Teaching peace in the midst of civil war: tensions between global and local discourses in Sri Lankan civics textbooks

ABSTRACT

Focusing on Sri Lanka, this article complements existing research on the adoption of global norms and discourses around peace education by illuminating the tensions between global and local demands in a multicultural society torn by conflict. In analysing a series of donor-funded official civics textbooks issued during the civil war, it identifies textbooks as sites of the conflictual ‘hybridisation’ of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm and the challenge to it posed by local interests and sensibilities. The analysis of the discourses around ‘good citizenship’ in Sri Lankan textbooks elucidates a case of the political co-optation of donor-driven agendas, traceable in the uneasy blend of a traditional and a global model of citizenship education simultaneously embracing and undermining liberal ideals of peacebuilding through emphases and silences that may risk compromising national reconciliation. The textbook discourses which enact these processes construct notions of social cohesion around civic virtues, frame rights as privileges earned through compliance and gratitude towards authoritative institutions, promote understandings of peace and conflict which highlight individual responsibility while obscuring systemic violence, and affirm social justice, democracy and human rights while evading the realisation of these ideals in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Sri Lanka
• peace education
• peacebuilding
• citizenship
• textbooks
• norm diffusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Denise Bentrovato holds a Ph.D. in History from The Netherlands and an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from the UK. Over the past decade, she has worked in academia and for government institutions, international organisations and NGOs on issues of education and youth in conflict-affected and post-conflict contexts in Africa. She is currently employed as a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, where she also acts as the co-director of the African Association for History Education. At present, her work focuses on examining educational approaches to historical conflict and injustice in transitional societies.

Marie Nissanka is a researcher, evaluator, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Marie's interests include multicultural education, conflict sensitive development, evaluation methodologies and reducing social inequalities including poverty and homelessness.

ORCID

Denise Bentrovato http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4828-0596

Notes

1 See, inter alia, Daniel Bar-Tal, ‘The Elusive Nature of Peace Education’, in Peace Education: The Concept, Principles, and Practices around the World, ed. Gavriel Salomon and Baruch Nevo (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 27–36; Claire McGlynn et al., eds., Peace Education in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: Comparative Perspectives (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Gavriel Salomon and Edward Cairns, eds., Handbook on Peace Education (New York: Psychology Press, 2010).

2 Susan Fountain, Peace Education in UNICEF (New York: UNICEF 1999).

3 Kerry J. Kennedy, ‘Global Trends in Civic and Citizenship Education: What Are the Lessons for Nation States?’, Education Sciences 2, no. 3 (2012): 121–35; Laura J. Quaynor, ‘Citizenship Education in Post-Conflict Contexts: A Review of the Literature’, Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 7, no. 1 (2012): 33–57.

4 James A. Banks, ‘Teaching for Social Justice, Diversity, and Citizenship in a Global World’, The Educational Forum 68, no. 4 (2004): 296–305; Eleanor J. Brown and W. John Morgan, ‘A Culture of Peace via Global Citizenship Education’, Peace Review 20, no. 3 (2008): 283–91; Ian Davies, Mark Evans, and Alan Reid, ‘Globalising Citizenship Education? A Critique of “Global Education” and “Citizenship Education”’, British Journal of Educational Studies 53, no. 1 (2005): 66–89; Lynn Davies, ‘Global Citizenship: Abstraction or Framework for Action?’, Educational Review 58, no. 1 (2006): 5–25; Audrey Osler and Kerry Vincent, Citizenship and the Challenge of Global Education (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 2002); UNESCO, Global Citizenship Education. Preparing Learners for the Challenges of the 21st Century (Paris: UNESCO, 2014).

5 Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, ed. Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); John W. Meyer et al., ‘World Society and the Nation-State’, American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–81.

