Deconstructing resistance towards textbook revisions: the securitisation of history textbooks and the Cyprus conflict

ABSTRACT

This article investigates Greek Cypriot ‘discourses of resistance’ to potential revisions of history textbooks as part of a wider peace education process. Although changing history textbooks towards a more inclusive and pluralistic narrative is arguably a necessary step for a sustainable peace, efforts to do so have met with strong resistance and ultimately failed. Existing studies have illuminated the problematic historical content of these textbooks and often point towards the controversies raised, but rarely do they offer an in-depth analysis of these discourses about textbooks. This study seeks to fill this gap by deconstructing these ‘discourses of resistance’ to reach a deeper understanding of why this aspect of peacebuilding has failed. Empirical findings through an analysis of interviews, policy documents, newspapers, speeches and circulars indicate a pronounced link between education and security, which has until recently remained at the periphery of peacebuilding research. Discourses of resistance present changes to history textbooks as a betrayal and threat to the nationalist struggle, a process I argue constitutes the securitisation of history textbooks.

KEYWORDS:

• Peacebuilding
• securitisation
• resistance
• history textbooks
• peace education
• Cyprus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Eleni Christodoulou http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3865-1904

Notes on contributor

Eleni Christodoulou is a postdoctoral research fellow and coordinator of the research field Peace and Conflict at the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) for International Textbook Research in Germany. She received a PhD in Political Science (funded by the ESRC) on the ‘Politics of Peace Education’ from the University of Birmingham, UK. She was also among the lead authors of the UNESCO Guide on Embedding ESD in Textbooks for Sustainable Development, and has worked with government bodies, national and international organisations on issues related to Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. She has also worked as a History and Politics teacher at the secondary school level. Currently, she is leading a project on preventing violent extremism through education, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Notes

1 For a historical overview of UNESCO’s role in history textbook revisions, see Pertii Luntinen, ‘School History Textbook Revision by and under the Auspices of UNESCO: Part I’, Internationale Schulbuchforschung 10, no. 4 (1988): 337–48.

2 ‘The Universal Peace Congress’, The American Advocate of Peace and Arbitration 51, no. 4/5 (September and October 1889): 101. There was a total of 33 Peace Congresses, held almost every year (though there was a longer pause during the First World War) with the last one being at the end of August 1939, a few days before the beginning of the Second World War. These events were highly regarded and supported by political elites. See David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 40.

3 The participant was Mrs Fisher-Lette from Frankfurt. Her paper was entitled ‘Teaching of History in Schools’ and it was read in association with Resolution I of the Educational Committee. Proceedings from the Second Universal Peace Congress, (London, 14th–19th July, 1890): 87–8.

4 See Yiannis Papadakis, History Education in Divided Cyprus: Α Comparison of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Schoolbooks on the ‘History of Cyprus’ (Nicosia: PRIO Cyprus Centre, 2008); Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Denise Bentrovato, Narrating and Teaching the Nation: The Politics of Education in Pre- and Post-Genocide Rwanda (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2015).

5 By this I do not contend that they are not nationalist or do not disrupt the peace process but rather posit that we need to go beyond these labels and merely rejecting these positions, to try and understanding them within the lens of empathy that peace education aims to teach in the first place. One group’s ‘spoiler’ is another group’s ‘saviour’. The term is usually used to describe those actors that are directly involved in the conflict and act against peace processes. For an outline of the impact of ‘spoilers’ on peace processes see Edward Newman and Oliver P. Richmond, eds., Challenges to Peacebuilding: Managing Spoilers during Conflict Resolution (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2006).

6 In this study, I focus on Greek-Cypriot resistance to peace education, and therefore when referring to resistance I am focusing on resistance in the Republic of Cyprus.

7 Lynn Davies, Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos (London: Routledge, 2004); Tony Gallagher, Education in Divided Societies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Elizabeth A. Cole, ed., Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). Lynn Davies has shown how educational practices construct a world of two opposing categories of ‘us’ the good, brave, ‘victims’ versus ‘them’ the malevolent, evil ‘perpetrators’.

8 This was part of a wider project that investigated how and why these discourses became hegemonic using theoretical insights from Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to expose the conditions of possibility/impossibility by reference to the historical and political systems of ‘power/knowledge relations’. Although these are strongly interrelated issues, in this paper, I focus on the ‘what’ of these discourses of resistance rather than on how they become hegemonic by operationalising a truth regime that marginalises the discourses that support textbook revision.

