Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
Peace education is currently enjoying the support and appreciation of most theoretical orientations and political establishments. Enlightened modernists and "soft" postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists, critical thinkers, and liberals all celebrate the new fashion.
An interesting set of assumptions is central in the
current general appreciation of peace education. It is important to note
the conviction that peace should be sought, and longed for, or struggled
for. Another central assumption is that peace is the opposite of violence
or conflict and that it is possible to differentiate them. Still another
central assumption is that it is possible to educate for peace or for the
promotion of peace, in one way or another, and that it is justified and
desirable to invest the proper means to do so. In this paper we wish to
question these assumptions. We will argue that peace education is normally
part and parcel of the reality it pretends to change. The division between
peace and violence (or conflict) is not unproblematic. The kind of differentiation
will determine the preferable version of peace education yet the whole
project should be able to justify the preference for peace. As an ultimate
goal, the justifications that are common in current peace education, we
will argue, not only serve various violences, which peace education fails
to reflect and challenge: peace education is one of the manifestations
of their presence. We will conclude by addressing the possibilities for
an alternative to the current trends in peace education.
Peace education: conflicting trends and their implications
In this paper we do not reconstruct in detail the similar or conflicting tendencies in current peace education. Suffice it to pinpoint the variations in the propositions, the aims, and their orientations. Under such circumstances, in fact, it is quite misleading to speak about "peace education" as a monolithic entity. We would do better to speak of the various theories and practices within current peace education. In this paper "peace education" as a general term is an abstraction and its usefulness carries a price. We will try to justify this price.
Most of the current peace education activities manifest much good will but less theoretical framework and philosophical elaboration concerning the propositions, aims, methods, and evaluation of the results and their meaning. We think that a lot of the difficulties and shortcomings that the peace education practitioners face are not challenged on account of the lack of conceptual work and reflection. In a certain sense this is not always a bad thing, since at times the naivete of the practitioners and their public is a productive or potentially productive element in normalizing educational process. At times philosophical work is understood as unnecessary, artificial, or even dangerous for this educational cause. This attitude also holds concerning the modernism-postmodernism divide of discourses.
Many peace education versions work within the framework of modernistic-oriented technical reason. This manifests various positivist, pragmatic, and functionalist views of knowledge, paying scant attention to the social and cultural context and the violence which produces the yardsticks and the conceptions of knowledge, values, strivings, and imagination, as well as their own identity. There is however an additional idealist moral dimension, which we will have to address with special sensitivity. This dimension concerns the concept of universal human rights. The source of many of these versions of peace education is religious (mainly Christian); others are humanist of various kinds. However they are all united in tying resistance against violence or the prevention of conflicts to human rights as an ahistoric, essential, universalistic phenomenon.
The concept of universal human rights is prima facie modernistic-oriented. It is rooted in an essentialist concept of the human subject as an entity whose characteristics are universally valid. Its telos, ends, or potentials are conceived as rooted in its essence. This concept related to peace education even before it acquired its current title, formalization, and institutionalization at the end of the 19th century from John Dewey and after World War I from the progressive educational movement.
Like many other activists of peace education of his day (except the pacifists), Dewey did not base his peace education on moral grounds but on pragmatic political arguments.(1) But here too, as everywhere else, Dewey's pragmatism is founded on Enlightened concept of the aim of knowledge and of the potentials of the human subject, and is to be seen as part of the humanist tradition even after its rhetorical divorce from metaphysics.
The realization of human potentials by humanist education accompanied by social changes, Dewey thought, would prevent the conditions for war. And since he understood peace as the absence of war, he had much hope in the restructuring of the curriculum and the pedagogy in order to enhance the education of a reflective and a non-dogmatic public, which would not easily be manipulated into warfare. Within such a framework
History is not the study of heroes, but an account of social development;
it provides us with knowledge of the past which contributes to the solution
of social problems of the present and the future. [Therefore,] before starting
with history as such it would be a good idea to identify the important
problems
of the present-day society… (2)
Since he identified peace with the elevation of humanity and the development of rational and pragmatically enlightened human capacities, he understood the development of geography and history studies as instruments for peace. His project was not directed solely to the American situation or for a limited time, but was part of a liberal-universalistic orientation sensitive to differences, contexts, and changes. Yet it remained fundamentally contextual: Western, humanistic, liberal, and enlightened. In general this also holds for the work of the central figure in peace education during the last generation, Johan Galtung. Galtung believed that
Ultimately, peace research is an effort to put Man together again, an effort
to transcend all these borders and divisions discussed in this paper, in
order
to arrive at something more truthful to the miracle that is Man.
(3)
Some scholars think that peace education continues the progressive education
articulated by Dewey. Within this trend Friesen and Weiler hold that current
feminist and multicultural peace education advocates Dewey's appreciation
for democratic principles when it maintains that its approach will further
social progress and global stability by enhancing understanding among nations.
(4)
This trend in peace education is part of a larger effort to integrate
emancipatory dimensions in Dewey's thought and neo-Marxist tradition with
some aspects of current postmodernist discourses, as manifested in the
work of Henry Giroux. (5)
These efforts are always highly problematic, as evinced by the various
efforts to construct a postmodern critical pedagogy in face of the need
to obtain a difficult or an impossible balance among the autonomy of the
subject and her contingency, the possibility of a priori value judgments,
universal validity of truth claims, and the possibility of a non-repressive
communication. Not only do various modern orientations take part in peace
education, but "soft" postmodernists too, in both the practice and the
philosophical justifications of essentialism, universalism, and transcendentalism.
But so far, the only work that explicitly set itself the task of articulating
a postmodern critique of current peace education has failed to realize
its promise in all but its title. (6)
Some trends in the Israeli multiculturalist and peace movements are
bona fide manifestations of this phenomenon. (7)
In the case of peace education the coexistence of these two trends is inexorably
modernist in its assumptions, even when using a fashionable "soft" postmodern
rhetoric in feminist, multiculturalist, and critical arenas. At the same
time a large part of peace education field activity and theoretical elaboration
is modern, and even pre-modern, as in the case of various religious educational
centers. Another part of the activity is run or heavily supported by governmental
agencies, and still another part by the United Nations. Substantial work
is done by NGOs.
The postmodern sensitivity to the contingent
stance of values and truth claims, the refusal to accept universal validity
claims, as well as the rejection of any general theory, of foundationalism,
essentialism, and transcendentalism, are in direct conflict with Enlightenment's
modern ideals and its philosophical tradition. Their implicit conservation
without their re-articulation or transformation should be addressed. Galtung
(8)
already identified the unreflective use of the term peace education
and the lack of theoretical elaboration of the foundations of the practitioner’s
work in this field. Galtung himself, however, worked within the modernist
framework and certainly did not challenge peace education and standard
peace research from a postmodernist orientation. So far, the only work
that explicitly set itself the task of articulating a postmodern critique
of current peace education has failed to realize its promise in all but
its title. (9)
Some feminist-oriented peace education programs explicitly connect
themselves to Dewey's philosophy and its concept of problem solving via
the practice of conflict resolution. They do so while emphasizing the importance
of "value clarification" as a reaction to current attempts to rationalize
patriotism and justify ever-growing investments in armament. The idea here
is that
Children must learn to be peacemakers in order to survive in the nuclear
age.
