Con-/divergences between postcolonial and critical peace education: towards pedagogies of decolonization in peace education

Abstract

This paper focuses on the limitations of the Eurocentric modernist framework that undergirds Freirean theory and critical pedagogy in relation to critical peace education, highlighting in particular the contributions of post-colonial and decolonial thinking. The paper posits that critical approaches to peace education need to consider these limitations in pushing critical peace education to engage more postcolonial and decolonial thinking. A renewal of critical peace education that integrates the critiques of both decolonial and postcolonial perspectives will provide productive possibilities for revitalizing the transformative orientation within critical peace education and decolonizing the work of research and pedagogical praxis in peace education. This means to evoke discourses and practices that move away from the dominant categories of Eurocentric thought and engage explicitly with the ways in which understandings and pedagogies of peace education are implicated in modernity and coloniality.

Keywords:

• Critical peace education
• postcolonial peace education
• decolonizing pedagogies
• critical pedagogy
• Freirean theory

Notes

1. There are major distinctions between decolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial theories. Although these theories are related, the terms ‘postcolonial’, ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti-colonial’ should not be used interchangeably. Wynter (2003) argues that material and land domination has been core to the project of coloniality over the centuries as well as the delineation of categories of human and not. Tuck and Yang (2012) also emphasize that decolonization is not a metaphor, but rather it is tied – both conceptually and in reality – with specific claims about the land that are bound up with settler colonial logics (which can overlap with a post-colonial framework, yet they are not synonymous). Andreotti (2011a) suggests that there are two strands of postcolonialism: one in a Marxist vein, focusing on changing the material circumstances of exploitation and the liberation of subjugated peoples (e.g. Freire, Fanon, Gandhi), and the other drawing theoretically from poststructuralism, problematizing power relations and the location of colonizers and colonized in language or discourse (e.g. Spivak, Bhabha). The notion of ‘anti-colonial’ has a more political connotation as a counter theoretical narrative and practice toward ways of being and structures that perpetuate colonization, racialization and oppression (Simmons and Sefa Dei 2012; Patel 2016). As Tuck and Yang further clarify,

an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework; anti-colonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn’t strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it. (2012, 19)

In this paper, I mainly use the terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’, retaining their theoretical nuances. However, I have come to prefer the term ‘decolonial’, because it promotes more explicitly the task of challenging and dismantling colonial logics and practices – which is the aim of the decolonizing pedagogies that I sketch for critical peace education toward the end of the paper.