Transformative Aspirations for Peace Education Research

“At the same time there are many new and young scholars from diverse societies who are able to bring fresh and challenging insights and approaches to peace education and we look for their support and contributions to carry peace education into the future as a central aspect of education for all, particularly in those contexts where peoples’ lives, especially those of children, are affected by marginalization, violation of human rights, poverty and conflicts.”(John Synott 2004, p. 1)

“We wish to provide a platform that invites all voices – global, national, and local – to have critical, reflective, and honest conversations about the state of education and its crucial function in strengthening world peace. We persist in discovering new ways to integrate peace education into formal institutions of learning, while informally carrying on daily peacemaking practices that positively affect all life on earth. We also persevere in building government/community/business partnerships with schools in common goals of peace for global citizenship and a world civil society.”(Jeannie Lum 2008, p. 1).

Clearly my predecessors Dr. John Synott and Dr. Jeannie Lum dedicated considerable effort to engage diverse voices, societies, learning contexts, and audiences in expanding our knowledge, research, and practice regarding education for sustainable peace. I am honored to venture forth in the wake of their efforts as the current editor and as the co-steward of this journal–a scholarly place to create and share knowledge. I will carry on their vision and dedication to achieving the goals of co-creating just, nonviolent, participatory, diverse, and ecologically sustainable societies.

Why do we do this peace education research work for this journal? Let’s remember our goals and our dedication. The Journal of Peace Education’s (JPE) goals of “education for the achievement of non-violent, ecologically sustainable, just and participatory societies” seem aspirationally astute during our times, yet practically tenuous as hopes get dashed against an ocean of violence amid uncertainty. The Journal of Peace Education is a scholarly publication dedicated to advancing knowledge; “ … it aims to link theory and research to educational practice and is committed to furthering original research on peace education, theory, curriculum, and pedagogy.” In the face of overwhelming direct, indirect, cultural, structural, symbolic, explicit, and implicit violence, we, the peace education research community, move onward with efforts to transform these various forms of violence; we work in vastly different contexts and yet in solidarity in the struggle of creating a more just and sustainable future. Many would argue we have an obligation to our children, future generations, ecosystems, and planet Earth to continue this peace education project with intention, discernment, and with the necessary fortitude and conviction to influence structural change.

We are living through a momentous era in human history and a significant moment in planet Earth’s history. The anthropocene has deeply impacted the basic four elements. The earth itself is grieving; just be still and listen to her pain. The air is changing; take a deep breath and consider. Water purity varies from place to place; drink deeply from a fresh glass of clean, water. Fire, our long-time human friend and enemy, fuels the cooking of our family meals and also scorches vast hectares of land–if left unchecked it destroys countless human and animal homes. Earth, air, water, and fire are all impacted by the anthropocene. Processes of creation, sustenance, and destruction interweave in endless cycles as time marches forward without pause.

We are experiencing the wake of a quadruple pandemic, a nexus of a global Covid-19 health crisis and a climate emergency as evidenced in a warming Earth with extreme and destructive weather events. We are experiencing persistent structural racism as evidenced by the disproportionate incarceration and police killings of Black youth and related protests in the streets (Black Lives Matter). We are experiencing wide chasms between the wealthy, power elite and those who suffer daily in abject poverty. Chasms, divisions, and violence are multilayered and many. An imperfect storm of violence is brewing: greed infused, unfettered global capitalism; a global climate crisis with extreme weather events; a global health pandemic that disproportionately impacts some geographic locales in relationship to wealthier others; the rise of authoritarianism; Putin’s war in the Ukraine; violent conflict elsewhere around the world; senseless mass shootings in the United States and elsewhere; and growing gaps in economic and health inequalities. Violence seems omnipresent if one examines mass media outlets that profit from focusing on violent events and problems. We know violence is sensationalized in the media and sells advertisements. We know that many make so much money by creating and selling sophisticated weapons for war and violence. The military-industrial complex is burgeoning in many parts of the world. War and violence are profitable. Yet what about people, what about social equity? What about the planet? What about justice and peace and the higher ideals of human aspirations–such as truth, love, beauty?

