On peace education in Colombia: a grounded international perspective

ABSTRACT

Promoted by the peace process between the Santos administration (2010–2018) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which resulted in the signing of a peace accord in November 2016, peace education at Colombia’s higher education establishments and schools is gaining momentum. Educators have seized upon the opportunity afforded by the peace process and the associated legislation, particularly Law 1448 (2011) on victims and Law 1732 (2014) on the Peace Chair (Cátedra de la Paz), to energise peace education. Yet this is proving to be difficult. Among the challenges are the persistence of high levels of political, criminal and other types of violence following the termination of the armed conflict affecting learners’ attitudes, behaviours and values; little relevance for peace education of established education in ethics and democratic citizenship competences; limited concrete knowledge on tertiary peace education as a pedagogical field; a vague legal framework; and little institutional guidance. Based on the author’s first-hand experience as a conflict analyst and university lecturer in Colombia and a discussion of the ‘conventional’ and ‘critical’ orientations of peace education, this paper addresses these challenges and presents ideas on how tertiary peace education in Colombia could be enhanced through a focus on historical memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace education
• Cátedra de la Paz
• violence
• armed conflict
• peace process
• Colombia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. It bears noting that prior to joining Universidad Icesi in Cali, I served for close to a decade as the Bogotá-based Project/Programme Director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Crisis Group, an independent global armed conflict prevention and resolution organisation.

2. On the difference between education on or about peace and for peace see (Reardon 1999).

3. The contributions of the participants in the focus group, among whom were three Colombians and two Europeans, are referenced in the text as (Focus Group 2020).

4. According to Bonta (Bonta 1993, cited in Boulding 2002, 11), peacefulness is a ‘condition, whereby people live with a relatively high degree of interpersonal harmony; experience little physical violence among adults, between adults and children, and between the sexes; have developed workable strategies for resolving conflicts and averting violence (such as warfare) with other peoples; raise their children to adopt their peaceful ways; and have a strong consciousness of themselves as peaceable’.

5. Among the experiences that students shared were traumatic events, such as the abduction of close family members by the insurgents and/or criminal organisations, as well as instances of stigmatisation by the authorities. Regarding the latter, one female student recounted, for example, how one day representatives of the local mayor’s office and the police came to her school in a rural area in the south-western Cauca department to let everybody know that ‘leftist indoctrination’, which they said they knew was happening at the school, would no longer be tolerated. While Cauca had for a long time been a stronghold of FARC, who managed to exert quite significant control over communities in the province, the official visit to the school took place when the peace talks between the Santos government and FARC were already well underway. The student therefore wondered about the intention behind, and appropriateness of, intimidating pupils and teachers in this way when a political solution to the protracted violent conflict with the insurgents appeared to be within reach.

6. The insight for peace education that can be drawn from these examples is that in regions of the world where violence is commonly used to ‘resolve’ entrenched political and other conflicts, reality may have a distorting effect on learners’ ‘moral imagination’ (Lederach 2005). Put differently, students may well ask themselves why, when violence is omnipresent and ‘normalised’ in reality, they should be expected to analyse it critically and develop non-violent conflict transformation or resolution strategies instead. It seems to me that when conceptualising and designing peace education, especially in violence-inflected political orders and societies, it is important to keep in mind what seminal legal scholar Georg Jellinek referred to as ‘reality’s normative power’ (die normative Kraft des Faktischen) (Anter 2004).

7. Managed and implemented by the Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación (ICFES), a national-level state entity ascribed to the Ministry of Education, the pre-university Saber 11 exam is taken by 11^th graders, while university students a required to take Saber Pro in the last semester of their study programmes.

8. The difficulty of establishing the effects and impact of peace education on students’ attitudes, behaviours and values is a recurrent topic in the literature. If at all, thus far authors have offered mostly anecdotal evidence about such effects, while it is generally recognised that there is a need for more systematic and methodologically more sophisticated evaluations of peace education (Bar-Tal 2002; Danesh 2008; Del Felice, Karako, and Wisler 2015; Frieters-Reermann 2010; Harris and Lewer 2005; Ross 2010).

