Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos

                           

   

 

         

       

 

 

vi Contents

PART I V

Strategic responses to conflict

9 Education in immediate times of conflict

141

143

10 The aftermath of conflict: rebuilding society

165

11 Conflict resolution within the school

183

PART V The complex adaptive school

201

12 Education for positive conflict and interruptive democracy

203

Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements

225 242

Thank you to: • •

• •

all the people whose minds I have plagiarised for this book; all the young and, er, older people who have inspired me through their examples of positive resistance people in the Centre for International Education and Research and beyond who read drafts, told me what to cut out, and provided everything from encouragement to jugs of margaritas — Clive Harbcr, Michele Schweisfurth, Gordon Kirkpatrick, Chris Williams and Hiromi Yamashita my husband Chris Davies who also applied his ideas around tree surgery to cut out the surplus my daughter Anna for being an oasis of peace.

Part I

The terms of the debate

1

i

Chapter I

I ntroduction The nature of conflict

There are no signs that the world is becoming a less conflictual place. Peace agreements are signed and conflict breaks out in another place, or resumes in the old one. The spread of international human rights conventions is barely able to contain the rise of various fundamentalisms, claiming rights to land as well as to ideology. Rewriting boundaries means new or resurgent ethnicities, and demands for recognition and autonomy. Violence against children may be legally prohibited in some countries, but domestic violence, school violence and child sexual abuse does not go away. Conflict is part of our lives, and it is difficult to foresee a time when there will not be a struggle for resources and when those seeking or maintaining power will not use some form of conflict in power interests. Highly 'educated' or qualified people have been responsible for major atrocities in recent human history — as with medical doctors in Nazi Germany as well as South Africa. The nature of conflict is however shifting. As Eade points out, it is almost routine to begin the discussion of conflict-related emergencies by stating that contemporary wars are fought not on demarcated battlefields, but in the towns, villages and homes of ordinary people. Ninety per cent of today's war casualties are civilians and four out of five refugees and displaced persons are women and children. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc are thought to have intensified these trends and ushered in the New World Disorder (Eade 1996). Some 7 million children worldwide were either killed or injured by conflict over the last decade alone, and more than 10 million are still affected by the violence they have witnessed or participated in (Ecole et Paix 2001). Terrorism is claiming new victims and new martyrs, as well as generating the dangerous 'war on terror' heavily promoted by the USA. Yet conflict resolution and prevention is grossly underfunded. In 2001 Britain was spending twenty times its contribution to OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) on continued military operations to `contain' Saddam Hussein (Mathews 2001). NATO countries spend approximately $413 billion on 'defence', which is 215,000 times the OSCE budget. As Mathews points out, the result of such policies is that in conflict areas

4 The terms of the debate

around the world, warlords have instant access to weapons, and attention is concentrated on the violent — while potential bridge builders and peacemakers have few tools and fewer resources. This book considers whether education can become part of these tools. Education spending is still less than defence spending in most countries of the world, but is nonetheless a sizeable chunk of the economy. Landmines cost less than $10 each, but once laid cost $300—$1000 to clear. De-mining lags far behind the placing of new mines, so that there are now over 110 million mines strewn over past and current battlefields; their removal would cost over $33 billion (UNICEF 1997). Landmine education also mops up some of the education budget in affected countries, as will be discussed later. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, with supposedly a keen interest in peacekeeping, are also the main suppliers of arms, accounting for more than four-fifths of weapons sold (Rihani 2002). Arms sales are linked to foreign policy; the Middle East, a lucrative market for the USA and Europe, has, as Rihani points out, 'the perfect mix of attributes: abundant oil money, leaders willing to start a fight at the least provocation and a long history rich with grievances' (Rihani 2002: 221). New Labour's promise to follow an ethical foreign policy with regard to the sales of British weapons abroad was forgotten soon after it won the election in 1997. Arms are marketed assiduously, with huge subsidies to foreign buyers. The figures show clearly that the expenditure on arms has not promoted peace. In 1994 it was calculated that 4 per cent of the sum spent by developing countries for military purposes would have been enough to achieve universal primary education, cut adult illiteracy by 50 per cent and educate women to the level of men (UNDP 1994). It is probably an even smaller fraction now, with the increasing sophistication and cost of weapons. The sale cf arms is of course a very complex web across a range of buyers and sellers, so that arms sold by one country can in the end easily be used against them, an irony not often admitted. UN peacekeeping forces die as a result of arms produced by the West. With arms easily accessible, internal conflicts are militarised; when wars break out they are prolonged; when wars end, peacekeeping operations are endangered, and the burden of peacebuilding is exaggerated by the need to try to collect millions of small arms that have been infused by western arms-dealers into the prevailing social and political disorder (O'Sullivan 1999). This book examines the relationship of education to such conflict and such contradiction. It does not paint a picture of schooling as a rescue operation, nor work on the premiss that a continuation of our present education systems will of necessity eventually lead to a more peaceful and collaborative world. There is little evidence so far that the formal systems that we have had in place for over a century in many parts of the world have directly made the world a more 'rational' or ordered place. The people making the decisions

