Rights-based education and conflict: a cross-national study of rights discourse in textbooks

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which rights-based education is utilised in textbooks from conflict-affected countries. Drawing on a unique dataset of 528 secondary social science textbooks from 71 countries from 1966 to 2008, we analyse factors that predict a rights discourse in texts. We find that textbooks from conflict-affected nations are significantly less likely to emphasise a rights-based discourse, while more recently published textbooks from more democratic countries are more likely to emphasise a rights discourse. Our findings have ramifications for curricular reform and rights-based education in conflict-affected nations.

Keywords:

• education
• conflict
• human rights
• textbooks
• multi-level analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Francisco Ramirez, John Meyer, Susan Olzak, Gina Biancarosa, members of the Comparative Sociology Workshop at Stanford University, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank the staff at the George Eckert Institute in Braunscheweig for their assistance and textbook collection, which was crucial to the compilation of our dataset. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference for the Comparative and International Education Society.

Notes

1. In their analysis of the ratification of human rights treaties, Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui (2005) find that governments tend to ratify human rights treaties to seek legitimacy even while violating these human rights.

2. We use an expanded and updated data set with a higher number of textbooks. Previous publications, such as Meyer et al. (2010), utilised an earlier version of the data with a smaller number of observations.

3. One factor was extracted with an Eigen value of 5.13. The index has a mean of 0.34 and a standard deviation of 0.34.

4. We also tested other measures of conflict from three different conflict datasets: the Correlates of War (COW) dataset on intra-state wars; Major Episodes of Political Violence (MEPV), and Political Instability Task Force (PITF) on internal wars and failures of governance. However, PRIO explains more of the variation in the discussion of rights; other measures of conflict only classify conflicts as those with more than 1000 deaths. Our model accounts for micro-level conflicts linked to inter-group tensions on a smaller scale.

5. Since HLM level 2 values cannot vary, all countries had to be coded as either conflict-affected or not. Thus, countries that experienced any conflict during the period of our analysis, 1966–2008, were coded as 1.

6. The year of 1994 is the mean of the country-level (i.e. level 2) data. For HLM, level 2 values cannot vary, thus we utilise the number of INGOs from 1994.

7. The average GDP refers to an average value of GDP per capita of a country for the years for which we had textbooks from the country. We then took the natural logarithm of this average GDP value of each country.

8. We tried random effects on the publication year but this was not significant in any of the models.

9. We do not show model 3a in the table.

10. We also test the interaction between conflict and democracy; however since the result is non-significant, we do not include this in our final model.

11. While the interaction between democracy and conflict was not statistically significant in our model, this is likely due to the limitations of our small sample size.