Introduction: governance, peace, and citizenship

Democracies seem to be in trouble. Autocratic rule and political instability are on the rise. Erratic and ultra-nationalist leaders are elected in what are purported to be free and fair elections. Protests and social movements threaten governments, for good or for ill. Feelings of division and enmity within societies are pervasive, and new media enhance the ability to speak only to those who share one’s views, thereby amplifying disagreement and widening divides between citizens. We seem to shout at each other, more than to debate. Governments respond to perceived threats with restrictive measures, threatening to ‘tear up human rights’ in the name of security.

Yet it hasn’t always been thus. In the midst of the political and economic transitions in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1990s, the movements away from autocratic governments in Latin America and the end of wars in the Balkans and Lebanon, a number of scholars predicted the ‘end of history’ as a wave of democratization seemed to be sweeping the world (e.g. Fukuyama, 1992; Huntington, 1991). In order to stabilize and consolidate these new democratically-inclined governments, a veritable industrial sector promoting practices and values of democracy, peace, and citizenship emerged, circulating ‘best practices’ for governments, civil society agents, and people who live in transitional societies (Staeheli, Marshall, Jeffrey, Nagel, & Hammett, 2014). Democracy seemed the inevitable next step in political evolution.

Twenty and more years on, however, it is hard to be so optimistic. Scholars have plotted the rise of anocratic governments and instability (Goldstone et al., 2010), defined as a form of regime that blends democratic and autocratic elements and that is prone to instability, infectiveness, internal and external conflict, and sometimes erratic leadership (Vreeland, 2008). In 2013, The Economist asked ‘What’s gone wrong with democracy?’ and proclaimed the ‘end of democracy.’ Francis Fukuyama, who declared the end of history in 1992, now bemoans the political decay of western democracies (2014). Commentators point to the rise of terror attacks (which are more often committed by nationalists and far-right organizations than by Islamists) and to the election of Donald Trump in the United States in order to make the point that violence and intolerance is a political force in the Global North, as much as it is in the South; established democracies seem as susceptible to this trend as are new regimes. Once again, programmes to promote the behaviours associated with citizenship and to encourage participation are ubiquitous. But along with these ‘positive’ encouragements, we also see new limits on tolerance and acceptable behaviours, and state responses that offer ‘security’ rather than a common purpose or identity. The consultants and NGOs promoting peace, tolerance, and citizenship are busy around the world.

In their actions, these agents often circulate pedagogies that promote – but do not guarantee – social cohesion and tolerance on the part of citizens as fundamental to peace, security, the ability to govern, and democracy (Staeheli, Marshall, & Maynard, 2016). At the same time, they impart the skills and rationalities to press claims on the state and to hold it accountable. A common concern amongst critical scholars is that in attempting to make citizens governable, or to direct – and even deflect – political action, the potential for radical, transformational and decolonising politics is diffused. Furthermore, to the extent that some narratives about the root causes of violence, about injustice, and about contentious issues are suppressed, attempts to create peace and citizenship may actually give rise to new forms and logics of contention and to entrench structural violence. At the same time, however, some activists take their training to enact new ways of being political, at times subverting normative ideas about how citizens should behave, what they should support, and how they should organize politically. Collectively, the articles in this volume explore these possibilities for citizenship and engagement, and ask what they mean for governance, peace and transformational politics. The possibilities, it seems are multiple, varied, ambiguous, and contested. The spatialities of politics and contention are similarly complex.

Daniel Hammet and David Marshall provide an overview of the ways that pedagogies of peace are entwined with governance and citizenship. Beginning with the argument that ‘peace’ is promoted as a universal good, they demonstrate the ways that liberal formulations of peace place the responsibility for building and maintaining good, governable societies on individuals and local collectivities to force change and to promote particular ways of being, rather than directly on the state. In so doing, these efforts tend to reify the local as the natural site in which tolerance and co-existence can be organically nurtured and directed toward consolidation of democratic initiatives. Hammet and Marshall also point to the ways that such initiatives do not work, either because they may create new forms of inequality and violence, or because peace itself becomes a subject of negotiation, disruption, and contention, reflecting visions of politics that may challenge neoliberal governance. There may be a widely circulated pedagogy of peace, it seems, but its manifestations are by no means predetermined.

