Peace education across continents
BY Dong Jin Kim & David Mitchell
Peace education hopes to foster peace-promoting attitudes like empathy and tolerance. It can also involve learning about the causes and possible solutions to specific conflicts. In our study, we set out to understand if, and how, peace educators in different conflict-affected places might support and collaborate with each other. By doing so, could they increase their impact within their own contexts?
For several years, we’d been interested in the comparison of conflicts: how it can be done analytically, and how people in different conflicts can come together to learn from each other. Comparing conflicts can be very sensitive. Everyone likes to think that their own conflict is unique. Politicians sometimes give comparison a bad name by drawing loose and inappropriate analogies to support their points of view.
Conflicts are unique. Geography and history make them so. But they are also similar in many ways. They usually involve groups fighting over the legitimacy of the state and/or state borders. Conflict emotions – trauma, grievance, fear, mistrust – are shared across conflicts. Peace and Conflict Studies has always assumed that studying more and more cases of conflict will lead to better understanding about conflict resolution.
With all this in mind, since 2015, we had been involved in making connections between people working for peace in Northern Ireland and in Korea. Through conferences, exchanges, and study tours, we tried to use comparison as a way of stimulating understanding and inspiration. This included peace educators. In fact, a partnership was initiated between two youth peace organisations in Belfast (R CITY) and Seoul (Okedongmu Children). These groups began a programme of online meetings in which young people learned about each other’s lives, contexts, and challenges. In-person staff exchanges also took place.
We had written about aspects of this work before, but we now wanted to focus on peace education. We spoke to twenty peace educators who had travelled between Ireland and Korea to meet with counterparts, and/or had, online contact with counterparts. This included people involved in the organisations above, as well as Corrymeela Reconciliation Centre and the Korean Sharing Movement. We asked people to reflect on their experience. Had interacting with peace educators from the other contexts helped their peace education work? If so, in what ways?
Three main benefits were highlighted. First, we found that getting to know people who were involved in another conflict and coming to understand the conflict from their experience could help change how people thought about their own situations. It gave them a new sense of perspective, showing that their own society’s problems were not unique, or uniquely bad. ‘You realise we’re not the only ones stuck living like this’ [in a divided society], as one interviewee said – a phrase we used for the title of our article.
Second, international partnerships and relationships can help build the capacity of peace educators. In other words, it added to what organisations could do and deliver. It was attractive to participants and developed the skills and knowledge of practitioners.
Third, interviewees spoke of how international partnerships and relationships could create a galvanising sense of solidarity. Peace education can be slow and lonely work. Discovering that there are people on the other side of the world who have the same challenges and hopes was impactful and encouraging for practitioners.
At the same time, the challenges to this work were also highlighted. These included the language barrier, the issue of commitment and sustainability, and funding.
Drawing on these findings, our article discusses how international connections and partnerships can help meet key goals of peace education. More generally, they are an example of what may be called ‘translocal’ peacebuilding. This contrasts with international peacebuilding which is carried out by outside agents, or local peacebuilding. Translocal work involves ordinary people in different conflict-affected places learning and supporting each other so that they can make a greater impact within their own contexts. This can help not only youth peace educators, but peace practitioners in all sectors. We believe that this kind of peacebuilding is worth further study and development.
Article details
‘You Realise We’re Not the Only Ones Stuck Living Like This’: Comparative Learning, International Partnerships and Civil Society Peace Education in Conflict-Affected Societies
Dong Jin Kim & David Mitchell
First Published: June 22, 2023
DOI: 10.1177/03043754231185927
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
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