Scholarly Contributions | Peace and Conflict Resolution

PEACE EDUCATION

Much of Professor Said’s peacebuilding scholarship and practice was in response to what he saw as a time of intense global change. The challenges and opportunities of this new era required new educational approaches for a global citizenship. Through both his writings and his time in the classroom, Said outlined a transformative education for peace and conflict prevention that acknowledges local cultural contexts and wisdom, emphasizes creativity for new solutions, prioritizes multiculturalism, centers on a spiritual dimension, and engages dialogical processes. For Said, the task for educators is not just to teach about peace but also to practice peace through their pedagogy, thereby transforming the relationship between teacher and student and empowering the next generation of global citizens.

Throughout the years of his scholarship and teaching, Said observed that “we are living in a world in which our traditional conceptions of borders, space, time, and distance are quickly changing.”¹ Diverse communities are engaging with each other in unprecedented ways, finding that their “fates and futures increasingly depend on one another.”² Yet simultaneously, Said notes, our perception of the world has become fragmented, with increasing gaps in income, knowledge, and political representation. Our future – especially if we hope for a global order of coexistence, cultural pluralism, and the exercise of political freedom – “depends upon conceiving an all-inclusive model of citizenship that reconciles these gaps in access and transcends limited national constructions of identity.”³ Indeed, educating the next generation of our global civilization must focus on “the material, intellectual, moral, and emotional skills necessary to transcend the current crisis of our world.”⁴ This is especially important in societies emerging from conflict, in which there is a distinct window of opportunity to reorder the infrastructures of society.⁵

Professor Said writes that the early stages of peace education focused primarily on the prevention of war and control of the arms race, in many ways reflecting the dominant paradigm of “negative” peace or the absence of violent conflict. Peace and conflict resolution studies (PCR) began to expand upon the concept of “positive” peace, which includes a focus on structural violence, starting in the late 1960s.⁶ While his own thoughts on the topic continued to develop through the decades of his scholarship and teaching, as early as the 1980s he discussed education as a forward-looking, creative, and life affirming process. He wrote, “we need to redefine education “away from the traditional concept of transmission of the accumulated wisdom of one’s cultural past toward the dialectical and ideological process of constantly creating a world culture that permits and encourages pluralism … [and] our common intuitive sense of the meaning of being human.”⁷ By the 1990s, Said was also discussing the importance of peace pedagogy, involving a “re-conceptualization of the art and science of teaching itself.”⁸ For Said, the transformation of education for global citizenship cannot just entail education about peace, but must include education for peace; it “is concerned less with information and more with liberation.”⁹

Said recognized a particularly important role for universities to play as agents of peacebuilding and conflict prevention. In a 2004 paper presented at the United Nations, Said outlined with Professor Nathan Funk several challenges universities currently face. Those in the Global North, for instance, find themselves at the center of a “culture war” between those who support a neoconservative culture and others who advocate for diversity and multiculturalism. Universities are also expected to focus on technical skills to “help the US ‘compete and survive’ in the global market,”¹⁰ with much less focus on such key skills as dialogue, debate, cross-culturalism, a philosophy of teamwork, and creative leadership. For universities in the Global South, challenges include a lack of funding and brain drain as students choose educational paths within the Global North. They also struggle with questions regarding whether indigenous knowledge and values should be synthesized with Western models, and the role of political and traditional authority in educational processes.¹¹ Said and Funk assert that universities must change course to effectively train students as global citizens, adapting “their curricula as well as their pedagogies to meet the challenges of the day.”¹²

Inspired by the work of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, who developed homes for the rural poor by synthesizing traditional and modern building techniques, Said drew on six principles adapted from Fathy’s approach to guide the training of students as global citizens. These include: 1) belief in the primacy of human values in designing social spaces, including ensuring there is equity in the classroom and space for rediscovering the applicability of past experiences to the present; 2) a universal rather than a limited approach to solving social problems, including transcending ideological dogmas and restrictive methodologies toward open, process-oriented dialogue in the classroom; 3) use of appropriate technology for innovative solutions, by both building upon past traditions and using technology in innovative ways; 4) importance of community and socially oriented education techniques, including acknowledging the many voices and truths of disenfranchised communities; 5) importance of re-establishing pride and dignity through social development, by acknowledging the worth of every individual and their perspective in the classroom and recognizing that poverty represents a condition in which one’s dignity has been removed; and 6) essential role that tradition plays in social development, for “if we accept that the whole world needs the whole world, then each culture needs to exchange its richness and its traditions with other cultures to continually expand horizons.”¹³

In a 2009 chapter, Said considered the application of these six principles to post-Saddam Iraq, asking, “what is achieved by liberating the population from Saddam Hussain if, we in turn, do not free minds to conceive of a global bases for citizenship?”¹⁴ Said explored how an inclusive model for citizenship can bring Iraqis together by looking to shared traditions and values of its multiple ethnicities, and considering how they may find modern articulation. He writes that helping Iraqis realize “the many benefits of global citizenship will require nothing short of a renaissance grounded in the traditions of the Abrahamic faiths,”¹⁵ as a source of traditional wisdom with particular resonance for different Iraqi communities. Drawing on the six principles, he explains that “a renaissance is a revival, a remembrance of the past to produce new artistic and intellectual forms for the future.”¹⁶ Said consistently called for peacebuilding efforts, including peace education that is locally grounded and draws on indigenous, spiritual, and religious resources for conflict resolution.