Allison Hayes-Conroy and Alexis Saenz Montoya provide an excellent example of the ambiguity of peace building in the context of neoliberal agendas, highlighting the dynamism of movements and the ways that funding and administrative structures fail to fully define them. Focusing on a youth-oriented, urban movement in Medellín, the Legion del Afecto, they highlight the ways that affect, emotion, and visceral learning can shape a movement and to some extent co-exist with the more rational and technical elements of government-sponsored elements of peace building initiatives. In particular, the Legion created a space in which alternative means of learning and expression – embodiment, music, dance, theatre – provide opportunities to reflect on and to shape the political visions and goals of young people. While funded initially through an international organisation and by the Columbian government, the organisation sought to create structural opportunities to enact peace. Over time, however, the Legion shifted from its goals of creating revolutionary change to a more humanitarian mission and shifted its logics from an emphasis on affect to a more complicated, economistic rationality that nevertheless enrols affective logics to engage in critique. Rather than being purely state-driven or reflecting neoliberal agendas, then, the movement and the organisation reflect complexities involved as different ways of learning and understanding work in support of peace and a more socially and economically just society. They argue that the key to continued engagement may be the ability to maintain critical reflexivity in what they term ‘the minded-bodies of those mobilized for peace.’

Sasha Davis also emphasises the importance of visceral knowledges and embodied actions in the work of global social movements. His argument centres on the ways that these knowledges and actions construct the ‘local’ as a complicated site of peace building. In tracing the ways that activists come together in locales, he argues that they develop a sense of place and of oppression that connects activist communities. These connections enable a translocal movement that depends on specific places and sites, even as locales are transcended. The intertwining of places and communities both enables and is dependent upon intellectual, visceral, and embodied ways of knowing that in turn is the basis for solidarity and mutual aid. The performances of solidarity and peace building depend on emotional experiences that exceed or transcend the specific places in which action is taken. In so doing, peace building is only partly about holding the state to account, but is also about creating and animating a global responsibility of care for each other, irrespective of where people are located and the governance of place. In so doing, these movements complicate and contest the spatialities of governance and peace.

Chloé Buire and Lynn Staeheli examine citizenship for young people in the townships and settlements in the Cape Flats area near Cape Town, South Africa. They discuss the embrace of ‘active citizenship’ on the part of many young activists, but note that this embrace is partial, qualified, and controversial. Rather than taking active citizenship as a political outlook and as involving a set of policy objectives, they trace the ways that some activists deploy it as an instrument, a set of tools, that they use in furthering their own goals. In so doing, however, the relationship between active citizens and their families and communities may be strained and even severed. For example, many citizenship promotion efforts depend on training leaders who will represent, but also intervene in, their communities. Activists, however, debate the issue of how they ‘represent’ their communities, and the ways that activism often distances themselves from the communities they are constructed as ‘leading.’ The article uses this example to argue that citizenship promotion efforts, and active citizenship in particular, embed contradictions that emerge as young people act politically. These contradictions are part and parcel of the pedagogy of citizenship itself and the varied ways that it can be used in advancing political goals intended or imagined to be transformational.

Sam Slatcher also attends to the contradictions and contested narratives of active citizenship and peace in one of its heartlands: the United Kingdom. In so doing, he demonstrates that the ‘problems’ of governance, peace, and citizenship are not solely – or even primarily – the provenance of transitional societies or of the Global South. Slatcher addresses the Peace Ambassadors in Leeds, a programme intended to instil leadership skills and an ethos of engagement with ‘other’ cultures in young people. In these efforts, encounter is presented as positive, as leading almost necessarily to peace, understanding, and tolerance. Interactions, therefore, are intended as a tool of governance in the publicly-funded programme. Yet there are contradictory assumptions at the very heart of this, and other, programmes. The Peace Ambassadors are implicated in the broader Prevent strategy that is intended to prevent radicalisation of Muslim youth in the UK; in focusing on Muslims, however, the programme constructs the religion and its adherents as antithetical to – or at least resistant to – tolerance and co-existence in British society. Participants in the Peace Ambassadors programming confront this contradiction in their work. Slatcher provides an example of the ways that a workshop at a mosque was experienced by participants, and contrasts it with the way the event was narrated in media coverage. The workshop and subsequent events make clear that peace is narrated through security in the UK, making ‘bridge building’ and peaceful encounters difficult, if not impossible, and thus reinforcing other narratives about the ungovernability of particular political subjects and their unsuitability for citizenship in a putatively tolerant and peaceful society.