9 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 27.

10 Exceptions to this are Mutsumi Hirano, History Education and International Relations: A Case Study of Diplomatic Disputes over Japanese Textbooks (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009) and Mälksoo, Maria, ‘Memory Must Be Defended: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security’, Security Dialogue 46, no. 3 (2015): 221–37, though the latter does not explicitly mention history education or textbooks but rather focuses on historical memory and ontological security theory, and neither of them take a strong (resistance to) peacebuilding focus. For a study of the relationship between memory politics and ontological security through the lens of war museums and its impact on Sino-Japanese relations, see Karl Gustafsson, ‘Memory Politics and Ontological Security in Sino-Japanese Relations’, Asian Studies Review 38, no. 1 (2014): 71–86.

11 Although a study of how history textbook revisions can be desecuritised falls outside the scope of this article, some suggestions for future research and practice are given in the concluding section.

12 Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2012). For research that engages with both these levels, see Mario Novelli and Sean Higgins, ‘The Violence of Peace and the Role of Education: Insights from Sierra Leone’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 41, no. 1 (2016): 32–45. The ‘resistance to peacebuilding’ literature is part of a critical approach to peacebuilding that questions the Western assumptions of the liberal peace project.

13 Roger Mac Ginty defines ‘liberal peace’ as ‘the dominant form of internationally supported peacemaking’ and as a broader term that ‘encompasses the socio-cultural norms associated with peacemaking’. Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 20, 22.

14 This resistance may or may not be justified, depending on one’s own political perspective and on the reason given, but an analysis of this is beyond the scope and purpose of this article.

15 Ibid., 10.

16 Ibid., 7.

17 Denise Bentrovato, Karina V. Korostelina and Martina Schulze, eds., History Can Bite: History Education in Divided and Postwar Societies (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016), 16.

18 Falk Pingel, ‘Can Truth be Negotiated: History Textbook Revision as a Means to Reconciliation’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617, no. 1 (2008): 181–98; Karina V. Korostelina and Simona Lässig, eds., History Education and Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Reconsidering Joint Textbook Projects (New York: Routledge, 2013). For an analysis of the emergence of textbooks (and bilateral textbook commissions), as an international relations issue in Northeast Asia after 1945, see Daniel C. Sneider, ‘The War Over Words: History Textbooks and International Relations in Northeast Asia’, History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories, ed. Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel C Sneider (London: Routledge, 2011), 246–68.

19 Mario Carretero, Constructing Patriotism: Teaching History and Memories in Global Worlds (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

20 Michalinos Zembylas and Froso Kambani, ‘The Teaching of Controversial Issues During Elementary-Level History Instruction: Greek-Cypriot History Teachers’ Perceptions and Emotions’, Theory & Research in Social Education 40, no. 2 (2012): 110.

21 Zvi Bekerman and Michalinos Zembylas, Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

22 The circularity is not, I argue, a problem that can be ‘solved’ as it reflects the co-constitutive nature of the conflict dynamics (e.g. history, identity and education) and is therefore an endogenous characteristic of peace education processes. Therefore, the ‘why’ question turns from one of causation to one that explains the situation with recourse to why some things are made possible, whereas others are not – what Roxanne Lynn Doty prefers to call ‘how-possible’ questions.

23 Jennifer Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (1999): 229. Roxanne L. Doty, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1993): 298.

24 John P. Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 23.

25 For a discussion about the timing of history teaching in the aftermath of conflict, see Pingel ‘Can Truth Be Negotiated’, 181–98.

26 As Panayiotis Persianis argues: ‘The Church leaders used the schools to enhance their political power and later they used their political power to support the schools and protect them from the Colonial Government interference.’ Historically the Church had founded and financially supported many schools in Cyprus, and priests often taught at these schools. It was historically seen as the ‘guardian’ of the national language, the national sentiments and the national identity’ of the Greek Cypriots. Panayiotis K. Persianis, Church and State in Cyprus Education (Nicosia: Volaris Print Works, 1978), Preface, 17.

27 According to the Greek junta, Cyprus was a state that was subordinate to Greece and enosis should be achieved by force, but the large majority of Greek Cypriots were against these hardliners.