They need an education that affirms life and encourages new thinking about
conflict, progress, and peacemaking. Feminist educators can play an important
role in peace education by helping children understand the connections
between
militarism and patriarchy. (10)
The central part of patriarchy and sex roles is sometimes complemented
by a
retreat to human nature and universal rights that feminist peace education
is
committed to. (11)
The lack of a social-oriented philosophical elaboration of peace education made possible the positivistic views about "conflict resolution" within media studies and communication in the 1980s and the great hopes of using the Internet in the service of peace education during the 1990s. (12)
Even peace education within the framework of current critical pedagogy has sometimes an essentialist conception of human rights and a positivistic conception of true critical knowledge in the service of peace education. This is occasionally so even when moral imagination is prized as against instrumental rationality and technical reason. (13) This trend is rooted already in the thinking of the Frankfurt School thinkers in the first phase of their thought (14) and in the concept of dialogue of Paulo Freire and even in present-day thinkers of critical pedagogy such as Henry Giroux.
This line of thinking is also highly evident in some current multicultural discourses which affirm difference, contingency, and anti-fundamentalist-oriented pedagogy. Here again, the very possibility of a postmodern dialogue among differences and of border crossing overcoming ethnocentrism is ultimately founded on modern universalistic conceptions of the good (or at least on universal pragmatic) and a fundamentalist conception of human nature and human rights. This is so even when explicitly educational thinkers like Giroux align themselves with the "soft" postmodern critique of the Enlightenment and its fundamentalism, universalism, and transcendentalism. (15) The relation between peace and human rights and the potential tension between multiculturalism and humanism is identifiable also in major UNESCO declarations, where the United Nations’ commitment to self-determination and the independence of states is covered by an explicit, uncompromising commitment to a humanist conception of universal human rights.
In UNESCO's Medium-Term Plan for 1977-1982 we read that it "condemns all violations of human rights as a threat and contrary to its very spirit". The struggle for peace and action to promote human rights are recognized as inseparable. Their linkage "constitutes a coherent conceptual framework". UNESCO (16) states in this spirit that
There can be no genuine peace when the most elementary human
rights are violated, or while situations of injustice continue to exist;
conversely, human rights for all cannot take root and achieve full
growth while latent or open conflicts are rife… Peace is incomplete
with malnutrition, extreme poverty and the refusal of the rights of people
to self-determination… The only lasting peace is a just peace based on
respect for human rights. Furthermore, a just peace calls for the establishment
of an equitable international order, which will preserve future generations
from the scourge of war.
The universalistic-oriented conception of human rights in the modern sense can be traced to the Virginia Bill of Rights and to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, as well as to the 1789 French declaration. It can also be traced to Kantian philosophy. Yet all these are founded not only on Locke’s and Rousseau's conceptions of natural law, but on Western traditional fundamentalism within which natural law and human nature are developed.
Such conceptions are highly problematic in today's philosophical and political discussions regardless of one’s self-positioning. As postmodernists, modernists, humanists, feminists, or post-colonialists, feminists, multiculturalists or other representatives of the postmodern influence, such thinkers are highly committed to challenging the modern universalistic and essentialist conception of human rights. They favor contingency, localism, difference, and uniqueness as the starting point for a declared non-Western-ethnocentric-oriented peace education. Within the various "soft" postmodern trends the politics of rights is founded on contingent, fragile, temporary coalitions of minorities, which represent real, changing interests and passions, replacing Western ethnocentric universalized concepts such as human rights. (17) Constituent thinkers of this trend do not take part in today's celebrated peace education even when they are involved in actual communal, ethnic, race, and gender conflicts, such as in the case of bell hooks, Peter McLaren, and Elizabeth Ellsworth. Here we do not address this issue but limit ourselves to developing the argument that both "left" and the "right" supporters of peace education are united in moralizing politics. This objectifies a certain discourse for the totalization of an order in which there will be no room for an autonomous subject and free spirit. Harmony, instead, will endure in perpetual "peace".
Moralizing politics is not too problematic for conservatives. As displayed by some of the "soft" postmodern rhetorics of peace education, it is also a serious challenge for some of the radical critics of Western meta-narratives. It is an issue to be addressed by the critics of the existing relations between politics and moral philosophy in essentialist terms, as part of the naturalization of inequalities, marginalization of the Other, and self-reproduction of the white man's domination and its structural and direct violence.
Karl Schmidt was quick to challenge the humanist
way to peace under the banners of universal human rights and moralizing
politics. He ridiculed the humanist attempt to legitimize "just wars" in
the name of future peace and present human cosmopolitan rights. Habermas
criticizes Schmidt for ultimately justifying all
wars (18) and Schmidt is rightly blameworthy
on this point.
More than that, Schmidt, along with other proto-Nazi writers such as Ernst Juenger, is to be blamed for aesthetisizing and moralizing all forms of heroic or effective national violence. But does Habermas's critique really respond to Schmidt's challenge to the concepts of "just war" and world peace as a (justified) violent realization of human rights? The difference here is between those who think that successful wars are all justified - or at least not provable as unjustified - and those who claim that only "just wars" are justified. We do not attempt to establish a postmodern position according to which there is no way to distinguish Schmidt's critique from Habermas's defense of humanist universalism and their concepts of the justification of war and the commitment to peace. We do claim, however, that from current postmodern critique and from traditional critical theory it is possible to place a serious challenge before the concepts of peace and violence presented within peace education as this is represented by declared modernists and postmodernists alike.
In our questioning of current peace education
some aspects of Schmidt's critique will be further developed by questioning
the concepts of "peace", "violence", and "education" that are normally
taken for granted by peace education practitioners and theorists. Amazingly,
it is Galtung, the positivist theorist of peace research, who suggests
the most advanced questioning of the concepts of peace and violence within
this tradition. (19) His pupils and critics
alike refrained from investing too much energy in the fundamental questions
of peace education.
The concept of peace in current peace education
The lack of conceptualization within the current framework of peace education has been noted by a number of writers. Salomon’s words are highly relevant:
What is peace education? What is the core of peace education,
its defining attributes? What, if anything, distinguishes its most prototypical
instantiations from other, similar fields? …Numerous programs are called
"peace education", ranging from violence reduction in schools to learning
about war and peace, and from democratic education to the cultivation of
self-esteem. Subsuming all of these under the superordinate category of
peace education tends to blur important distinctions, such as between the
kind of peace education that is carried out in areas of conflict, such
as
northern Ireland, and programs designed for more peaceful regions.