On the other side of the stark realities of war and violence, I am reminded of the wise focus of Elise Boulding’s book, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. Peaceful acts of connection, solidarity, sustainable living, nonviolent resistance and change, are also happening every day and in our time. Small scale, sustainable agricultural communities are growing and being funded by governments. Government investments in green economies hold structural promise for a sustainable future that centers the planet, people, as well as profit. Efforts toward greater representation of diverse and minoritized people and ideas are being made in the media and in various leadership positions. In the United States, we are seeing historic changes in who is elected and appointed to political office. Despite significant resistance amid ideological, religious, and political tensions around the world, people who are LGBTQI+ and allies continue to struggle for the right to love and to live freely and with dignity. These acts of resistance to structural and cultural violence provide hope and promise for transformative possibility and sustainable change.

Vision: Equity, Decolonization, and Earth

In an editorial in 2005, a year after the inception of the Journal of Peace Education, John Synott wrote “one of the clear strengths of peace education that makes it especially relevant for our times is its inclusive, global orientation.” (p.5). Years later, Lum 2013) elucidates the origins and trajectories of the field of peace education by tracing the transdisciplinary roots of the field; Jeanie reminds readers of a “Culture of Peace” and Earth Charter aspirations such as: respect for life; human rights; equal rights and opportunities for women and men; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, nonviolence and peace–to name just a few (p. 221-223). Clearly the transformative aspirations of the field of peace education are beacons of hope that involve navigating the tensions among the global and local, among inclusiveness and situated criticality, justice, reparations, and peace. The tensions of our time involve reconciling human need and greed with the carrying capacities of finite ecosystems and involve grappling with the moral rights of the more-than-human world to live and prosper. The transformative aspirations of the field of peace education invite us to examine the existential crisis of our species and to strive toward planetary co-existence among a multitude of competing and often contradictory interests.

The Journal of Peace Education is a place for rigorous scholarly work and dialogue in the field that aims to shed light on alternatives to war and other forms of violence, greed-driven capitalism, racism, sexism, and climate-fueled violence. Scholarship is a dialogue with a community of people, and yet there are people in the community who often go unmentioned. These people steward and support academic publishing processes. I would like to thank the behind the scenes management and production teams of Taylor and Francis (Terri Ward, Ian White, Louise Evans, Reagan Rodrigues, Dhivya Bharathi Periyasamy, Praise Ann Catubay) and the work of book review editor Linda Johnston. Thank you to the authors who engage in countless hours of research and writing. Thank you to the high-quality global reviewers who struggle to find constructive ways to support, encourage, and improve manuscripts. I would also like to thank the many people who submit papers and who never get accepted and published. Your work matters. Finally, the steady guidance of the editorial board grounds the work and fuels those moments of connection when published work is used by readers. All the aforementioned people and processes combine to co-create published articles.

As I reflect on the past year of editorship of the Journal of Peace Education, my most important takeaways are these:

• Peace education knowledge production has a cost in terms of time and energy; the cost is worth it. So many people contribute countless hours to making this journal a reality. The time, dedication, and selfless service on many fronts are integral to journal success.

• Dedicated reviewers who provided honest, substantive, and constructive feedback are foundational to rigorous, uplifting processes and quality publications that support ongoing research in the field of peace education.

• The COVID-19 global health pandemic has changed the meaning and importance of life and work for many of us. So how can we establish and honor healthy life-work boundaries? How do we support one another as we grieve, suffer, heal, and restore energy and commitment for the work ahead?

• Special issues are important, and take considerable determination, patience, and grit to bring to fruition.

• Justice and peace-oriented publishing requires decolonizing knowledge production processes. Examining global and inter-group equity dynamics is important. Access, opportunity, and “critical mentorship” (Longmire Avital 2020) matter.

• Expanding networks and including diverse scholars from diverse regions in the review and publication processes are imperative for the journal moving forward.

In the first year of my editorship, I have co-led an effort, alongside editorial board members, to promote more fair and open access for global scholars. The result has been a Journal of Peace Education Equity and Access Special Collection. In specific, the editorial board co-created a list of quality published journal articles that serve as models for others who wish to publish in JPE. We aim to distribute this widely so that dialogue among our community of scholars reaches new communities and brings more diverse voices into readership and publication opportunities. We also discussed reviving a special features section in the Journal to focus on research snapshots–smaller articles that focus on historically underrepresented topics, regions, and voices. Yet all this requires new energy, vision, and commitment. Additionally, we are stewarding special editions of the journal. For example, we are stewarding special issues on cultural encounters and peace education, the climate crisis and peace education, and decolonizing peace education knowledge production. Special editions are opportunities for a laser focus on spotlight issues of importance in the field of peace education and often include a diversity of global voices. JPE invites your ideas for future special editions.

