After conflict comes education? Reflections on the representations of emergencies in ‘Education in Emergencies’

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, education has been advanced as a new and legitimate core of the humanitarian crisis response. ‘Education in Emergencies’ (EiE) developed into an institutionalised field of humanitarian practice, advocacy, and scholarly work. Identifying how emergency discourses have been critiqued to operate as ‘social imaginaries’, in this paper the ‘emergency imaginary’ as it develops in the particular discursive context of EiE is analysed. We scrutinise how emergencies are represented in this EiE-discourse by pointing to the socio-ideological and economic drivers of conflict, how the interconnections between education and these drivers are pictured, and the educational changes subsequently advocated for. We conclude that, while EiE has been called a ‘new field of academic and policy research’, the discourse might reiterate prevailing power relations, leading to an adverse portrayal of crisis-affected communities and a legitimation of a global status-quo.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• conflict
• emergencies
• humanitarian assistance
• discourse
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Indra Versmesse is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Leuven University, affiliated to the Laboratory for Education and Society. She holds a master’s degree in Social Work and in Conflict and Development. Her principal interests concern the politics of humanitarianism and the global refugee regime. In her research she focuses on humanitarian discourse and practice; specifically the fields’ rhetorical and actual engagement in the provision of refugee education.

Ilse Derluyn is Professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy, Ghent University. Her research concerns the psychosocial wellbeing of unaccompanied refugee minors, migrant and refugee children, war-affected children, victims of trafficking and child soldiers. She is actively involved in supporting refugees and practitioners working with refugees groups, and in policy influence. She has published over 50 international publications and several books. Prof. Derluyn is co-director of the Centre for Children in Vulnerable Situations (CCVS) and heading the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR).

Jan Masschelein is Professor in Philosophy of Education and working at the Laboratory for Education and Society, Leuven University. His principal interests are in educational theory and social philosophy. His research focuses explicitly on (re-)thinking the public role of schools and universities. He co-authored (with Maarten Simons): Globale Immunität. Ein kleine Kartographie des Europaischen Bildungsraum (2005); Jenseits der Exzellenz. Eine kleine Morphologie der Welt-Universität (2010) and In Defence of the School. A Public Issue (2013). They co-edited The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality (2007) and Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy (2011).

Lucia De Haene is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Leuven University, affiliated to the Laboratory for Education and Society. She conducts research on the psychosocial impact of forced migration in refugee family relationships and clinical research on transcultural trauma care. Specifically, her current research focuses on family and community psychosocial sequelae of organized violence, forced migration, and exile; the role of cultural and collective identifications in coping with traumatic experience during forced dislocation; and process analyses of clinical and community-based psychosocial interventions in host societies.

Notes

1 At the dawn of the new millennium the lack of humanitarian budgets for education, 4% of the overall budget, was criticized (e.g. Sommers 1999; Sinclair 2002). The percentage has, however, remained the same (e.g. ECHO 2016; UNHCR 2016).

2 Whereas emergencies are seen as consequences of both natural disaster and conflict, the EiE-field’s focus has mainly been directed to the latter (Chelpi-den Hamer, Fresia, and Lanoue 2010). The term ‘EiE’ appeared for the first time in Graça Machel’s 1996 UN report ‘Impact of armed conflict on children’, indicating how the notion of EiE is inextricably linked to conflict-induced emergencies. 

3 Here, Agamben’s (2005) notion of the emergency as ‘a state of exception’ is often referred to describe how the humanitarian argument has become a justification for surpassing national sovereignty and enacting extralegal action.

4 It should be stressed that the critique points to the humanitarian field’s recent educational interventions. Northern interventions in southern educational systems are of course not new, nor are the critiques of these interventions (Sobe 2007).

5 Sinclair (2005, 23) states: ‘Children exposed to violence and aggression from an early age need to be educated in basic life skills and values so that they can develop a sense of respect towards each other and shed prejudices against other ethnic/religious groups’.

6 European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations.

7 International Institute for Education Planning, an arm of UNESCO.

8 Here she cites from the 1945 Constitution.

9 As Pigozzi (1999, 13) talks about ‘environmental awareness’ and ‘a sustainable future’, she seems sensitive to this too.

10 Goodhand (2003, 637) argues that the most poor are less likely to be involved in conflict. As he notes, ‘although one can point to a number of links between poverty and bottom up violence, it can be hypothesized that the transient (or ‘churning’) poor are more likely to rebel than the chronically poor, who tend to be the least organized and most passive group in society. Their limited social capital, both a cause and a consequence of their poverty, constrains their capacity for organized resistance.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the VLIR-UOS [grant number NDOC2013PR003].