6 Elizabeth Buckner and Susan Garnett Russell, ‘Portraying the Global: Cross-National Trends in Textbooks’ Portrayal of Globalization and Global Citizenship’, International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4: (2013): 738–50; John W. Meyer, Patricia Bromley, and Francisco O. Ramírez, ‘Human Rights in Social Science Textbooks: Cross-National Analyses, 1970–2008’, Sociology of Education 83, no. 2 (2010): 111–34; Francisco O. Ramírez, Patricia Bromley, and Susan Garnett Russell, ‘The Valorization of Humanity and Diversity’, Multicultural Education Review 1, no.1 (2009): 29–54.

7 Julia C. Lerch, Susan Garnett Russell, and Francisco O. Ramírez, ‘Wither the Nation-State? A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism in Textbooks’, Social Forces 96, no. 1 (2017): 153–80; Susan Garnett Russell and Dijana Tiplic, ‘Rights-Based Education and Conflict: A Cross-National Study of Rights Discourse in Textbooks’, Compare 44, no. 3 (2014): 314–34.

8 Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid Peace: The Interaction Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Peace’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 4 (2010): 391–412; Oliver Richmond, ‘The Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace: Negative or Positive?’, Cooperation and Conflict 50, no. 1 (2015): 50–68.

9 Anne Gaul, ‘Where Are the Minorities? The Elusiveness of Multiculturalism and Positive Recognition in Sri Lankan History Textbooks', Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 6, no. 2 (2014): 87–105; Ariel Sánchez Meertens, ‘Courses of Conflict: Transmission of Knowledge and War’s History in Eastern Sri Lanka’, History and Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2013): 253–73; Elizabeth Nissan and R. L. Stirrat, ‘The Generation of Communal Identities’, in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1990), 19–44; Marie Nissanka, ‘The Nature of Multiculturalism within the Civics Textbooks of Sri Lanka’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 18, no. 2 (2016): 97–112; Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, ‘The Politics of Citizenship and Difference in Sri Lankan Schools’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 423–43.

10 In total, Buddhists comprise 70.1% of the population, Hindus 12.6%, Muslims 9.7% and Christians 7.6%. Census of Population and Housing 2012, Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka.

11 Patrick Peebles, The History of Sri Lanka (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006); Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London: Routledge, 1990); Jonathan Goodhand, Benedikt Korf, and Jonathan Spencer, eds., Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka: Caught in the Peace Trap? (London: Routledge, 2011).

12 What appears to be established is that those favoured in colonial Ceylon had received English and western-oriented education from Christian missionaries; in addition to European descendants, these people were more likely to be high-caste Tamils, alongside a smaller group of Sinhalese who had converted to Christianity. At the same time, however, the Indian Tamil estate labourers were among the least educated and thus the least privileged in colonial society.

13 Mark Salter, To End a Civil War: Norway’s Peace Engagement in Sri Lanka (London: Hurst, 2015).

14 United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (2011).

15 S. I. Keethaponcalan, ‘Violence, Nonviolence, and Ethnic Reconciliation in Post-War Sri Lanka’, in The Promise of Reconciliation? Examining Violent and Nonviolent Effects on Asian Conflicts, ed. Chaiwat Satha-Anand and Oliver Urbain (New York: Routledge, 2017), 87–102.

16 Peter Colenso, ‘Education and Social Cohesion: Developing a Framework for Education Sector Reform in Sri Lanka’, Compare 35, no. 4 (2005): 411–28; Lynn Davies, ‘Sri Lanka’s National Policy on Education for Social Cohesion and Peace’ in Learning to Live Together: Education for Conflict Resolution, Responsible Citizenship, Human Rights and Humanitarian Norms, ed. Margaret Sinclair (Doha: Education Above All, 2013), 224-33; Angela W. Little, ‘Education Policy Reform in Sri Lanka: The Double-Edged Sword of Political Will’, Journal of Education Policy 26, no. 4 (2011): 499–512; Lal Perera, Swarna Wijetunge, and A. S. Balasooriya, ‘Education Reform and Political Violence in Sri Lanka’, in Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion, ed. Sobhi Tawil and Alexandra Harley (Geneva: UNESCO International Bureau of Education, 2004), 375–433.