As I continue on as co-steward of the Journal of Peace Education, I commit to equity, decolonization, and to the Earth as central foci to peace education pursuits. In the past year I have presented on decolonizing peace education knowledge production by sharing an ongoing content analysis of articles published in the Journal of Peace Education from 2004-2021 at the Georg Arnhold Symposium for Education for Sustainable Peace in Germany and at the Comparative and International Education Society Conference in Washington, D.C. Additionally, I will present on decolonizing peace education knowledge production and on editorial insights in the publication process at the 2023 International Peace Research Association Conference in Trinidad and Tobago.

In the aforementioned content analysis, research assistants Zach Simms and Xavier Grier-Griffin and I examined the titles, abstracts, key words, and author information in published articles to ascertain the country of the author’s institution, focus countries of studies, and espoused topics studied in published articles. Preliminary analysis suggests that authors are overwhelmingly from institutions in the United States, Northern Europe, Canada, The Middle East, the United Kingdom, and Australia and the focus regions of study are similarly aligned, though several studies have been published about Turkey. Voices from Africa, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and other regions are missing and needed. No doubt, we are an English medium journal which privileges authors in English-speaking spaces and academic traditions that follow a colonial model of knowledge production, valuation, and performance. Yet expanding the existing institutions, focus countries of study, and topics of published articles seems crucial to justice and equity in the peace education knowledge production process. Let us move toward the decolonizing ideal by ensuring that JPE is a “ … vehicle for voices from the global South” (Synott, 2008, p. 125). Let us also amplify other marginalized and minoritized identities and entities–such as the Earth. If we do not center the Earth in our work moving forward, I fear future human generations are in big trouble.

The peace education research community is a diverse group with diverse interests and insights and we need to continue to mentor and support one another. In that spirit, I also re-commit to the core values of inclusiveness and diversity that both John Synott and Jeannie Lum exemplified through their commitments to mentoring diverse young scholars and in their invitations for diverse ideas that help to evolve the field. Dissenting, innovative, disruptive, and dynamic research that brings new themes from the margins and into the main are particularly encouraged. We need transformative creativity, new disciplines, solid critiques of theory and practice, cross-cutting analysis, and methodologically rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research studies to understand what works and does not work to bring forth just, nonviolent, ecologically sustainable, and participatory societies. We need concrete data, sophisticated analysis, illuminating theory, and integrative philosophy. We need allostatic vision, one that anticipates and predicts the perceived needs of the future and adapts in the moment, accordingly, to changing environmental circumstances. How do we cultivate adaptive and anticipatory intelligence in the field of peace education? To quote African-American singer-songwriter, Tracy Chapman (1995):

We need to make new symbols

Make new signs

Make a new language

With these we’ll re-define the world.

There is great promise, talent, and hope in the peace education research community for re-defining and envisioning a “rooted future.”¹ From interacting in various ways with many people over the last year of editorship, I am inspired and humbled by the incredible work of various colleagues around the world and want to name just a few of those colleagues: Colins Imoh; Basma Hajir; Mere Skerrett; Jenny Ritchie; Ali Glasgow; Wendy Kopisch; Manoj Mishra, Obasesam Okoi, Kevin Kester; Jing Lin; Wolfgang Dietrich; Maryam Sharifian; Tony Jenkins; Janet Gerson; Monisha Bajaj; Arthur Romano; Maria Hantzopoulos; Hilary Cremin; Kathy Bickmore; Rina Alluri; Hakim Williams; Maria Jose Bermeo; Michalinos Zembylas; Noorie Brantmeier; Tongnan Xie; and many others. May your work toward justice and peace continue to prosper. I would like future generations to know, other people’s children and our children to know, we gave it our very best–with intention, discernment, conviction–to leave this world a little less violent than the one we, and they, were innocently born into. In our transformative aspirations, care, daily actions, and structural advocacy, we can co-create the world we want to live in. May we learn to harm less, love more.

Acknowledgments

Gratitude to Linda Johnston, Hakim Williams, Kathy Bickmore, and Kevin Kester for your comments to help this editorial. Editors need good editors. I also want to thank James Madison University and the College of Education for continued support for this editorship of the Journal of Peace Education. However, the viewpoints in this editorial are my own professional and personal reflections and do not necessarily represent my employer or the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Rooted Futures: Visions of Peace and Justice” is the theme of the 2023 International Peace Research Association Conference that will be held in Trinidad and Tobago.