parts, yet to understand connectivity we do need to look at those parts.

Part III moves more directly to review the interface between education and conflict in terms firstly of how war or violence affects educational institutions, and secondly (or conversely) how education can contribute to war – or to peace. It must be stressed again that these chapters are not just about ‘war-torn’ societies. Conflict spreads historically and spatially. The contribution of education to war is not just in military training camps, but in ‘normal’ competitive, authoritarian, non-critical pedagogy the world over. Similarly, the contribution to peace can range from very specific ‘peace packages’ used in refugee camps to ‘normal’ democratic, rights-based, cooperative education which can also be found all over the world (although, I would have to say, far less frequently).

Part IV contains four chapters delineating strategic responses to conflict. I have initially followed the convention of distinguishing conflict and post-conflict societies, while admitting that the strategies overlap hugely. In the ‘immediate’ conflict chapter I look at rapid educational response and humanitarian aid, as well as refugee education; in the ‘aftermath’ chapter I focus more on the issue of rebuilding society and restoring public and political culture. These two chapters are followed by one that focuses specifically on conflict resolution within the school, showing how the techniques used in conflict resolution at international levels equally apply to classrooms and relationships in an institution. The final chapter sets out my argument for interruptive democracy and positive conflict, for the deliberate introduction of certain sorts of conflict within a school in order to create a generation of learners who will challenge injustice and the folly of violence – and whereby the complex adaptive school can be an agent of change in the community and beyond.

Definitions of conflict, war, violence, protest and peace

It would be useful to begin with how this book sees and uses the basic terminology. Coser (1956) had a simple definition of conflict as involving struggles between two or more people over values, or competition for status, power and scarce resources. He later added ‘in which the aim of opponents is to neutralise, injure or eliminate rivals’ (1967: 8), which seems somewhat extreme, in that it does not include consensual resolution. Roche (1996) similarly defines conflict as ‘the playing out in violent form of politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I. The terms of the debate
• PART II. Roots of conflict and their implications for education
• PART III. The education/war interface
• PART IV. Strategic responses to conflict
• PART V. The complex adaptive school
• Bibliography
• Index