The final two articles in this issue address courts as pedagogical sites of peace, citizenship and governance. These sites are significant, as much of the literature on neoliberal governance and citizenship have pointed to the increased importance of ‘soft sites’ such as the courts and civil society in attempts to forge governable citizens through civil and lawful behaviour (e.g. Boyd, 2006; Haughton, Allmendinger, & Oosterlunck, 2013; Jeffrey & Staeheli, 2015). Michaelina Jakala and Alex Jeffrey address the increased role of courts in public outreach, demonstrating how it is deployed in war-crimes tribunals. Focusing on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they analyse the ways that the micro-spatiality of outreach (including the arrangement of court- and hearing-rooms, the sites of hearings, and the publics represented in and through them) enabled different kinds of politics to emerge. Similar to the arguments presented in other articles in this special issue, Jakala and Jeffrey explore the embodied, affective, and emotional public testimony related to sexual violence within a peace building process often narrated in terms of institutional power-sharing arrangements between ethno-territorial entitles. They argue that the outreach hearings represent an example of the ways in which information, knowledge, practice, and the spatiality of each are developed. Their relational perspective highlights the ways that practices are not fully determined by the pedagogy of peace, as the hearing presented a space in which a politics of resistance was shaped and articulated. Importantly, the public created through the hearings is characterised by contention and consensus, by solidarity and solitude, with each dependent on the other.

In the final article, Joaquin Villanueva attends to a different form of pedagogy through public outreach on the part of the judicial system in France. He explores the ‘Houses of Justice’ that were established to shape promote a particular understanding of citizenship practices to young people in ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’ – a coded term for suburbs with high proportions of immigrant-origin families characterised by social exclusion and marginalisation. This was, he argues, an avowedly spatial strategy to govern by bringing a judicial presence to these neighbourhoods, to prevent delinquency and violence on the part of young people, and to promote practices that would avoid adjudication and detention. Unusually amongst the articles here, the programming enacted through the courts did not encourage engagement and participation. To be sure, it addressed issues related to the norms and ethos of citizenship, but its primary focus was on behaviours in daily life. Through his fieldwork, however, Villanueva noted a contradiction, in that young people were encouraged to know their rights and perform as citizens, even as public discourse censured them for exercising their rights. The extent to which the programming and the Houses of Justice enabled young, immigrant-origin citizens to be seen and to act as citizens remains uncertain, at best.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue explore attempts to animate pedagogies of peace and citizenship as part of strategies to make societies governable and ‘democratic’ in the contexts of division, injustice, marginalization, and structural processes of disenfranchisement and pacification. The articles demonstrate that the effects of this pedagogy as it is deployed in diverse settings are complicated, even perhaps confused, and the articles point to the need to understand the ways that elements of the pedagogies can be used as tools to advance a range of political positions. Activists and citizens often struggle to animate particular elements of the pedagogy, to draw resources and skills from it, even as they challenge, contest, and perhaps hope to transform the societies and nations in which they live.

Acknowledgements

Early versions of many of the articles in this special issue were presented at the 2015 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers in sessions organised by David Marshall and Daniel Hammett as part of the YouCitizenship research grant funded by the European Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Lynn A. Staeheli is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. Her research expertise includes citizenship, democracy, public space, youth, and protest.

ORCID

Lynn A. Staeheli http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7223-0970

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded through the European Research Council Advanced Grant entitled ‘Youth Citizenship in Divided Societies: between Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Civil Society’ ERC [grant number 295392].