Similarly, too wide a category tends to lump together programs designed
to cultivate universal peaceful outlook with programs aimed at promoting
a
peaceful disposition toward a particular group, race or nation to replace
collective sentiments of hatred, discrimination, and hostility. (20)
While accepting part of Salomon's critique it is worth observing that that very critique makes indiscriminate use of various and conflicting ideological and philosophical conceptions of peace education. More important still is that like the thinkers whom he criticizes for lack of conceptualization, he too treats "peace" as an unproblematic concept and does not invest much efforts in conceptualizing his own project. True, there is here a beginning in the direction of a general conceptualization of the field and tackling its major problematic; but following Galtung, Salomon distinguishes negative and positive peace, adding that
One needs, perhaps, to distinguish here between peace in the sense
of harmony and the absence of tension and conflict on the individual,
micro level, and peace in the sense of the absence of war, armed conflict
or violence, on the collective, macro level. (21)
Other scholars, such as Reardon, identify peace with reconciliation, and the prospects for achieving peace with conflict resolution (22) and education for reflection grounded in shared values. (23)
This trend is also manifested in UNESCO's 1998 declaration on the occasion of World Teacher's Day. Teachers are presented as peace builders who shape the future within a positivistic conflict-resolution orientation:
Building the foundations for peace is as much a challenge for teachers
as it is for those who sign peace treaties. Conflict resolution and the
implementation of peace settlements feature regularly in the news,
but today on World Teachers' Day, we should ask ourselves how
much such peace efforts would achieve without the unheralded
contribution of the world's 50 million peace teachers? Day after day and
year after year, teachers build the very fabric of peace. They transmit
the
knowledge, values and attitudes, the skills and behavior which ensure that
peace is not just the absence of conflict but becomes a way of life for
all,
putting into daily practice the concept that social justice is essential
to
universal and lasting peace. (24)
This positivistic orientation might have a positive concept of peace,
not just a negative one which conceives peace as an absence of national
conflicts, as do Salomon and
many other peace education researchers and practitioners. However,
it is important to note that while accepting Galtung's positive concept
of peace (25) and even when relating to the
social context and its structural violence, (26)
the UNESCO declaration conceives peace as an absence of conflict that is
to be achieved by solving "social injustice" through the teaching of conflict
resolution skills. This declaration conceives peace and social justice
as positive and desirable, in contrast to violence and injustice, which
are undesirable. According to the UNESCO's declaration, this is the aim
of teachers as educators, and this is actually what teachers universally
do in their daily work.
We claim that the work of the 50 million teachers referred to by UNESCO is one of the main mechanisms of perpetuating violence and injustice. This is not because they are doing such a poor job, but on the contrary, because around the world teachers, together with the other manipulations of normalizing education, are doing it so well. The current human reality is to be challenged by a critical addressing of the fundamentals and the context of the concept of peace that these teachers/educators are committed to, and certainly not by a search for new routes for improving their present "achievements".
Within this trend there is a strong positivistic conviction that conflict resolution skills are a matter of professional knowledge and good didactics. There is here a belief that these skills, fundamentally, might be taught along with the quest for justice, in the most concrete and specific manner. (27) Some of the positivist writers within this trend even see peace education as a successful conflict-solving process in which the decline of violence is to be detected by a measurable promotion of schools' efficiency and productivity. (28)
As the UNESCO declaration shows, not all peace education researchers and thinkers neglect the social context and the challenge of actual power relations within which peace education and its rivals are produced. Winch, for example, is a peace education thinker who rejects the conception of positive peace. Winch stresses the inevitability of social conflict and suggests that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but entails "learning to live with conflict in a constructive manner.(29) Within this framework personal fulfillment is essential for world peace, or in Ross's words "the individual must be helped to develop his full potential for constructive, peaceful living". (30)
Peace education within the multicultural discourse emphasizes diversity as a precondition for peace, in contrast to the concept of reproducing shared values and a homogeneous kind of reflection towards universal solidarity and responsibility as analyzed by liberal peace educators and most of the theorists of civil education. Rennebohm-Franz’s statements are paradigmatic in this context:
With multiple versions of ways of coming to know our world as well
as multiple versions of presenting and sharing understandings,
we begin to weave an educational tapestry that reveals the complexities,
diversities, commonalties, and interconnectedness of many human experiences.
Understanding multiple versions is the beginning of learning how to weave
a
global multicultural peace tapestry rich in many colors, textures, and
styles. (31)
Freire, Rivage-Seul, and many other critical educational theorists such
as McLaren and Giroux tried to give voice and place to the perspective
of the marginalized, to empower those whose voice has been silenced. Rivage-Seul
tries to develop an alternative peace education based not on hegemonic
perspectives and interests but on the contrary, on those of the silenced,
based on Freire's concept of moral imagination which, it is hoped, will
transcend "the bounds of technical thought". (32)
However, peace education within the framework of this traditional Freirerian
framework is universalistic and essentialist, and at bottom conceives hierarchical
relations between teacher and students as a precondition for educational
progress. (33)
The writers who are committed to developing the possibility of the
oppressed raising their voice conceive the potential for the universalization
of knowledge and the articulation of the facts as a precondition for an
emancipatory peace education.
Since all human beings are inevitably interrelated on a limited planet,
the pursuit of a material advantage on the part of some inevitably affects
the ability of others to meet their basic needs. Therefore, persistence
in the
cult of the superfluous necessarily violates the others' basic freedom,
understood as the liberty of each to choose whatever does not endanger
the material basis of the freedom of any other). (34)
This conception of human essence is impossible to separate from the conception of the possible emancipation manifested in "peace". Under the influence of Marcuse and the positive utopian tradition Rivage-Seul cites Hinklammert to hint in the direction of emancipatory, critical, peace education:
Transcendental imagination envisions full human life in which there
no longer exists a disjunction between sensual hunger and its equally
sensual satisfaction… It is a question of imagining fullness in which
there is no need for institutions… There is neither perfect competition
nor planning. It is the spontaneity which comes from the recognition of
all as subjects, and which is not thinkable except by means of an imagination
of a fluid nature friendly to human beings. (35)
All these diverse conceptions of peace are united in conceiving "peace"
as desirable, on the one hand, and as a manifestation of the reduction
or complete elimination of violence and the realization of human potential
free and just intersubjectivity, on the other. We think that this conviction
should be challenged.
Is peace a manifestation of or the elimination of violence?
In Book IV of The City of God against the Pagans, St. Augustine establishes the sources of peace and violence and articulates their essence and characters. Since the various trends in current peace education share the same general concept of peace, which is traceable not only to the Enlightenment's thought but even to earlier Christian and Greek sources, it is worth resorting to St. Augustine even if he is not the sole influence or the earliest. As we will show, while being one of the sources for the concept of peace dominant in present peace education, the Augustinian concept is much richer and is of more value in the presentation of the concepts of peace and violence in the postmodern elaboration.
I distinguish two branches of mankind: one made up of those
who live according to man, the other those who live according to God.
I speak of these branches also allegorically as two cities, that is, two
societies of human beings, of which one is predestined to reign eternally
with God and the other to undergo eternal punishment with the devil.