Introduction: the nature of conflict 5

on both sides of a conflict—whether in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland — have been 'educated' in the sense of 'schooled', but will still see armed conflict as a solution — sometimes the only solution — to territorial claims. The fact that it is in the interest of many economies that other countries live in perpetual tension so that they purchase arms is not something that appears on the school curriculum. It is not just that schools do not all do 'peace education', but they do not tackle the uncomfortable economic and political issues which might enable the next generation to demand a more ethical foreign policy. This book argues that there are grave omissions — or contradictions — in the curricula of both stable and conflictual societies, omissions which contribute to a continued acceptance of war. There are also elements of the process and ethos of schooling which foster a lifelong predisposition to hostility — also often glossed over. The World Bank Report A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and Finance for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has a section on 'Extensive Armed Conflicts'. This documents the brutal facts of one African in five living in a country severely disrupted by war, a growing number of perpetrators of violence being children, and conflicts destabilising the region as a whole, eroding investor confidence, disrupting trade routes, accelerating the spread of HIV/ AIDS and sending refugee populations into neighbouring countries (World Bank 2001a: 25). The report is then curiously silent on how or whether education should respond to this. Instead it focuses on the conventional areas of universal primary education, alternatives to existing service delivery, costsharing, language of instruction, physical infrastructure, teacher—pupil ratios, health education, locally produced textbooks, technology, vocational training: education of nomads, teacher training and teachers' conditions of service — it would seem everything but any direct attention to conflict and peace. This is extraordinary. The section on 'measuring progress' does not even hint at progress towards peace, relying on indicators of reading ability. The gender/equity sections discuss access to schooling, but have nothing to say about the role of education in combating gender-based violence. There is a mention of Colombia's aim 'to develop citizen skills', and conflict is mentioned in terms of problems of violence between nomads and farmers, but basically, conflict is seen as a contextual (a diversionary?) issue rather than one to be addressed head on through the education system. Given that this text is within the 'human development' series, it is a great pity that a body as influential as the World Bank does not appear to want to take a radical stance in prioritising peace. Nonetheless other bodies and arenas are acknowledging the centrality of the issue. By the time of the 1990 World Conference on Education for All in 1990, in Jomtien, a connection had been made between declining school enrolments and armed conflict, although the actual Jomtien Declaration and Framework made only limited reference to such armed conflict. The

6 The terms of the debate

Amman mid-decade review in 1996 devoted one of its round table sessions to `Education in Emergencies', identifying escalating violence caused by growing ethnic tensions and other sources of conflict as an 'emerging challenge' for education (Tawil 2001). The World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 introduced into the Dakar Framework for Action that EFA initiatives must take into account the needs of children and adults affected by armed conflict. How exactly should this be 'taken into account' though? Tawil asks these questions: If one of the principal functions of education is to ensure social cohesion, what do violent breakdowns of social cohesion tell us about the content and function of formal education? How does formal education contribute to the breakdown of social cohesion and the outbreak of internal conflict? Conversely, in what ways can formal education contribute to the reinforcement or rebuilding of social cohesion? (Tawil 2001: 294) I would add some further puzzles. Why do some schools remain resilient in the face of war, while others collapse? How can a school simultaneously seem to be a force for good and a force for evil? How can religious education do likewise? Are the ways of doing peace directly opposite to the ways of doing war? What are the 'rules of engagement' for peace? Can a country declare peace on another country, and can schools help in this declaration? These are all the questions for this book. As the above discussion has implied, the relationship of education to conflict is not just about conflict societies — it is a global issue in which stable countries are also implicated. And conflict within the school occurs in any political context, with increasing concerns about violence and disaffection among students. These two arenas are intricately interlinked, as I will try to show. On one level, of course, all life is conflict, and it may be difficult to know where the boundary falls between the inevitable everyday cut and thrust and the full-scale war — or whether to talk of a boundary at all. In parallel with the concern about armed conflict and violence, this book also advances the notion of 'positive conflict' — the necessary way in which social progress occurs and challenges are made to injustice. My aims in this book are fourfold: (a) to demonstrate the crucial contemporary importance of an analysis of the relationship between education and conflict (b) to trace connections between wider conflict and school-based conflict (c) to provide a theoretical framework for understanding which can also be used in practical ways (d) to advance the use of positive conflict and interruptive democracy in education as a way to allow the emergence of more appropriate learning.

