Teachers’ perspectives on educating for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

What does it mean to educate for peace after witnessing one’s community being devastated by war? And what impact, if any, does educating for peace have amidst the complexity of post-war reconstruction? To explore these questions, a phenomenological study was conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 with eight ethnically diverse educators who participated in a programme of Education for Peace (EFP) which began a decade earlier in the cities of Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Zenica. Through semi-structured interviews, the study (1) explores meanings and experiences associated by participants with their role as post-conflict peace educators, (2) examines the extent and limits of their sense of peacebuilding agency and (3) elicits evaluations of the longer term impacts of educating for peace in the Bosnian context. The study finds that meanings associated with educating for peace are nuanced by educators’ personal histories of conflict, professional identities and the country’s wider socio-political dynamics. Benefits, risks and challenges stemming from peace education engagement are found in four domains (personal, social, educational and political). Conclusions recommend greater focus to the subjectivities of teachers in conflict-affected contexts as a key site for evaluating peacebuilding impact, for revising theories of change and improving planning and provision.

Keywords:

• Post-conflict
• peace education
• teachers
• Bosnia
• impacts
• phenomenology

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the Gates Cambridge Trust for funding this research, to the participants in this study, to the key individuals who helped in its realization – Professor Madeleine Arnot, Nermana Sukalic and Naghmeh Sobhani – and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Notes

1. Baillie (2013) argues that the term ‘post-conflict’ is a misnomer and that ‘post-conflict’ societies can ‘linger in the limbo of ‘conflict-time’…defined not by the presence or absence of violence but rather by an on-going sense of heightened unease and contestation’ (301). While acknowledging Baillie’s point, the term ‘post-conflict’ is used in this article as the conventional term for referring to a society in which violent intergroup conflict has recently ended (although lesser or random acts of violence may continue) and the long processes of reconstruction, recovery and reconciliation have begun. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been called a post-war or post-conflict society, although in recent years it is increasingly referred to as a ‘frozen conflict’ site (Perry 2009, 2015).

2. The war in BiH is most often classified as an ethnonationalist conflict. A more nuanced understanding acknowledges that a confluence of ideological, political and psychological drivers produced the conditions which led to mass violence. The evidence of intra-ethnic fighting, of shifting inter-ethnic allegiances and of international involvement further complicate any simplistic understanding of the Bosnian war and its trajectory.

3. Drawing on (Novelli and Smith 2011), peacebuilding agency is understood here in as the capacity of an individual to positively influence the values, attitudes, behaviours and/or policies in their conflict-driven surroundings such that the conflict itself transforms.

4. In the research literature, notable exceptions include Horner et al.’s meta-analysis cited above, as well as studies by Bekerman and Zembylas (2011), Novelli and Sayed (2016), Vongalis-Macrow (2006, 2007) and Zembylas, Charalambous, and Charalambous (2011). See also (Zembylas 2003).

5. Notable exceptions include Koshmanova and Hapon (2007), Christopher and Taylor (2011), and Diazgranados et al. (2014), although the first two of these studies focus on student teachers in non-conflict settings.

6. Understood here in terms of Sherif and Sherif’s (1969) notion of social cohesion as cooperative interdependence in the pursuit of shared goals which cannot be achieved by an individual alone, and Bollen and Hoyle’s (1990) notion that perceived cohesion has two dimensions: a sense of belonging and feelings of morale. See also Bruhn (2009).

7. See Perry (2014), Council of Europe (2000), OSCE-BiH Education Department (2005), and Nelles (2006).

8. See (Fischer 2006; Hromadžić 2008; van der Merwe, Baxter, and Chapman 2009; NDC and Saferworld 2010, 2012; Perry 2003, 2013; Subotić 2013).

9. For a more detailed case study of the programme, its conceptual framework, objectives, methods, sponsors and participants have been published, see (Danesh 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b).

10. In BiH, the ‘Pedagogical Institutes’ function under the authority of the Ministries of Education and perform a number of functions: they implement Ministry policy, develop curriculum standards, provide in-service teacher education, and inspect schools.

11. Including the youngest in her 30s, whose war-time certification as a teacher still followed Yugoslavian pedagogical and certification norms.

12. In the case of ‘mixed’ families, choosing between ethnic identifications was painful and often resulted in tragic consequences.

13. I was national coordinator of the two-year EFP pilot project and have written about the pilot experience (see Clarke-Habibi 2005). Until 2007 I remained professionally engaged with the implementing NGO. This research afforded me an opportunity to gain insight into the decade-long experience and longer term value of EFP in the shifting BiH context. It also gave me the opportunity to inquire more critically into its design, operation and impacts on those involved.

14. These self-defined roles differ from those identified by (Horner et al. 2015; Reardon 1988). It may indicate that these educators constructed a narrower peacebuilding role for themselves, but whether that was attributable to the EFP programme orientation or to the cultural, contextual and professional frames through which the teachers selected what was most meaningful to them, was not clear in this study.

15. The EFP programme’s director and senior trainer, a retired psychiatrist and professor with expertise in the causes, recovery and prevention of violence.