For at the very start, when the two cities began their history through
birth and death, the first to be born was the citizen of this world, and
only after him came the alien in this world who is a member of the city
of God, one predestined by grace and chosen by grace, one by grace
an alien below and by grace a citizen above. (36)
St. Augustine's framework distinguishes two entities and two histories within which the separation of peace and violence acquires its full meaning. But for St. Augustine, contrary to current major trends in peace education, this is a dialectical historical process. He follows it in presenting an imperative to transcend history and its violences. We will return later to this aspect of the division between peace and violence's historical existence and its transcendence. However, already at this stage it is important to stress his grounds for the preference of peace: its relation to true belief in the right way to the redemption of humans and the world.
Here St. Augustine follows the Socratic tradition and connects redemption to the possibility of transcendence as attaining the light of the true knowledge. (37) This is one of the preconditions for the totalizing dimension of Western education and its being swallowed, reproduced, and re-presented within the hegemonic violences. The present peace education has lost its theological sources and its theological conceptualizations. It has also lost its humanist as well as its total commitment to the imperatives of reason and to the revolutionization of the general human condition towards its full emancipation.
While speaking in the language of moral politics, present-day peace education fails to submit non-contingent justifications for its claims, practices, and hopes for a state of peace that is not a mere violent/stable, political construct. However, it is exactly in the present-day postmodern condition and in the current globalization process that there is no room for a serious challenge to the hegemonic claims for knowledge by the totally other than the present reality or by an alternative, vivid Spirit. Within the present reality there is no room for a new Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Marx, or Hitler. Even the supposed alternative Spirit of Humanism was rapidly domesticated in the Middle East and in Iran itself by the logic of capitalism and instrumental rationality. Within the present modern and pre-modern conditions the otherness of the Other is terrorized while proclaimed as evil, sin, or a dangerous epistemological or dogmatic gift. In the most efficient assault, such as the assaults currently taking place in today's postmodern arenas, such as the cyberspace, it is presented and functions as an irrelevant element; it is being ironized or even internalized within the global pleasure machine as a mere meaningless "link", "site", "item", or "experience", namely as an ornament or a plaything to be used for a passing moment in a context where there is no transcendence or escape from meaninglessness.
This conception is immanently committed to totalizing information and to purging the threatening gift or "saving" humanity from its danger by all necessary means. Here normalizing education, purging the Other of his or her epistemological otherness, structural violence, and the "direct" individual and collective violences are inseparable. One of our aims should be to unveil the relation between the success of these violences and their invisibility as a manifestation of mental health and collective stability, order, and "peace" as an order of things which prevents reflection, resistance and transcendence. Within the theological tradition this resistance to the given reality is conceived as openness or quest for "redemption". Peace is conceived within this framework as “the return of the multiple to unity, in conformity with the Platonic or Neoplatonic idea of the one". (38)
It is important to note, however, that within history, for St. Augustine it is impossible to conceive "the city of God" disconnected from "the earthly city": they are always to be conceived in their mutual relations. More than that, while real peace is only to be conceived within "the city of God", its rival city strives for peace too. The division is not only, as in current peace education, between a state of peace and a state of violence (or conflict), but in parallel also between two essentially different states of peace. One could also say, between two different sets of violences, one secular, the other sacred violence, namely "peace".
"The earthly city" is in constant "pursuit of victories that either cut lives short or at any rate are short-lived".(39) Yet as the manifestation of successful violence, these victories contain also goods, although only "the lowest kind of goods". Among these "lowest kinds of goods" attained by warfare St. Augustine counts "earthly peace". (40) The point that is important for St. Augustine, which is forgotten by today's peace education, is that (earthly) peace is only attainable by warfare:
Thus to gain the lowest kind of good it covets an earthly peace,
one that it seeks to attain by warfare; for if it is victorious and no
one remains to resist it, there will be peace…(41)
According to St. Augustine there are higher goods than a earthly peace; these "belong to the city above, in which victory will be untroubled in everlasting and ultimate peace". (42) This other kind of peace is totally other than the peace that is tenable in the earthly city, and it is even conditioned by transcending from the peace that the earthly city and its victories can offer.
On the one hand, St. Augustine represents a Western philosophical tradition which after being secularized by Kant, Hegel, and Marx could lead to a kind of universalism within which idealists, pragmatists, and even (very) "soft" postmodernists could share peace education.
Within peace education as developed by pragmatists, feminists, multiculturalists, and certainly by positivistic-oriented functionalists who strive for social stability and free, prosperous national and international markets, all trends relate to human rights and resist direct and explicit violence in the name of universal rights such as freedom from persecution or exploitation. Here the division between peace and violence is clear-cut, and the very commitment and quest for peace is left unaddressed and is unproblematized.
It is St. Augustine, more than present peace education theorists and practitioners that follow his essentialism, who seriously addresses the issue of peace and problematizes the quest for peace in relation to the essence of the human and her ultimate goal. In Augustinian terms the ideal and the reality, which peace education strives for, is the earthly city in its most severe form. For St. Augustine this is something unavoidable in this world, yet it is a challenge to overcome in order to be redeemed.
We see St. Augustine's doctrine and the educational
attitude he represents within Western thinking not solely but also as part
of a violent control of Western consciousness and as a manifestation of
epistemological violence against its disciples. At the same time, however,
it is worth acknowledging its dialectics and its transcendental element.
It contains an antagonism to the whole order of which "peace" as a desire,
as an ideal, and as a reality, is but a part. As such it is a constant
challenge to this order, while being part of it, and it contains an important
emancipatory potential. This dimension of challenging the hegemonic realm
of self-evidence and the imperative for overcoming philosophy and existence
is surely missing in the concept of peace which functions in the various
trends in current peace education.
Following St. Augustine we claim that what
in the political arena is called "peace" is one of the extreme manifestations
of successful terror. Levinas sees the seed of this condition already in
"Greek wisdom" and pinpoints its violent nature in which human peace is
awaited on the basis of the truth:
Peace on the basis of the truth - on the basis of the truth of
knowledge where, instead of opposing itself, the diverse agrees
with itself and unites; where the stranger is assimilated… Peace
on the basis of the truth, which - marvel of marvels - commands
humans without forcing them or combating them, which governs
them or gathers them together without enslaving them, which through
discourse, can convince rather than vanquish… (43)
This totalizing concept of peace in its relation to true knowledge allows
effective de-humanization of humans and their formation into collectives.
At its peak it makes possible and secures consciousness, which is committed
to "true" solidarity. It creates and generously awards the willingness
of the individual to sacrifice herself for the collective, its security,
ideals, values, and horizons. As such it is part and parcel of the violence
which produces borders, wars, and Others as objects of education, destruction,
redemption, emancipation, or deconstruction. Yet it is a concept of peace
conditioned by abandonment of reflection and transcendence. It is a manifestation
of one’s being swallowed or constructed by the ruling realm of self-evidence.
With the assistance of good parents, devoted teachers, supporting friends,
beautiful texts, and endless other ways it produces brave warriors to protect
its borders and destroy its internal and external enemies. As such, it
actually manifests human forgetfulness of its goal, domestication, tranquilization
that reflects the victory of normalizing education. It is peace as "repose
among beings well-placed or reposing on the underlying solidity of their
substance, self-sufficient in their identity or capable of being satisfied
and seeking satisfaction". (44)
This concept of philosophy, which was dominated
by the Platonic quest for light and love of truth, is embarrassed and feels
guilty in current Western thought. It finds it hard to
Recognize itself in its millennia of fratricidal, political, and
bloody struggles, of imperialism, of human hatred and exploitation,
up to our century of world wars, genocides, the Holocaust, and
terrorism; of unemployment, the continuing poverty of the Third World.