Introduction: the nature of conflict 7

1

It can be seen that I hope for multiple audiences. I do think that the link between conflict and education is a grossly under-analysed area. This is not surprising, as it is uncomfortable for policymakers and curriculum developers. It is safer to focus on literacy and numeracy, on the number of desks and the achievement of measurable targets. It is significant that much of the curriculum work and materials on rights, non-violence and peace education comes from NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) outside the main state frameworks. I want to see conflict brought into the mainstream, to encourage both risk-taking and networking. The aims and range of this book are in some ways hopelessly ambitious, but what I attempt to show is that everything is interlinked, that you need a robust sociological theory as well as examples of good practice, and that you need some sort of vision as well as descriptions of everyday 'reality'. A central position of the book is that we all have agency, but that we need a range of alliances to sustain real change. If the book has multiple audiences, it is because we need multiple connectivities. As a teacher educator, I like Murphy's (1999) idea of 'an open conspiracy'. If we are to do anything about conflict, it will need an open conspiracy of a large range of people in and around education. I should at this point reveal where I come from in this book. It is from a history of working around deviance, around gender issues, around democracy and around education management — all within international contexts. Pupil deviance, teacher deviance and government deviance are closely intertwined in most parts of the world. Short periods of work in Kosovo, Bosnia and Palestine over the last few years have given me practical insights into responses to conflict, and certainly will have underpinned the interest in complexity. Management training with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) officials in UK and Jordan has also been a learning experience, as is teaching human rights education and citizenship education to experienced international participants. Theoretically I often come at conflict from a feminist standpoint and have been influenced by feminist writers and researchers on conflict and masculinity. However, to arrive at complexity theory means an eclectic mix of feminist theory, deviancy theory, management theory and development theory. Friends ask whether this book is my life's work, and in some ways it is. But it is a life bombarded by other lives, other rationalities, other absurdities. I acknowledge debt to them all. Structure of the book

The ordering of this book has been difficult, because of the overlapping nature of all of the discussion and the predicament of fitting a non-linear subject into a linear framework. Nonetheless, I do want to try to build an argument, and isolate some areas before reassembling them. After this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sets out the framework of complexity theory which will

Introduction: the nature of conflict

8 The terms of the debate

underpin the book. Part II focuses on the roots of conflict and their implications for education. This is somewhat artificially carved up into the three areas of economic/class relations, gender, and ethnicity/identity, acknowledging their interconnections but arguing that there are distinctive contributions that each 'field' makes to the conflict debate. Analytically it is necessary to tease out such contributions, if only to avoid the paralysis that comes from seeing everything as inexorably linked. The irony or paradox of complexity theory is that the sum is not reducible to its parts, yet to understand connectivity we do need to look at those parts. Part III moves more directly to review the interface between education and conflict in terms firstly of how war or violence affects educational institutions, and secondly (or conversely) how education can contribute to war — or to peace. It must be stressed again that these chapters are not just about 'wartorn' societies. Conflict spreads historically and spatially. The contribution of education to war is not just in military training camps, but in 'normal' competitive, authoritarian, non-critical pedagogy the world over. Similarly, the contribution to peace can range from very specific 'peace packages' used in refugee camps to 'normal' democratic, rights-based, cooperative education which can also be found all over the world (although, I would have to say, far less frequently). Part IV contains four chapters delineating strategic responses to conflict. I have initially followed the convention of distinguishing conflict and postconflict societies, while admitting that the strategies overlap hugely. In the `i mmediate' conflict chapter I look at rapid educational response and humanitarian aid, as well as refugee education; in the 'aftermath' chapter I focus more on the issue of rebuilding society and restoring public and political culture. These two chapters are followed by one that focuses specifically on conflict resolution within the school, showing how the techniques used in conflict resolution at international levels equally apply to classrooms and relationships in an institution. The final chapter sets out my argument for interruptive democracy and positive conflict, for the deliberate introduction of certain sorts of conflict within a school in order to create a generation of learners who will challenge injustice and the folly of violence — and whereby the complex adaptive school can be an agent of change in the community and beyond. Definitions of conflict, war, violence, protest and peace

