‘It’s not a thing, is it?’ The production of indicators tracking attacks on education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the development of indicators measuring attacks on education through a case study of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA). As GCPEA and its partners have brought the problem of attacks on education to the attention of global civil society, they have engaged in contestation to define attacks on education and construct indicators to track the relevant violations. These debates are significant in that indicators are a tool of global governance that shape policymaking and resource allocation. The discussion draws on the author’s decade of experience working among groups focused on the protection of education, including direct involvement developing indicators on attacks on education, and on three sets of qualitative interviews. It analyses how resource limitations, organisational agendas, challenges of measurement and verification, and global power dynamics exert pressure towards a more narrow understanding of attacks on education. This limits the transformative potential of the protecting education agenda. The discussion illustrates that EiE actors must consider the ways that they measure their work in ongoing conversations about creating a decolonial and more equitable field of practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Education in emergencies
• indicators
• human rights
• humanitarianism
• global governance

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editors of this special issue, especially Bilal Barakat, for their review and feedback on this paper. And a big thank you to my research assistants Samantha Barnes and Samantha Ortiz-Clark, who helped transcribe and analyse data and review literature for this paper, and to Zoe Jannuzi, Naomi Moland, and Anne Campbell who reviewed it and provided feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Today the GCPEA’s Steering Committee includes: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Institute of International Education, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Plan International, Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict – a project of the Qatari Education Above All Foundation, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR).

2 See also Tikly (2017), who writes about the EFA movement as a form of global governance. The EFA movement was an important predecessor for EiE.

3 UNESCO published the first two editions of Education under Attack.

4 Ethics review for interviews conducted in 2011–2012 was done by New York University’s University Committee on Activities Involving Human Subjects (HS#: 11-8490). Ethics review for interviews conducted in 2020–2021 was done by Swarthmore College’s Institutional Review Board (17-18-107).

5 A former colleague once pointed out to me that the concept of an attack on education has two components that can shape how it is defined: ‘attack’ and ‘education’. To some degree, the legal-humanitarian perspective foregrounds ‘attack’ by rooting the category of attacks on education in the framework of IHL, the international body of law that regulates state responsibility for ‘enemy’ populations or prisoners of war, and the Geneva Conventions, which regulate civilian protection during periods of armed conflict. As one international advocate put it: ‘the term attack comes with a certain legal accountability dimension’ (Interview, September 15, 2020). In contrast, the rights-based perspective foregrounds ‘education’ by expanding the category of an attack on education to include any action that impedes educational access and achievement. As mentioned above, these two paradigms are not mutually exclusive. However, they shape slightly different world views and demands for data. In this section, I draw on the findings of my research to describe these two paradigms in detail. This provides the background for the subsequent section in which I argue that a variety of factors exert pressure towards the legal-humanitarian view.

6 My discussion of the legal-humanitarian approach is reminiscent of Slim’s (2019) discussion of humanitarian advocacy and humanitarian diplomacy (see also Whittal [2009] on humanitarian diplomacy in Palestine).

7 For example, one of the people I spoke with in Palestine had used the 4A’s framework developed by Tomaševski (2001) to develop a typology of attacks on education. According to the framework, education must be available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable.

8 The question of perpetrator is particularly salient in the Palestinian context, where Israeli settlers are one of the main groups responsible for violence targeting Palestinian schoolchildren, teachers, and schools, but are not considered an armed group under IHL.

9 This is somewhat common in some contexts when claiming responsibility for an attack furthers a groups’ political or social goals.

10 Other organisations do focus on events that GCPEA does not. For example, Scholars at Risk track cases of dismissal or expulsion through their Academic Freedom Monitor.