(45)
Levinas does not explicitly say it but he implies that actually there exists a resemblance between this quest for the Platonic light and the violence which governs/constitutes Westerns reality. Postcolonialist thinkers implement this concept of Levinas and Derrida for re-reading the direct and symbolic violence and counter-violence between Western colonialism and its marginalized cultures in the third world and within the Western realm itself. (46) Adorno and Horkheimer showed in a fascinating manner how this tradition was galvanized (47) and how instrumental rationality is responsible for the control of nature and the control of nature within humanity, as a trend which leads to the Holocaust, to Stalinism as well as to their liberal alternates. (48)
The concept of peace that is at the basis of peace education (in all its different versions) is to be seen as part and parcel of the same reality which it is committed to overcome. As the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer shows, it is much more than what Levinas calls "an embarrassment" for the West, as if it were a misfortune that could be overcome within the tradition of instrumental rationality which made it possible it in the first place. But the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer and the philosophy of Levinas do share an understanding that the struggle against the governing violence and the challenge to the epistemological, cultural, political, and economic misfortune afflicting today's human is possible. This challenge, according to these two philosophical trends, is to be developed from within the Judeo-Christian tradition by the pursuit of the option encapsulated as "the wisdom of Jerusalem". Within their utopian pessimism they present an alternative concept of peace to the one that is hegemonic in current peace education and the philosophical frameworks from which it borrows its concepts, strivings, dreams, and fears. Later we shall return to the alternative concept of peace and peace education; first we have to present current oppositions to this kind of utopianism.
For all their differences, neo-Marxist thinkers
such as Adorno and Horkheimer share with Levinas a common understanding,
belief, or narrative. Within it the autonomous subject is not an empty
concept, freedom is an imperative, knowledge is possible, and responsibility
is highly relevant in challenging the reality in which the absence of peace
or false "peace" has the upper hand. The Frankfurt School critical
theory too emphasizes the responsibility of the subject to resist the
hegemonic realm of self-evidence. These two philosophies are highly skeptical
and ironist, yet they reject the kind of relativism that made possible
most forms of current postmodern discourses even in their "soft" versions.
However, central figures of current postmodernism too are challenging the
philosophical assumptions of current peace education. Postmodernists such
as Foucault, Derrida, Leotard, and Baudrillard, as well as post-colonialists
such as Homi Bahba and Gayatri Spivack, constitute a considerable challenge
to the various naive humanist concepts of peace education from the "left".
As we have seen, the conceptualization that divides peace and violence parallels the division between true and false knowledge. This division provides the unification of peace and truth. In parallel it provides a conception of the essence of the human being and an appropriate ethics. This provides the West with a metaphysical preference for peace and the justification of peace education. The philosophy of Foucault is a serious challenge to this project. According to Foucault
…one's point of reference should not be to the great model of
language and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history,
which bears and determines us, has the form of war rather than
that of language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. (49)
Within the Foucaultian project, peace education does not differ from any other regime of truth which produces subjects, knowledge, and values within a history which has no "meaning". Like all others, this regime too should be subject to analysis not in accordance with good intentions, "truth", and a natural or sacred "faith in the human" or God, but "in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics" without "evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict", without "avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue".(50)
The concept of peace, which makes possible peace education as resistance to the various manifestations of national, ethnic, racial, and gender repression, is seriously challenged by the Foucaltian project. Here "the understanding of the ways within which power manifests itself resist the very concept of repression”. (51) It denotes the productivity of power and represents the subject, be it a "victim" or a "victimizer", as one of the manifestations of contingent, meaningless, aimless power relations. In contrast to the traditional Western concepts of violence, now truth itself "isn't outside power". (52)
Foucault, like some other postmodernists, deconstructs the quests and the concepts that allow transcendent, orchestrated, essential change by human autonomy or reason. Traditionally the very possibility of transcendence made reflection possible. It also allowed a concept of a difference, which makes a difference of the kind that "peace" is supposed to be in relation to "war". People who refuse to accept the omnipotence of epistemic violence, namely that there is no difference that makes a difference, he considers naive; such people find it difficult to acknowledge
that their history, their economics, their social practices,
the language that they speak, the mythology of their ancestors…
are governed by rules that are not all given to their consciousness… (53)
Peace education as a normalizing education
Peace education is but one version of normalizing education. A systematic critical reconstruction of peace education should also challenge its positive utopianism. Within this positive utopianism in relation to the stance of "peace" a special role is played by conceptions that allow hierarchical relations, asymmetries, positive value judgments, and guarded existential horizons. These are developed and delivered by the ideal educator/teacher, trainer, mediator, or facilitator. This Utopia determines not only her/his relation to the student but to human communication in more general terms, within a broader concept of education. This positive Utopia determines the entire set of concepts, yardsticks, and strivings available to the student. Yet here objects, norms, persons, and events are inseparable from the struggles between conflicting representation apparatuses and the meta-narratives within which they dwell.
The philosophy and politics of representation as well as the life-and-death struggles between narratives and their colonialist imperative and other "dangerous" issues of that kind are absolutely foreign to peace education, which is committed to a positive Utopia of undistorted dialogue and peaceful consensus among adversaries. As such peace education cannot reflect on the preconditions for the kind of educational discourse within which it is positioned and it cannot reflect on the violences that it serves and others that it tries to resist.
Within this project the various violences of the nameless kind are untraceable and unchallenged. It is important, however, not to conceive this situation as mere blindness and passivity: this special situatedness of peace education is what makes other violences explicit and addressed. As such it allows their categorization, articulation, and evaluation. The unreflective consumption and the productive internalization of violences of the first kind allows the transparency of "evil" and the quest for peace within a stable realm of self-evidence. It is important to note the productivity of the theoretical limits of peace education; it produces not only the refusal to problematize the concepts of knowledge, representation, communication, consensus, intersubjectivity, and the avoidance of treating the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of the context within which peace education flourishes. At the same time it also re-produces the dichotomies between victims and victimizers, good and evil, light and darkness, and ultimately gives birth to a positive Utopia which makes possible the quest for "peace" and peace education of the kind of "the earthly city".
Within current peace education, therefore, it is impossible to problematize the hegemonic concept of "peace" or the concept of "violence". Nor is this peace education competent to question the concepts of justice/injustice and of human subjects and "their" subjectivity, or to resist the powers and the apparatuses which produce, re-produce, and destroy collectives, individuals, their identities, knowledge, skills, perspectives, consciousness, and contexts. It is no wonder that within peace education there is no problematization of issues such as the representation of "reality", and the Other and his/her otherness in terms of potential violence, mistakes, threats, and refusal to acknowledge the true and the just. The politics of recognition, the politics of representation, and the life-and-death war raging between and within narratives and truth regimes are unmentioned, unchallenged, and unaddressed. As a result there is no reflection on the possibilities for creating a critical distance from the realization of their relation to the capitalistic globalization and the world division of work and the room it makes for well intentioned intellectuals and Western peace activists.
