Toward a conflict-sensitive approach to higher education pedagogy: lessons from Afghanistan and Somaliland

ABSTRACT

Higher education has become an important agenda in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. A major aspect of this agenda is the conceptualization of education as a tool not just for development but for peacebuilding. Yet there are few studies examining how university educators might be equipped as frontline peace workers. This study explores: How might conflict affect teaching in higher education, especially in and with students from conflict-affected contexts? In what ways does higher education pedagogy serve to ameliorate or exacerbate conflict? How could the practices of academics working with students in conflict-affected contexts inform approaches to higher education pedagogy? Data for the study was collected through interviews with university educators working in Afghanistan and Somaliland, and analyzed through the lens of Santos’s ‘post-abyssal thinking’. Findings indicate that educators who work in conflict-affected contexts have numerous practical strategies that inform their thinking, curricular decisions, teaching, and policymaking. Implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• conflict-sensitive teaching
• post-abyssal thinking
• Afghanistan
• Somaliland

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the NRF for their generous support, and the participants of this study for kindly agreeing to share their expertise.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This study is focused on university educators in general and not necessarily those who specifically teach history, political science, or peace studies. The working assumption is all educators in universities everywhere have a role to play in mitigating or reproducing social conflict through the taught and hidden curricula of norms that are established and practiced in classrooms across the institution.

2 It is noted here that there are no universal ‘best practices’, but it is assumed that there are context-specific ‘good practices’ that could potentially be relevant to educators practicing in other related settings.

3 This number rises to 258 million children and youth out of school when secondary school enrollment is included (UNESCO UIS 2020). Moreover, as higher education is path-dependent on completion of primary and secondary education, lack of access to quality education in the earlier years has cascading negative effects (Dryden-Peterson and Giles 2010; UN 2015).

4 I use this framework as it supports the criss-crossing of practices from the local to global, and its postcolonial orientation interrupts the violences of Western/Northern modernity and coloniality. Cremin et al. (2021) claim, ‘the post-abyssal philosophy of de Sousa Santos’ supports ‘new ways of thinking’ about research in ‘settings affected by armed conflict and crisis’ and ‘put[ting] them into practice … across diverse international settings’ (1).

5 It should be noted that interviews were conducted in early 2021 prior to the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government.

6 This study received ethical approval from Seoul National University IRB No. 2101/001-004.

7 The university website too reflects this statement. The website is omitted here to maintain anonymity.

8 The university frequently releases press statements reaffirming its policy commitment to diversity. Such statements can be found on the university’s homepage. A link is omitted here to maintain anonymity of the institution.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A8042338).