Nationalistic education and its colourful role in intergroup prejudice reduction: lessons from Albania

ABSTRACT

Contributors to the education-as-enlightenment approach maintain that education helps to create less prejudicial individuals. This conclusion, emanating mainly from data collected in western democracies that apply multicultural education might not apply to countries where education’s primary goal is the establishment of a sense of national unity and belonging. On the one hand, nationalist education could reduce prejudices against groups not targeted by the ethnonationalist narrative – e.g. through positive comments about them or by not mentioning them at all. On the other hand, education might produce more prejudice towards groups targeted as the hostile Other through a nation-building narrative. We test this argument with a simple random sample of a cellphone public opinion survey collected in Albania in 2015. By framing our analysis inside the intergroup contact theory, we build two sets of models, the first explaining respondents’ prejudice levels towards Greeks and the second explaining respondents’ prejudice levels towards homosexuals. We found that more education predicted respondents’ higher prejudice levels towards Greeks, a group targeted by the Albanian ethnonationalist narrative as the hostile Other, whereas it did not significantly affect prejudices towards homosexuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergroup contact theory
• ethnonationalist education
• Albanians
• Greeks
• homosexuals

Acknowledgments

We presented an earlier version of this paper at the 12th international conference DisCo 2018: Open Education as a Way to a Knowledge Society, Prague, June 26-27. We thank Ian Beseda and other members of our panel for their engagement with our paper during the discussion session. Geoffrey Wodtke read an earlier version of the manuscript and provided valuable comments. We are grateful to all those who helped with collecting the data, namely Arbresha Mehmetaj, Ardit Konjufca, Arton Demolli, Blerina Islami, Blerina Zeqiri, Blerta Morina, Brigita Rexha, Drenushë Osmani, Erenik Dujaka, Gazmend Obrazhda, Gentiana Sahiti, Habibe Ademi, Lekë Hoxha, Përparim Hashani, Rrezart Dema, Valmira Hoxha and Vildane Xhemajli. Eno Minka from the Vodafone Albania helped with technical issues during the survey period. All responsibilities for errors and misconceptions remain with the authors.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded with a small grand offered by the University of Kentucky's Department of Political Science through our colleagues, D. Stephen Voss.

Notes on contributors

Ridvan Peshkopia

Ridvan Peshkopia is Lecturer of Political Science at the University for Business and Technology, Kosovë. He received an MA in Diplomacy from the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, and MA and PhD in Political Science with the University of Kentucky. He also spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the George Washington University. He publishes in several disciplines and sub-disciplines including international relations, film studies, social theory, political behaviour, migration studies and epistemology.

Konstantinos Giakoumis

Konstantinos Giakoumis is Associate Professor of History, Arts and their Methods at the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Linguistic Communication at LOGOS University College, Tirana, Albania. He is a doctoral degree holder from the CBOMGS, the University of Birmingham. His research interests extend to the political, social, economic, cultural and pedagogical history of the Balkans from the Middle Ages to early modern times. His publications include studies on the role of education in national identity construction with a focus on the Western Balkans from the nineteenth century to the present.