It would be useful to begin with how this book sees and uses the basic terminology. Coser (1956) had a simple definition of conflict as involving struggles between two or more people over values, or competition for status, power and scarce resources. He later added 'in which the aim of opponents is to neutralise, injure or eliminate rivals' (1967: 8), which seems somewhat

9

extreme, in that it does not include consensual resolution. Roche (1996) similarly defines conflict as 'the playing out in violent form of political relations'. For this book, I prefer a wider concept of conflict, in line with Agerback's delineation of 'dispute': In the sense of dispute, conflict is of course universal in the politics of family, community and nation. In that sense, any dynamic human system is by nature a conflictive one, encompassing the play of opposing interests. The crux lies in how such conflict is managed. So long as the social and political processes provide channels for dialogue, participation and negotiation, conflict plays a constructive role. Where such channels are blocked, and yet basic needs go unmet, then resentment and desperation build up. The outcome is protest, repression and violence. (1996: 27) Such a description links the universal nature of conflict with the more crucial question of where it stems from and what people do with it. Many conflict resolution books start out with definitions of conflict, definitions which are actually about causality and process. From Isenhart and Spangle's (2000) list of definitions from a range of authors, for example, one could summarise that conflict is: • • • •

a real or apparent incompatibility of interests or goals a belief that parties' current aspirations cannot be achieved simultaneously a struggle over values and claims to status, power or resources an intermediate stage of a spectrum of struggle that escalates and becomes more destructive.

In organisational psychology on the other hand, there is a traditional distinction between cognitive conflict and affective conflict. Cognitive conflict is overt, related to the task; affective conflict happens at the more subtle, process level and relates to group maintenance and interpersonal dynamics. Cognitive issues focus on roles, policies and resources and enhance group performance. Affective issues focus on norms and values, and supposedly reduce performance and satisfaction. Apparently, people are able to tell the difference between the two, and whether conflict is about affective states such as hatred and jealousy (Thomas 1992). I would hazard however that it is unlikely, especially in education, that there is clear water between the two states. Even a conflict about something functional, such as curriculum policy, is likely to mean people taking positions related to their identity. If the question is solved after a simple debate with people putting forward views and counter-indications which are persuasive enough for a consensus

Introduction: the nature of conflict I I

10 The terms of the debate

to form, then this is not actually a conflict. If something becomes a conflict, then affective issues are bound to emerge. The nature of escalation and the question of time together mean that definitions of 'conflict' therefore may revolve around a temporal or 'stage' issue, that is, at what point a difference of opinion actually becomes a conflict. `Crisis', for example, is defined by Roche as 'a critical juncture in a process at which a radical change becomes necessary. Thus a crisis represents a period of transformation, or transition when disaster threatens. Disaster is defined here as the situation that occurs when crisis outstrips the capacity of a society to cope with it' (1996: 23). Hence instead of attempting to deal solely with events produced by different types of change, we must try to shape and guide the forces which produce such events, in order to 'change the nature of change itself' (Roche 1996: 23). Perceptions of the history of a conflict become crucial for looking at points of intervention and 'coping'. As Cockburn (1998) points out, conflicts (such as in the Balkans, or Northern Ireland) are portrayed by the media and other commentators as based on age-old, primordial ties — wars are thus seen as inescapable and will never end; they will just vary in intensity. Yet a more careful reading shows that these wars are modern — not just fought with modern weapons, but with modern goals — sovereignty, statehood or citizenship, as well as resources. Focusing on 'age-old' rivalries also underestimates the part played by twentieth- and twenty-first-century world powers such as the USA, Britain and Germany. Who is fighting whom can change all the ti me, including who are allies and who become the refugees in whose country. This is another argument for complexity theory, to help understand the dynamics of change in conflict. Shifts in the nature of armed conflicts are also relevant to discussing the role of education in different countries (Tawil 2001). Since the end of the Cold War, violent conflicts have increasingly taken place within, rather than between, states. In 1999, only two of the twenty-seven major armed conflicts observed throughout the world were international. Yet this picture can change, and will be influenced by 'international terrorism' within and across countries. I then come to the question of whether 'war' is the same as 'armed conflict' and/or 'violent conflict'. Arnhold et al. (1998) in their book on Education for Reconstruction distinguish three forms of 'war': intercountry belligerence, civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict, all of which mean physical destruction and disruption to education. Even after a political settlement, hostility will persist. We should not conflate the three forms of conflict — interpersonal aggression, public order and organised war — as they have legal distinctions. Definitions of 'war' may also have a gendered component. Kelly asks, 'Does militarism construct a particular form of brutal (or brutalised) masculinity? When is a war a war, and what constitutes peace from the perspective of women?' (2000: 47). She points out how the term 'sex war' was commonplace