It is wrong to decontextualize peace education and detach it from the capitalist globalization and the world order. We think there is a heavy human cost to the acceptance of this order as a yardstick and guide for peace education. This is why we think it is important to address the reasons for peace education’s disregard for the hegemonic culture industry and neglect of a critical perspective for evaluating the reaction to the violences which produce, reproduce, represent, and consume the present order of things. Peace education refrains from tackling the fundamentals of the order within which narratives, armies, merchants, priests, parents and teachers, establishments, nations, and ideologies struggle for hegemony. This struggle is for hegemony over truth and justice. It is the very same hegemony that allows the invisibility of the violence that manipulates, constructs, or destroys the material base, the consciousness, and the violences of the rival narratives and establishments which they serve and represent. (54)
Peace education in all its versions avoids questioning life itself and refrains from questioning the positive, constitutive role violence plays within it. It avoids addressing the status quo as a protection and reproduction of an order whose very existence implies the destruction of other possibilities for life and the production of concepts of "justice" as part of the elimination of possibilities for other, alternative violences within this dynamics.
The real aim of peace education is revealed as the fortification of the existing order and the preservation of the invisibility of the hegemonic violence, even when it claims to give voice to the silenced and challenges the injustice inflicted on the marginalized or the oppressed. The ultimate yardstick of this concept of peace is the productivity of the existing symbolic and material order without questioning its own legitimization as a narrative knowledge. (55)
Epistemic violence (56) is a precondition for to the explicit, unmediated use of violence, which as such is granted a name and is addressed as a "conflict" or a "violence". It is realized in the formation of conceptual apparatuses, knowledge, consciousness, ideological orientations, and consensus or self-evidence. This is the aim of normalizing education, in the service of the self-evidence and the hegemonic order of things. (57)
Only when this violence is successful in producing the subject (58) and her self-evidence as well as the horizons of her predetermined consensus is it possible that she and her compatriots/rivals will become good soldiers and destroy the Other while manifesting bravery or activating efficient violence to save the collective or ("her")self.
Without effective educational apparatuses (teachers and schools are only one element in a much richer arsenal) there will be no room for the subjectification of the subject (who actually functions as an object) and for successful delegitimization of all other language games and their subjectifications. In the absence of normalizing education or in face of its deconstruction it will be difficult to establish a stable consensus which will provide a suitable legitimization of the hegemonic narrative and its social matrix of power. In such a utopian situation it will be impossible to actualize an effective direct collective violence which is normally conceived as a just, unavoidable, use of force. (59)
The various versions of peace education with their special relations to the concept of universal human rights share a modernist view of consensus, which should be addressed. Some of the peace education theorists and activists share very naive conceptions regarding the role of rationality, good intentions, or openness in the meeting with the Other as sure ways to guarantee a change in attitude to the Other and consensus. (60) Even in its most advanced forms, for example, the Habermasian project, within this modernist orientation the concept of truth is based on a consensus of a collective universal subject. But the very notions of consensus, truth, or norms, which are ideally articulated freely and jointly in an undistorted dialogue, are challenged by postmodernists such as Lyotard in a manner which is extremely relevant to the rhetoric of peace education. For Lyotard,
Consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end.
Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy. This double observation…
destroys a belief that still underlines Habermas's research,
namely, that humanity as a collective (universal) subject seeks
its common emancipation through the regularization of the “moves”
permitted in all language games and that the legitimacy of any
statement resides in its contributing to that emancipation. (61)
Normalizing education is founded on an unchallenged consensus and it is committed to securing its self-evidence. As part of its function it is very important for normalizing education to conceal its foundations and avoid transparency (or secure only a certain kind of critique and transparency, which is the same thing) of the apparatuses it uses. This is in order to reproduce the subjectification or the human subject as some-thing and not as some-one. This process includes the production of his/her potential violence/productivity and the aims, ideals, interests, and strivings for love and peace - as well as categories such as "justice". All these enable the subject to function as an agent of the reproduction of the system. In "peace" the invisibility of the violence, which guarantees the present order, is best secured, the hegemonic violence is unchallenged, and counter-violence is successfully delegitimized. In "peace" the subject is efficiently sent off on the quest to realize her human potentials to become other than what she is constructed to be. In such a "peace" and stable normality (62) forgetfulness rules and humans are not ready to be called upon by their destiny. Normalizing education sets for them the relevant quests, or real dreams, goals, and enemies, and all the rest is a history of struggling efficiencies – until something totally other intervenes and challenges the hegemonic self-evidence and the order of things. The constant subjectification of the subject goes on unchallenged.
The process of subjectification does not relate solely to individuals. This kind of objectivization and closure is no less present in the normalization of collectives. Normalizing education cannot reproduce the horizons of the collective and the closure of its identity without the enclosure of the Other and her otherness. Yet, as Stuart Hall puts it,
The unities which identities proclaim are, in fact, constructed
within the play of power and exclusion, and are the result, not
of a natural and inevitable or primordial totality but of the naturalized,
overdetermined process of “closure”. (63)
This is an implicit critique of the agenda of peace education and its propositions. It problematizes the concept of violence, which makes possible the will for preventing "unjust" violence between and within opponent collectives. It problematizes the hidden procedure of legitimization/delegitimization and the very possibility of an unproblematic evaluation and consensus.
It is also important to question the unproblematic introduction of conflict resolution skills and knowledge. From the postmodern perspective these strategies are revealed as one of many conflicting voices fighting over the position of silencing their Others, in a context of constant semiotic bombardment. Peace education is unveiled as a position situated in the narrativization of the individual and collective "self". As such, it is part and parcel of the conflicting violences competing over hegemony. In this space hegemony ensures its own veiling as violence by producing its justification, or in the case of a final defeat of its rivals by ensuring totality, closure, sameness, harmonious order, and "peace". In relation to Levinas's concept of war we can say that in "peace" the "same does not find again its priority over the other" since the otherness of the Other has totally vanished. (64) This is where the project of conflict resolution skills within peace education is situated.
Propagating and bestowing conflict resolution "skills" is ultimately nothing less than a mode of violence which is committed to reproducing the present order of things and its ideals. There is no room here for the totally other except for the given facts, quests, and ideological horizons. This holds as long as it is instrumental and effective, yet it is precisely where it is practically most needed that its impotence is most dramatically manifested. This is manifested in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle. In not even one of the many peace education projects in this spot on the globe is there an attempt to challenge the dialectics of the Israeli Independence Day and its concept of the Holocaust-Exile-Redemption, or the Palestinian concept of the Nakbah. The violences of the two representation systems of the conflicting memories and their instrumentalizations within the rival ethnocentric collectives (65) are taken for granted by all of today's peace education projects. Conflict resolution skills education is threatened even by approaching an issue such as relating to the national day of triumph/defeat. It fears treating it as part of the questioning of who are "we" and what is worthy life or death for “us”. It turns away from questions such as what kind of togetherness is possible/bearable/longed-for and what are the ways to approach such a future - along "practical" questions which are for each of the parties fundamentally life-and death struggle worthy questions. It refuses questioning the language that should be the language of the dialogue/conflict or: what are the starting points, the horizons and the aims of the dialogue/struggle within which peace education is promoted/rejected?