28 Gürel, Ayla, Mete Hatay and Christalla Yakinthou, An Overview of Events and Perceptions, Displacement in Cyprus – Consequences of Civil and Military Strife, PRIO Cyprus Centre Report 5 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2012).

29 Ibid., 9–10. The fact that tens of thousands of mainland Turkish citizens have been encouraged by Turkish governments to move to the northern part of Cyprus has been an extremely controversial issue, strongly criticised by the Greek-Cypriot side as a violation of international law. The figures tend to be over-estimated from the Greek-Cypriot authorities, sometimes reaching 160,000. According to a report by Mete Hatay based on his research and the 2006 census in the north, the number of these ‘settlers’ from Turkey who have received citizenship (and hence the right to vote) is around 42,000 or 24% of the population. This number does not include temporary residents from Turkey, for example, students or immigrant workers. He argues that the figures from the Greek-Cypriot authorities are misleading as they include Turkish nationals who do not have voting rights. Mete Hatay, Is the Turkish Cypriot Population Shrinking? An Overview of the Ethno – Demography of Cyprus in the Light of the Preliminary Results of the 2006 Turkish-Cypriot Census. PRIO Cyprus Centre Report 2 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2007).

30 Jean Christou, ‘Stelios Award for “The Ultimate Bicommunal Project: Life”’, Cyprus Mail, October 26, 2015. http://cyprus-mail.com/2015/10/26/stelios-award-for-the-ultimate-bicommunal-project-life/. 2015 was the first year that this foundation awarded a couple for their intercommunal marriage under the category ‘life’. According to the founder, Sir Stelios Hadji-Ioannou, their marriage was the ‘ultimate form’ of bicommunal co-operation and their child ‘one of the first bi-communal babies’ since 1974. Since 2017, there is a new category specific to awarding couples and it is called ‘Married couples/partners in life’. From 2015 to 2017, the Foundation has given a total number of 14 such awards. http://stelios.org/stelios-award-cyprus/blog.html.

31 Nathalie Tocci, EU Accession Dynamics and Conflict Resolution: Catalysing Peace or Consolidating Partition in Cyprus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

32 ‘Cyprus may have missed its last chance for reunification’, The Economist, July 9, 2017. https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21724899-collapse-talks-turkish-occupied-north-makes-deal-look-unattainable-cyprus-may.

33 Niyazi Kizilyürek, ‘National Memory and Turkish-Cypriot Textbooks’, Internationale Schulbuchforschung 21, no. 4 (1999): 388.

34 Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

35 Contrary to the Greek-Cypriot struggle to revert the status quo, in the north there is a struggle to make the partition permanent. This policy of permanence for the northern part is reflected in the way the Turkish-Cypriot street names of heroes replaced the Greek-Cypriot ones, only Turkish place names were used, and new memorials were built that strengthened the nationalist sentiment. Yiannis Papadakis, Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 149.

36 Miranda Christou, ‘A Double Imagination: Memory and Education in Cyprus’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24, no. 2 (2006): 290. This article also discusses interpretations of the slogan in schools as well as the modifications it has been subjected to over the years.

37 For a discussion of changes to the dynamics of the communal narrative of the missing persons after the exhumations that began in 2004, see Christalla Yakinthou, ‘The Quiet Deflation of Den Xehno? Changes in the Greek Cypriot Communal Narrative on the Missing Persons in Cyprus’, Cyprus Review 20, no. 1 (2008): 15–34.

38 ‘Δεν Ξεχνώ το «Δεν Ξεχνώ»’ 25 September, 2016. http://www.antepithesi.gr/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2321:den-ksexno-to-den-ksexno&Itemid=303.

39 See inter alia Loris Koullapis, ‘The Subject of History in the Greek Cypriot Educational System: A Subset of the Greek Nation’ in Clio in the Balkans: The Politics of History Education, ed. Christina Koullouri (Thessaloniki: CDRSCE, 2002), 406–422; Spyros Spyrou, ‘Constructing “the Turk” as an Enemy: The Complexity of Stereotypes in Children’s Everyday Worlds’, South European Society and Politics 11, no. 1 (2006): 95–110; Papadakis, History Education in Divided Cyprus; Bekerman and Zembylas, Teaching Contested Narratives.