in feminist rhetoric and analysis in the 1970s. This was intended as a powerful metaphor, to challenge the limited definitions of war, and is less used now after some trivialisation by the media. However, the need to understand gender relations as a potential ongoing site of conflict is still there, particularly in terms of sexual violence and the forms such sexual violence takes in national or civil armed conflict (see Chapter 4). 'War' is generally used now in a range of metaphorical discourses, and this has educational implications. There are also different definitions of violence, not of all of which include arms. Cairns says we must distinguish interpersonal violence from intergroup or political violence, the latter defined as 'violence perpetrated by one set or group or people on another set or group of people who were often strangers to each other before the violence occurred' (Cairns 1996: 10). Yet in civil war such as in Bosnia the groups were only too familiar; I am not sure about this definition. Zwi and Ugalde (1991) distinguish four main types of 'political violence', although recognising that they overlap considerably: • • • •

structural — resulting from the maldistribution of resources and political power repressive — by the state or others in which social groups are targeted because of their religion, ethnicity, political beliefs, etc. reactive — a reaction against the repression experienced, or conversely by privileged groups against reforming government combative — the use of force to preserve or gain power, possibly linked with outside intervention such as the 'low intensity' wars of Mozambique or Nicaragua.

I find Jamil Salmi's (1999) typology one of the most useful for this book. He offers an analytical framework to define violence and distinguishes four different categories: • •

• •

Direct violence relates to physical acts resulting in deliberate injury and killing (murder, genocide, rape, torture, forced resettlement, forced labour, slavery). Indirect violence refers to violence by omission — lack of protection against poverty, hunger, disease, accidents and natural catastrophe, or victims of persecution; also mediated violence which is the result of deliberate human interventions in the natural or social environment (defoliants, pesticides, embargos). Repressive violence refers to human rights violations — of freedom of thought, speech, religion, freedom to vote, go on strike, form a union. Alienating violence is the deprivation of a person's higher rights such as psychological, emotional, cultural or intellectual integrity. This includes racism, social ostracism, cultural repression and living in fear.

12 The terms of the debate

Obviously, some occurrences may fall into several categories — for example, slavery. Salmi asks, can the same analytical framework be applied to the concept of education? At first sight, he says, they do not fit well together, as the former (violence) refers to harmful situations which cause people to suffer, and the latter (education) to a positive process of intellectual and moral growth. Yet they have many points of intersection: schools can be violent environments, and at the same time education can be a powerful instrument to reduce violence and improve human rights (Salmi 1999). The notion of schools as violent has resonances of course with Bourdieu's (1977) concept of 'symbolic violence' — the way that schools repress and do harm to children through labelling and the power of words rather than through physical violence. Many writers on conflict also distinguish not only between interpersonal, social and political violence but also between overt and covert violence, with the latter referring to 'symbolic or structural oppression' (Tawil 2001). I shall return to this in Chapter 7. One aspect of conflict which has been specifically investigated for education is protest. Robert Adams's (1991) book Protests by Pupils traces the history of collective protest over the last two centuries, arguing that this had received scant attention from researchers. He outlines the characteristics of pupil protest as sixfold: interruption (to the process of schooling); temporariness; groups of pupils (collective action); expression of a grievance; achieving/demanding a change; and action as part of a continuum (of practices and relationships). Collective protest is the dimension of disruption which covers boycotts, sit-ins, walkouts and riots. The strategies and tactics include confrontation (ranging from actual violence against staff or property to silent resistance); alliances (with parents, teachers, media); diversion (ranging from absenteeism to satire); and subversion (sabotage and reprisals). Adams gives examples of all of these, across a range of countries. Adams talks of the 'silence' of the sociology of the school on this issue, compared to radical sociology in general which examines in detail industrial unrest such as strikes. He considers that structuralist sociology, which locates knowledge and culture in the superstructure of power, then ignores the knowledge and culture of young people. There has of course been a mass of sociological literature on pupil deviance, but he is probably right that specific political struggles have received much less attention. They are important for my book, in that, as we shall see in Chapter 12, pupil protests may constitute a form of positive conflict which is to be encouraged rather than suppressed. Also important are the definitions of non-violent action, as well as violent action. Non-violent direct action is characterised by withdrawal from contact, silent protest and shunning of the authorities, and social techniques such as petitioning, ostracism or avoidance. In educational terms, it also includes 'economic' techniques, such as boycotts of school or college, blockades, strikes, slowdowns, picketing, blocking entrances, vigils, demonstrations and marches. It also includes propaganda. There are inevitably