17 Nissan and Stirrat, ‘The Generation of Communal Identities’; Colenso, ‘Education and Social Cohesion’.

18 Government of Sri Lanka, National Policy and a Comprehensive Framework for Actions on Education for Social Cohesion and Peace (ESCP) (Colombo: Social Cohesion and Peace Unit, Ministry of Education, Government of Sri Lanka, 2008), ii.

19 Ibid.

20 The analysis of only one book per grade is related to the fact that Sri Lankan government schools, like public schools in many developing countries, rely on a single standardised textbook per grade and school subject as the main text on which examinations are based. The books we analysed here were written by different teams of local authors employed by the government. Perhaps due to this circumstance, they are inconsistent in terms of the variety of English employed.

21 Gaul, ‘Where Are the Minorities?’.

22 Klaus Krippendorff and Mary Angela Bock, eds., The Content Analysis Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009).

23 Michael W. Apple, ‘The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?’, Discourse 14, no. 1 (1993): 1–16.

24 Teun A. Van Dijk, ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, Discourse & Society 4, no. 2 (1993): 249–83; Norman Fairclough, ‘Intertextuality in Critical Discourse Analysis’, Linguistics and Education 4, no. 4 (1992): 269–93.

25 Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

26 Ian Harris, ‘Conceptual Underpinnings of Peace Education’, in Peace Education: The Concept, Principles, and Practices Around the World, ed. Gavriel Salomon and Baruch Nevo, 17.

27 For a general overview, see Eckhardt Fuchs and Annekatrin Bock, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also Falk Pingel, UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision. 2nd rev. (Paris/Braunschweig: UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute, 2010).

28 James H. Williams, ed., (Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014).

29 Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook (New York: Routledge, 1991); Heather Hickman and Brad J. Porfilio, eds., The New Politics of the Textbook: Problematizing the Portrayal of Marginalized Groups in Textbooks (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012).

30 Denise Bentrovato, Karina Korostelina, and Martina Schulze, eds., History Can Bite: History Education in Divided and Post-War Societies (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2016); Denise Bentrovato, ‘History Textbook Writing in Post-Conflict Societies: From Battlefield to Site and Means of Conflict Transformation’, in History Teaching and Conflict Transformation: Social Psychological Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation, ed. Charis Psaltis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Cejahic-Clancy (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 37–76; Muhammad Ayaz Naseem and Georg Stöber, ‘Introduction: Textbooks, Identity Politics, and Lines of Conflict in South Asia’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 6, no. 2 (2014): 1–9.

31 Lerch et al., ‘Wither the Nation-State?’; Russell and Tiplic, ‘Rights-Based Education and Conflict’. The closely related issue of local resistance to internationalised standards of textbook revision in conflict-affected regions is addressed in the present special issue, with reference to Cyprus: see Eleni Christodoulou, ‘Deconstructing Resistance towards History Textbook Revisions: The Securitization of History Textbooks and the Cyprus Conflict’, Global Change, Peace and Security 30, no. 3 (2018).

32 Educational Publications Department (EPD), Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 6 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 41.

33 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 8, Book 2 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 23.

34 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 87.

35 Ibid., 88.

36 The Grade 7 textbook emphasises a message of unity through common goals and ideals by asserting that, ‘[t]o gain independence for Sri Lanka, leaders of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities worked in unison’. EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 7 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 146. The textbooks additionally highlight commonalities among all religions and cultures and contain positively-connotated depictions of diversity by presenting, for instance, religious celebrations marked by minorities. This particular emphasis in civics textbooks contrasts with the approach found in a recent study of Sri Lankan history textbooks, which critiqued the ‘elusiveness of multiculturalism and positive recognition’ characterising a school subject that foregrounds Sinhalese legends and heroes at the expense of the histories of the country’s minorities. Gaul, ‘Where Are the Minorities?’.

37 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 7, 108.