40 Eleftherios Klerides, ‘Thinking Comparatively about the Textbook: Oscillating between the National, the International and the Global’, Journal of International Cooperation in Education 14, no. 2 (2011): 51–65.

41 A case in point is the history textbook ‘History of Cyprus’ used for the lower secondary school level which has remained largely the same (just reprinted) since 1994. History of Cyprus, 7th–9th Grade. 2013. A. Pantelidou, K. Protopapa & S. Giallourides. Nicosia: Curriculum Development Unit (CDU), Ministry of Education and Culture.

42 In the northern part of the island, revised and improved history textbooks were quickly withdrawn after the change of government. Although the left-wing Republican Turkish Party (CTP) published new textbooks in 2004, that were supporting unification of the island and even had a critical stance towards Turkey, this educational policy change was short-lived and was reversed as soon as a right-wing party came to power again. See POST RI, Textual and Visual Analysis of the Lower Secondary School Cyprus History Textbooks Studied Between 2004 and 2009 (Nicosia: POST RI, 2010).

43 Felicitas Macgilchrist & Tom Van Hout, ‘Ethnographic Discourse Analysis and Social Science’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (January 2011). http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1600/3107 (accessed June 12, 2017).

44 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

45 Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 410.

46 The interviews were part of a wider study on the politics of peace education in Cyprus. The data analysed here emerged from questions on peoples’ views, attitudes and beliefs regarding the role of history textbooks and (resistance to) proposed textbook revisions.

47 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

48 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’, 229.

49 Adapted from John, W. Cresswell, Research Design: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks, CA; Sage, 1994), 155.

50 More recently these discourses are being expressed by the more ‘progressive’ members of the conservative party DISY, of which the party’s previous leader Nicos Anastasiades has been president since 2013. Anastasiades has so far shown strong commitment to the UN peace talks.

51 Eleni Christodoulou, ‘The Politics of Peace Education in Cyprus’ (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2015).

52 Max Weber, transl. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90.

53 The aim is to expose the nature of predominant interpretations while demonstrating the inherently political nature of these discourses (see Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’). However, I do not claim that all negative representations fall neatly under this ‘ideal-type’ category. This approach is useful as it allows certain common patterns, themes and strategies to emerge from the empirical analysis, which though may not be shared by all hegemonic discourses and to the same degree, they nevertheless seem to have persisted over time and across policy, regardless of which political party was in power.

54 Education Reform Committee (ERC), ‘Democratic and Human Education in the Euro-Cypriot State’, Report of the Educational Reform Committee (Nicosia: MOEC, 2004).

55 For a detailed study of this initiative, see Michalinos Zembylas, ‘Ethnic Division in Cyprus and a Policy Initiative on Promoting Peaceful Coexistence: Toward an Agonistic Democracy for Citizenship Education’, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 6, no. 1 (2011): 53–67.

56 Ministry of Education and Culture, Objectives of the School Year 2008–2009 (Nicosia: MOEC, 2008), 1.

57 European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), Fourth Report on Cyprus (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2011), parag. 66.

58 See Maria Repoussi, ‘Politics Questions History Education. Debates on Greek History Textbooks’, Historical Consciousness – Historical Culture, Yearbook 2006/7, International Society for History Didactics, (Frankfurt am Main: Wochenschau Verlag), 99–110. Maria Repoussi later changed some of the terminology and stated that she had no intention of insulting the historical memory of those who lived through the Asia Minor Catastrophe and despite some changes the revised version of the book was still not accepted. See also Emre Metin Bilginer, ‘Recent Debates on Greek History Textbooks: The Case of the Contemporary History Textbook for 6th Grades by Maria Repoussi’, Eckert Beiträge (2013/2).

59 According to Steele, ontological security is achieved by traditions, routines and habits which lead to a cohesive and stable understanding of one’s self through a sense of certainty, continuity and order. Brent Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State (New York: Routledge, 2008), 43, 51. ‘Nation-states seek ontological security because they want to maintain consistent self-concepts, and the “Self” of states is constituted and maintained through a narrative which gives life to routinized foreign policy actions’ (p. 3). Applied to the context of this study, both individuals and states therefore, feel that their self-identity is threatened when there is a proposed change or disruption to the historical narrative taught in schools.