Research has illuminated the first steps of departing from the safe ground of "coexistence" projects within the present order into less restricted and controlled elaboration. It manifests the structural asymmetry and its violences, which are intent on maintaining Israeli hegemony within which peace education, "dialogue aimed at peaceful coexistence", and conflict resolution projects flourish. The moment of departure from the hegemony of one side dictating the agenda of "peace" for its Other is also the moment of exposure of what education in conflict-resolution skills is dedicated to veiling and protecting. Even the most advanced research on this issue in Israel/Palestine still treats it with positivistic optimism and speaks of "dilemmas" in realizing ideal coexistence paradigms in the asymmetrical intercourse within which peace education is realized. (66)
The current swelling Palestinian demand in Israel is to problematize the status quo and challenge this order and the kind of peace it longs for. The Israeli hegemonic ideologies and central political powers have so far refused to question, let alone abolish the structural violence which establishes the conditions not only for the systematic oppression of the Palestinians citizens but also of securing the very existence of the State of Israel. This trend is not totally disconnected with the hegemonic Palestinian attitude of denying the legitimacy of any Jewish sovereign existence in Israel, or Palestine, as they insist on calling it. For the Palestinians’ part, peace education and dialogue should lead, ultimately, to nothing less than regaining Palestine and the abolition of the Zionist project. Only within this context is each of the struggling collectives willing to promote projects furthering conflict resolution skills and those oriented to achieving "just peace". This only shows how education in conflict resolution skills within peace education takes part in the reproduction of symbolic, mental, economic, cultural, and political struggles in this arena. It is an arena that hosts many competing camps contesting for hegemony over representing "reality" as it really is, reality as it actually should be interpreted, or as it should be best deconstructed/reconstructed. It is served or reproduced by subjects whose agency guarantees the invisible violences which name the Other, his violences, injustice, mistakes, and potentials for improvement which will render possible making peace with him. This "earthly city" produces representations of reality, which pretend to be different, more accurate, or more just than competing representations and evaluations of "reality". It produces subjects who will strive to reproduce, change, or destroy this "reality" and its representations or evaluations as part of the meaninglessness which ultimately fills the whole of such a world of competing representations, evaluations, interpretations, and consensuses.
Peace education within critical, feminist, multiculturalist, and ecological-oriented groups dwells on the same quicksand, even when using functionalist or pragmatic orientations instead of an idealist or transcendentalist rhetoric. This is so as long as these groups do not address the challenges presented here.
All this, however, does not mean that we should
accept all of Lyotard’s, Foucault’s, or Levinas's
alternatives. Nor does it imply that there are no emancipatory dimensions
in different versions of peace education or that there is no difference
that makes a difference between the victim and the victimizer, war, general
health care, and well-being, poverty, and illiteracy. But it does
mean that there is a need to decipher the material, historical and
political context of normalizing education and challenging it with a counter-education
that will not be anything other than one more version of normalizing education.
If counter-education ought seriously to address violence and be committed to peace, and we do believe that this is implicit in its essence, counter-education should not follow the positive Utopia of peace education and its naive universalistic essentialism. It should address and overcome its philosophical assumptions and challenge the politics of peace education while avoiding the kind of universalism and violences it is committed to overcome. It should avoid, at the same time, reintroducing violence as "justified" counter-violence. This attempt is embedded in its negative Utopia.
While introducing itself as a Utopia, counter-education cannot find comfort in an abstract negativism which negates the illusions of consensus among individuals and collectives that are produced to perpetuate meaninglessness and productivity of contingent symbolic economy. It should not abandon the imperative of transcendence as the human mode of existence. Its Utopia, however, must be a negative Utopia. Within it there are no positive universals such as “justice” or “human rights” but transcendent negative imperatives for openness such as responding to injustice and worthy suffering. Within it there is no commitment to universal "truth" but an infinite responsibility to transcending the fabricated "truths" and their violences which they represent and serve. Within counter-education there is rejection even of the universal validity of the pleasure principle, and it represents, instead, the presence of pain and the possibility of transcending it into worthy suffering. Counter-education offers a need for a radically different concept of peace and an alternative conception of education. This, however, should be not only in face of the naivete or violence of the hegemonic concepts of peace and education within current peace education.
Counter-education should today face the changing postmodern conditions, and within it the questions of responsibility (ethics), life (ontology), and knowledge (epistemology). Violence in the era of cyberspace and violence within cyberspace present us with additional challenges on the psychic, conceptual, and political levels, and counter-education should address it also by concrete political action. Within this arena the responsibility of the subject, and the very possibility of a subject and responsibility, are impossible to be conceived in the traditional way. However, violences are not to be understood as opposed to "real" responsibility. Violences signify irresponsibility (of the Other) and are to be understood as making possible the violences of counter-ethics and counter-responsibilities.
The possibility of a non-repressive consensus, the possibility of meaning, the possibility of justice in respect of the cyberspace dwellers and the hardware producers who work for less than 50 dollars a month and are structurally deprived of the potentials of their work, needs a brave reconceptualization. Counter-education not only has no positive Utopia; it also looks for a new language that has not yet been born. This does not mean that it should be silent and passive before the current reality.
The responsibility of counter-education is not naive. It acknowledges the importance of deconstructing the naivete and violence of the quest for challenging injustice and violence. Yet it refuses relativism and escapism. It is a serious commitment, a responsibility in a Godless world where the logic of capitalism has the upper hand.
The impetus of counter-education springs from the ethical I. Yet the responsibility of the ethical I has no words; it is pre-rational even if it is always historically embedded.
Counter-education acknowledges that an unavoidable
rupture deprives the ethical I of the moral
I. (67)There is a rift between the pre-rational
ethical responsibility toward the Others and the rational/moral dialogue
with the others, which does not negate their otherness. Such a dialogue
is not a given reality, it is a Utopia. The Utopia of such a dialogue is
a negative Utopia, a concrete negative Utopia.
Only as concrete negative Utopia is the dialogue able to produce a conversation that is not a contingent manifestation of power relations and symbolic economies, that merely reflects the omnipotence, and the whole-presence, of simulacra. Such a negative Utopia acknowledges not only reason, politics, and compromises, but also the presence of power in the formatted, conceptualized, manipulated, otherness of the Other. This is as far as its negative dimension is concerned. As a concrete Utopia it is present as an actual potential to be realized, and it is realizable even in microscopic arenas and for instant hindrances of the continuum. Its historical situatedness enforces its presence within concrete power-relations which it addresses within its openness to infinity, to the totally other than the given reality. These power-relations which govern its context constantly attempt to invade the dialogue, to cause a perpetual distortion that permits no ideal speech situation. As such, the dialogue is committed to transcend the realm of self-evidence and its agencies within the dialogue and its participants. Its awareness of its conceptual and historical situatedness as well as its commitment to reflection and to its own transcendence constitutes a central difference between it and peace education. As such, it cannot avoid being a concrete praxis.