38 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 88.

39 Kara Chan, ‘Consumer Socialization of Chinese Children in Schools: Analysis of Consumption Values in Textbooks’, Journal of Consumer Marketing 23, no. 3 (2006): 125–32; Youngdal Cho and Yunkyoung Park, ‘Textbook as a Contradictory Melting-Pot: An Analysis of Multicultural Content in Korean Textbooks’, Asia Pacific Journal of Education 36, no. 1 (2016): 111–30; Joy Chew Oon Ai, ‘Civics and Moral Education in Singapore: Lessons for Citizenship Education?’, Journal of Moral Education 27, no. 4 (1998): 505–24; Tan Tai Wei and Chew Lee Chin, ‘Moral and Citizenship Education as Statecraft in Singapore: A Curriculum Critique’, Journal of Moral Education 33, no. 4 (2004): 597–606.

40 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 86.

41 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 8, Book 1, 34.

42 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 7, 10.

43 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 88.

44 Ibid., 89.

45 Ibid., 84.

46 Ibid., 85.

47 Bentrovato, ‘History Textbook Writing’; Quaynor, ‘Citizenship Education’.

48 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 87. The new edition of the Grade 11 textbook contains a new, direct reference to the civil war experience in terms of ‘national security’, said to have been maintained through ‘a great effort […] challenged when weapons are supplied unofficially to terrorist groups’. EPD, Civic Education, Grade 11 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2016), 132.

49 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 39.

50 Ibid. In a section titled ‘Attempts to devolve power in Sri Lanka’, the new edition of the book more vaguely states that ‘the enforcement of these pacts was not possible in the expected manner’. EPD, Civic Education, Grade 10 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2016), 41.

51 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 85.

52 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 6, 6.

53 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 90.

54 Ibid., 92.

55 Unfortunately, the authors were unable to retrieve the respective term used in the Sinhalese and Tamil versions of this textbook and thus ascertain any differences in meaning and connotation.

56 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 92.

57 Ibid., 90.

58 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 55.

59 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 8.

60 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 34.

61 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 10, 9.

62 Angela W. Little and Siri T. Hettige, Globalisation, Employment and Education in Sri Lanka: Opportunity and Division (London: Routledge, 2013).

63 Shweta Singh and Marie Nissanka, Connectors and Dividers: Challenges and Prospects for Conflict Transformation in Kashmir and Sri Lanka (Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies; New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2015).

64 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 9 (Government of Sri Lanka, 2007), 131.

65 Specifically, the textbooks do not critique the gender-discriminatory nature of the Thesawalamai (Tamil) and the Mohammedan (Muslim) law, which confers on men sole authority over legal matters relating to property and divorce.

66 Despite this legislation, no executions have taken place in Sri Lanka since the mid-1970s; death sentences are often commuted to life imprisonment.

67 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 7.

68 Ibid., 35.

69 Amnesty International, ‘Sri Lanka 2017/18’, retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/sri-lanka/report-sri-lanka/ (last accessed 29 June 2018); Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘Sri Lanka’, retrieved from https://cpj.org/asia/sri-lanka/ (last accessed 29 June 2018).

70 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 85.

71 Government of Sri Lanka, National Policy, ii.

72 Ibid.

73 EPD, Citizenship Education and Governance, Grade 11, 86.

74 Singh and Nissanka, Connectors and Dividers.

75 Davies, ‘Sri Lanka's National Policy', 261.

76 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 7, 146.

77 EPD, Life Education and Citizenship, Grade 9, 22.

78 Karen Brounéus, ‘Analyzing Reconciliation: A Structured Method for Measuring National Reconciliation Initiatives’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 14, no. 3 (2008): 294.

79 Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence’, Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 291–305.

80 Oliver Richmond and Audra Mitchell, ‘Peacebuilding and Critical Forms of Agency: From Resistance to Subsistence’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36, no. 4 (2011): 326–44.

81 Bentrovato, ‘History Textbook Writing’.