60 See Louiza Odysseos, ‘Dangerous Ontologies: The Ethos of Survival and Ethical Theorising in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 403–18; Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 2 (2006): 341–70; Steele, ‘Ontological Security’; Bahar Rumelili, ‘Identity and Desecuritisation: The Pitfalls of Conflating Ontological and Physical Security’, Journal of International Relations and Development 18, no. 1 (2015): 52–74.

61 Mälksoo, ‘Memory’, 224.

62 ‘Cyprus History Book Rewrite Sparks Outcry’, Agence France Presse, 10 December, 2008. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/cyprus-history-book-rewrite-sparks-outcry.aspx?pageID=438&n=cyprus-history-book-rewrite-sparks-outcry-2008-10-13.

63 Society for the Study of Greek Matters (SSGM), ‘The Circular of the Ministry of Education and Culture for the Rapprochement/Reconciliation Measures’. https://evagorasblog.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/09092008-η-εγκύκλιος-του-υπουργείου-παιδεία/ (September 9, 2008).

64 Petros Papapolyviou, ‘Η Νεότερη και Σύγχρονη Ιστορία της Κύπρου στα Σχολικά Εγχειρίδια’ [The Modern and Contemporary History of Cyprus in School Textbooks], In Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Educational Association of Cyprus on School Textbooks (Nicosia, 2009), 53.

65 Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1940), 134.

66 Catia Galatariotou, ‘Truth, Memory and the Cypriot Journey Towards a New Past’, in Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict, eds. Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 242–3, 248.

67 Ibid., 248.

68 ‘Archbishop has no place in deciding content of history books’, Cyprus Mail, November 11, 2008.

69 SSGM, ‘The Circular’.

70 Kizilyürek, ‘National Memory’, 394.

71 Most of the data showed a lack of any knowledge of the Turkish-Cypriot textbooks actually being revised, despite their short-lived use.

72 These findings coincide with other studies investigating the position of Greek Cypriots regarding reconciliation in general. For a study on Greek-Cypriot teachers’ attitudes, see Michalinos Zembylas, Panayiota Charalambous and Constadina Charalambous, ‘Emerging Stances and Repertoires Towards Reconciliation in Greek-Cypriot Teachers’ Interview Accounts’, Journal of Peace Education 8, no. 1 (2011): 19–36.

73 See, for example, this article: Michalis Ignatiou, ‘Η Ρεπούση προσβάλλει ξεδιάντροπα την ελληνική ιστορία’ [Repoussi shamelessly insults Greek History], February 2, 2013 http://www.aixmi.gr/index.php/repoushprosvalleiksediantr/.

74 SSGM, ‘The Circular’.

75 See also Constantinos Adamides and Costas M. Constantinou, ‘Comfortable Conflict and (il)liberal Peace in Cyprus’, in Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism, eds. Oliver P. Richmond and Audra Mitchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 242–59.

76 Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 52.

77 Mälksoo, ‘Memory’.

78 John Eggleston and Denis Gleeson, ‘Curriculum Innovation and the Context of the School’, in Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education, ed. Denis Gleeson (Driffield: Nafferton Studies in Education, 1977), 17.

79 Eric Van Rythoven, ‘Learning to Feel, Learning to Fear? Emotions, Imaginaries, and Limits in the Politics of Securitization’, Security Dialogue 46, no. 5 (2015): 458–75.

80 Christopher S. Browning, ‘Ethics and Ontological Security’, in Ethical Security Studies: A New Research Agenda, eds. Jonna Nyman and Anthony Burke (Routledge: New York, 2016), 166.

81 Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, Security, 24.

82 Vamik D. Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 135.

83 This is by no means a simple undertaking, but it is important to take advantage of the small windows of opportunity in order to breathe some fresh air of momentum in to the current educational stagnation. Indeed, issues of identity, sovereignty, military security, territoriality etc. form inadvertently part of the wider conflict discourse (from which textbook discourse cannot be detached), but it is arguably possible to start a progressive move of textbook revision away from the realm of urgency that comes with securitisation without necessarily dealing with them first. In other words, in terms of the education argument, rather than attempting to transform identity perceptions, one first more plausible step would be to first reshape how people visualise these revisions and what they would entail, thereby addressing some of the existing fears and concerns.