The realization of negative Utopia is the imperative
of counter-education. Even when realized to a certain degree on a specific
occasion it can never offer peace of mind or symmetrical relations. Yet
it can offer sensibility to be called upon by something totally other,
by the Other as a demand for responsibility, seriousness, and love. One
should ask, facing counter-education, but what about positive manifestations
of meaning, truth, consensus, justice, and peace? Counter-education does
not promise such gifts. These, in their positive form, remain in the hands
of peace education and its rivals.
Notes
(1) Charles F. T. Howlett, "John Dewey and Nicholas Murray Butler: Contrasting Conceptions of Peace Education in the Twenties", Educational Theory, 37: 4 (Fall 1987): 448.
(2) John Dewey, "Lectures in China 1919-1920", in Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen (eds.), John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919-1920, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1973: 277.
(3) Johan Galtung, Peace: Research, Education, Action: Essays in Peace Research, I, Copenhagen 1975: 262.
(4) John W. Friesen and Edith Elizabeth Wieler, "New robes for an Old Order: Multicultural Education, Peace Education, Cooperative Learning and Progressive Education", The Journal of Educational Thought, 22: 1 (April 1988): 50
(5) Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1988): 160.
(6) Ian M. Harris, “Editor’s introduction”, Peabody Journal of Education, 71: 3 (1996), pp. 1-11.
(7) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Modernity, postmodernity and multiculturalism in Israeli education", in I. Gur-Ze'ev (ed. ). Modernity, Postmodernity, and Education, (Tel Aviv: Ramot Tel-Aviv University Press, 1999): 7-50.
(8) Johan Galtung, "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research", Journal of Peace Research, 6 (1969): 167.
(9) Ian M. Harris (ed), "Peace Education in a Postmodern World", a special issue of Peabody Journal of Education 71: 3 (1996).
(10) Ruth S. Meyers, "Peace Education: Problems and Promise", Women's Studies Quarterly XII: 2 (Summer 1984): 21.
(11) Brigit Brock-Utne, Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective, (New York : Pergamon Press, 1983).
(12) Marcia L. Johnson, "Trends in peace education",
http://www.indiana.edu/~ssdc/pcdig.htm
15.11.1999
(13) Marguerite K. Rivage-Seul, "Peace education: Imagination and pedagogy of the oppressed", Harvard Educational Review 57: 2 (May 1987): 157.
(14) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism (Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University Press, 1996). (in Hebrew).
(15) Henriette Dahan-Kalev, "Mizrakhim in Israel: A Postmodern Point of View", in Ilan Gur-Ze'ev (ed.). Modernity, Postmodernity, and Education (Tel Aviv: Ramot Tel-Aviv University Press, 1999).
(16) UNESCO, “Thinking Ahead 1977”, p. 62, in Brock-Utne, 1983: 2.
(17) Linda Alcoff, "Culture Feminism versus Post-Structuralism", Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13: 31 (1988): 405-435
(18) Juergen Habermas, "Two hundred years' hindsight", in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.).), Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, London and (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997): 141.
(19) Galtung (1969).
(20) Gavriel Salomon and Baruch Nevo, "Peace Education: An Active Field in need for Research”, paper presented at a Peace Education Conference, The University of Haifa, (November 7-8, 1999):5-6
(21) Ibid. 6.
(22) Betty A. Reardon, Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1988): 69.
(23) Ibid. 72.
(24) UNESCO, ILO UNDP and UNICEF launch a joint message on occasion of World Teachers' Day, October 1998, http://mirror-us.unesco.org/opi/eng/unescopress/98-209e.htm (4/01/2000).
(25) Galtung (1975): 29.
(26) Ibid. 251
(27) Benjamin Chetkow-Yanoov, "Conflict-resolution Skills Can be Taught", Peabody Journal of Education 7: 3 (1996): 12-28.
(28) Harris, 1996.
(29) Friesen and Wieler, 1988: 51.
(30) Ibid.
(31) Kristi Rennebohm-Franz, "Toward a Critical Social Consciousness in Children: Multicultural Peace Education in a First Grade Classroom”, Theory into Practice 35: 4 (Autumn 1996): 266.
(32) Rivage-Seul 1987: 160
(33) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy", Educational Theory 48: 4 (1988): 463.
(34) Rivage-Seul 1987: 162
(35) Ibid.
(36) Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, IV, XVI. (London and Cambridge: W. Heinemann, 1957): 415.
(37) Plato, "Phaedo", The Portable Plato (New York: Viking Press, 1950): 201.
(38) Emmanuel Levinas, "Peace and proximity", in Adriaan
T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert
Bernasconi (eds.), Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical
Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996): 162.
(39) St. Augustine (1955): XV., IV: 425.
(40) Ibid.
(41) Ibid.
(42) Ibid., p. 427
(43) Levinas (1996): 162.
(44) Ibid, 163
(45) Ibid.
(46) Iain Chambers, "Waiting on the end of the world?" in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996): 209.
(47) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
(48) Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.)
(49) Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980).
(50) Ibid: 115.
(51) Ibid : 118
(52) Ibid : 131
(53) Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, translated by A. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1995): 210-211.
(54) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Destroying the Other's Collective Memory, New York: Peter Lang (forthcoming).
(55) Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Benington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1991):27.
(56) Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Tavistoc, 1965): 261-262
(57) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Jan Masschelein, and Nigel Blake, "Reflectivity, reflection and counter-education, Studies in Philosophy and Education 20 (2001): 93-106.
(58) Homi Bhabha, "Culture's in-between", in Stuart Hall and Paul de Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996: 54-55).
(59) Gur-Ze'ev, Ibid.
(60) In Salomon and Nevo, 1999.
(61) Lyotard 1991: 65-66.
(62) Dan Bar-On, The Indescribable and the Undiscussable; Reconstructing Human Discourse After Trauma (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999): 261.
(63) Stuart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs Identity?" in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1996: 5.
(64) Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity", in Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987): 51.
(65) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "The Morality of Acknowledging/not Acknowledging the Other's Holocaust/Genocide", Journal of Moral Education, 27: 2 (1998): 161-178.
(66) Ifat Maoz, "Multiple conflicts and Competing Agenda: A Framework for Conceptualizing Structured Encounters Between Groups in Conflict: The Case of Coexistence Project of Jews and Palestinians in Israel", Journal of Peace Psychology (forthcoming).
(67) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Jan Masschelein, and Nigel Blake, "Reflectivity, Reflection and Counter-Education", p. 103; Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Postmodernism, Values and Moral Education in Israel”, in Yaacov Iram, Samul Scholnicov, Jonathan Cohen and Elli Schachter (eds.), Crossroads: Vlues and Education in Israeli Society, Jerusalem: Ministry of Education Chief Scietist’s Office (2001), pp. , Jerusalem: Ministry of Education Chief Scietist’s Office (2001), pp. 91-155 (in Hebrew).
(68) Levinas 1987: 47-60.