9. In a similar vein, Boulding defines peace culture as a ‘mosaic of identities, attitudes, values, beliefs, and patterns that lead people to live nurturantly with one another and the earth itself without the aid of structural power differentials, to deal creatively with their differences and share their resources’ (Boulding 2002, 8).

10. Among the issues that haunted first-generation peace researchers cum pedagogues was whether peace education should be about or for peace. In other words, should peace education focus on teaching the insights and results gained from academic peace studies (what could be called the ‘scientific’ approach) or should it strive to educate learners so that they would become peaceful and peace-supporting citizens of the world (what could be called the ‘normative’ and ‘applied’ approach) (see, for instance, Nicklas and Ostermann 1974; Wiberg 1974). In a contribution to the debate published in 1974, the recognised Norwegian peace scholar and educator Johan Galtung called for ‘peace education [to] be taken seriously’ and ‘peace research, peace action, and peace education […] find[ing] each other and integrate into the natural unified whole’ (Galtung 1974, 153). Interestingly, and very much in counterflow to conventional academia, his proposal for how to achieve these important goals is based on the idea that the form of peace education ought to guide the development of its contents.

11. Post-colonial pedagogues like Paulo Freire see modern education as either an elitist instrument designed to integrate (some of) the young into the prevailing social and economic system and achieve conformity or to strengthen, in much broader and inclusionary fashion, the upcoming generations’ ability to seek freedom and develop their potential to transform the world (Freire 1968/2000; Harber 2004). More recent postcolonial critiques offer ‘an alternative avenue for peace education, namely for recognising the political interests at play in the promotion of: (a) a unified vision of peace and peace education; and (b) the individuals and groups who conform to this vision as agents of peace’ (Zakharia 2017, 48). In this vein, ‘postcolonial theory enables “the emergence of a kind of contestatory dialogue where knowledge is perceived as situated, partial, and provisional” and where “contextual and ongoing co-construction of meaning” (Andreotti 2011, cited in Zakharia 2017) is possible’ (Zakharia 2017, 48).

12. Among the conferences and forums were the National Meeting on Peace Education (Encuentro Nacional de Educación para la Paz) in October 2015; the First International Congress on Education and Society: the role of education in peacebuilding (Primer Congreso Internacional de Educación y Sociedad: el papel de la educación en la construcción de la paz) at Universidad de La Salle in November 2016; the annual conferences of REDUNIPAZ, a university alliance on peace education dating back to the late 1990s; and a series of public debates organised by Colombia’s National Vocational Training Service (SENA in Spanish), in one of which I participated in Cali as a speaker in 2017. At the level of the Andean region, the UNESCO Chair on Culture and Education for Peace at Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja in neighbouring Ecuador began establishing collaborations with higher education institutes in Colombia, such as the Centro de Investigación y Estudios en Paz, Conflictos y Desarrollo (CIPAZ) at Universidad de Pamplona (Santander). Recently created study programmes and higher education centres that focus on peace education or include an emphasis on peacebuilding are the Centro de Estudios en Educación para la Paz at Universidad de La Sabana, the UNESCO Chair on Education and a Culture of Peace at Universidad del Rosario, and the MA in Peacebuilding at Universidad de Los Andes, among others. Entrusted with coordinating the MA in Government at Universidad Icesi in Cali between 2016 and 2018, I developed the extant curriculum to include a focus on the challenges and governance of peacebuilding in Colombia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Georg Arnhold Programme on Education for Sustainable Peace;

Notes on contributors

Markus Schultze-Kraft

Dr. Markus Schultze-Kraft is a professor of Political Science at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin) with more than two decades of global research, teaching and policy experience with respect to a broad range of peace, conflict and security issues. His recent publications include the monographs Education for Sustaining Peace through Historical Memory (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and Crimilegal Orders, Governance and Armed Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).