Several additional themes emerge from Said’s framework for peace education for global citizenship. As this new era requires new thinking and new approaches, creativity should be fostered alongside intellectual analysis; indeed, “new solutions, breakthroughs, and changes in the repertoire of behavior happen because intuition and creativity are given space in which to interact with content and analysis.”¹⁷ Instead of telling students how to be good citizens, opportunities should be created for both teachers and students to ask critical and ultimately liberating questions about what it means to be a part of a changing global community.¹⁸ With Funk, Said asserts that “education should increase the boundaries of awareness, and open new horizons to individuals in their search for truth, beauty and order. Knowledge should liberate us from our presumptions and illusions. It should liberate our creativity to interact with the magnificent diversity and vibrancy of the many ways of knowing developed by different civilizations.”¹⁹

A transformative education for conflict prevention must also center on an ethos of multiculturalism, “understood as a valorization of dialogue about cultural differences.”²⁰ Said writes in a 1995 essay that cultural diversity is the ability to see the big picture, to have a big enough view of the world to recognize that people have different worldviews, which can be resources for the problems we face. In a 2004 keynote speech on new paradigms for global citizenship, Said explains that cultural diversity “enables each person to become more individually authentic yet simultaneously recognize the genuine uniqueness of others.”²¹ An education that embraces multiple forms of knowledge “liberates us from our presumptions and illusions.”²² Indeed, he asserts that “the process of education means learning to see the many faces of humanity.”²³ Doing so invites empathy, “an essential but often underdeveloped tool of analysis that peace education should develop.”²⁴ Ultimately, peace education “entails learning to see the many faces of humanity; the essence unfolded in each person. It enables us to see that the oppressor and oppressed are both human beings experiencing life in all its vicissitudes.”²⁵

Said also recognized a necessary spiritual dimension to peace education, which he understood as “a consciousness that sees the whole of existence in its parts and constructs the whole from the parts.”²⁶ Spirituality starts from the individual, “our very essence,” but our political and social arrangements are also spiritual as they reflect our social values. Spirituality “is an experience of a sense of unity and a sense of global citizenship.”²⁷ While Said is not referring to specific religious principles or doctrines in his discussion of spirituality as an integral part of peace education, he separately recognizes the role of religion in conflict resolution, and “the rich and vivid truths shared by different faith traditions and their conceptualization of the role of knowledge and education as a purposeful, ordered quest for meaning and beauty.”²⁸ In a 1996 article on the spiritual dimensions of teaching conflict resolution, he writes that spirituality “helps to bring a sense of unity and possibility to conflict resolution efforts … By infusing our work with our innermost humanity, we transform our social and educational dialogues into processes of peace through communication and relatedness.”²⁹

Said was not just concerned with the content of peace education but also its implementation. According to him, peace pedagogy recognizes that the essential values of the field must also be reflected within the classroom. As Said and Funk explain, “because conflict resolution must be dialogic in nature and in practice, the primary methodology of conflict resolution education should be dialogue based on mutual respect among the teacher and students.”³⁰ Peace pedagogy is empowering and responsive to the unique wisdom, insights, and potential of individual students. It “removes the distance that separates teacher and student,” Said explains, as “educator and student meet as equals in a genuine relationship and are transformed by the truth which they share.”³¹ Ultimately, the teacher serves as “a facilitator rather than an ultimate authority,” and students are encouraged to see themselves as “co-learners” and “co-creators.”³² For him, “education for peace building requires a respect for human dignity that must be demonstrated if it is to be learned. Each student should be recognized for bringing a unique set of experiences to the classroom; each student is a resource for others in a collaborative process of learning.”³³

These values of peace education and pedagogy were evident throughout Dr. Said’s decades of work with students. For him, teaching was a vocation, to which he was exceptionally committed. (See A Meaningful Life). In a 2017 interview, Said explained that transformation is the most profound goal of teaching: “I wanted to create around me an open environment … [because] for me transformation is to create an environment where people can change. It’s a spiritual context.”³⁴

Reflective of his respect for his students and their unique knowledge as budding scholars, he frequently collaborated with them on publications as a creative and cooperative process. It is perhaps no surprise that many of the awards he received throughout his career were for teaching. In a 2005 essay on “Growing Global Citizens,” Said offers the following conclusion:

In the end, one does not create a global citizen. Rather, we can create, restructure, and develop the realm of education so that each human being can see himself or herself in a global context. And when we develop the view that being is one, that human consciousness comprises both the analytic and intuitive modes, we begin to see the individual parts of humanity as well as the whole of it.³⁵

Notes