Reflections on decolonizing peace education in Korea: a critique and some decolonial pedagogic strategies

ABSTRACT

Universities and scholars around the world teach and research extensively in the field of peace education; yet, despite a plethora of diverse scholarship, educational programs are often critiqued as dominated by the English-speaking world. This paper employs the intersecting lenses of decolonization and postcolonial theory to explore and challenge the perceived dominance of Western literature and practice. Using a criss-crossing comparison method, English and Korean literatures are compared to ascertain the extent of Western-centricity within Korean higher education peace studies, and to offer a critical discussion of liberal peacebuilding, and linear problem-solving models within the literatures. Counter-arguments and policy recommendations are considered. The paper concludes that for peace education to fulfill its mission, global educational decolonization movements need to be strengthened. It is argued that efforts toward decolonization of Korean peace education could support the global movement toward a more socially just peace education for the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace education
• postcolonial theory
• decolonization
• comparative review
• Korea

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank Hakim Williams and Shawn Bryant for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are myriad definitions of peace education, but for the purposes of this paper we are drawing on Fountain’s (1999): Peace education is ‘the process of promoting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to bring about behavior changes that will enable children, youth and adults to prevent conflict and violence, both overt and structural; to resolve conflict peacefully; and to create the conditions conducive to peace, whether at an intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, national or international level’ (1).

2 We understand colonialism to be ‘a system that defines the organization and dissemination of epistemic, material, and aesthetic resources in ways that reproduce modernity’s imperial project’ (Andreotti et al. 2015, 23). In other words, it involves the control and domination of modes of thinking, space/place, and knowledge production.

3 Decolonial thinking is ‘thinking that delinks and opens to the possibilities hidden by the modern rationality that is mounted and enclosed by categories of Greek, Latin, and the six modern imperial European languages’ (Mignolo 2011, 46). Decolonial thinking offers new ways of intercultural communication and theorizing, and ‘offers “other” economic, political, social, subjective modalities’ (Mignolo 2011, 63).

4 We understand postcolonial thinking as offering critiques of modernity/coloniality but largely ‘limited and internal to European history and the history of European ideas’ (Mignolo 2007, 451). Decoloniality, on the other hand, ‘starts from other sources’, e.g. non-European aimed toward global social justice and disrupting the power structures that prevent epistemic, material, and aesthetic equity (Mignolo 2007, 452). We use both postcoloniality and decoloniality in this paper to note these historical, geographic, and political differences while simultaneously arguing for the complementarity of the two approaches.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Keimyung University: [BISA Research Grant 2019–2020].