Introduction: the nature of conflict 13

disputes about whether 'non-violence' can include sabotage or damage to property (Adams 1991). While this book will be drawing a host of parallels and interfaces between political conflict and within-school conflict, it would be cautious about going down the road of depicting the school as a battleground, or as a simple repository foutiysical and symbolic violence. It would be an insult to those who have experienced the real horrors of war to paint schools as equivalent, however nasty some of them may be. Perhaps the most vivid definition and description of civil war (and what constitutes 'arms') is Kate Adie's: Civil war is domestic violence writ large: the bread-knife and the fear at the top of the stairs. All your neighbours become a suspect family, and no one will intervene. You shriek among familiar surroundings and no one else takes much notice. You appeal to the authorities — and they're rather embarrassed. And when the uniforms finally arrive they never understand the intensity of what's going on. Nor can they have a solution. Civil wars are nasty, vindictive, and redolent of vendetta and revenge. Memories are vivid — for the events take place in and around the home. The local shop is burned out, the bakery becomes an ammunition store, the farm machinery plant an arms factory. Names of the dead are recognized — the people along the street. Also the names of the people who did the killing. The conflict is called a war, but has no rules of war, for everything is legitimised in' the name of survival. You kill cattle and burn houses full of useful belongings, just because they belong to the wrong people. And a Red Cross is meaningless — because there is talk of ambulances ferrying arms and fighters to the other side. Besides, your people do it too. Superstition rears its medieval head, for there is faith in the past and your struggle is rooted in past injustices. So bodies are not left untouched, and even graves not left quiet. And you never wish to live next door to your neighbour again. The foreigners call it ethnic cleansing. But you fear the bread knife, in the middle of the night. (2002: 255-6) The themes in this description will be returned to again and again in this book — fear, revenge, memory, identity, legitimisation. But I can see no good in civil wars, and I can see some good in schools. I am not a de-schooler. This book also looks at what schools do and can do for peace — which again needs a brief definition here.

14 The terms of the debate Peace is a process: a many sided, never-ending struggle to transform violence. . . . Stable peace is a relatively rare state. . . . Peace is often compared to health, in that it is more easily recognised by its absence .. . Absence of war is often described as a negative (`cold') peace, and is contrasted with positive (`warm') peace, which encompasses all the aspects of the good society that we might envisage for ourselves: universal rights, economic well-being, ecological balance and other core values. (Fisher et al. 2000: 10) Most definitions therefore now agree that peace is more than just the absence of war. It can be linked to the 'quiet, mundane, feminine' (Kelly 2000: 48). For writers such as Enloe (1987), a peace meaningful to women would require not just the absence of armed and gender conflict at home, locally and abroad, but also the absence of poverty and the conditions which recreate it. The classic definition is that of the United Nations: 'Peace includes not only the absence of war, violence and hostilities . . . but also the enjoyment of economic and social justice, equality and the entire range of human rights and fundamental freedoms within society' (United Nations 1993: Paragraph 13). To look at whether schools are peaceful places, we need to see whether pupils and teachers enjoy justice, rights and fundamental freedoms. This will be the task of Chapter 8.

Introduction: the nature of conflict 15

• •

•

•

•

Theories of causes of conflict

A book on conflict should say something about causation, especially if we are trying to see where education 'fits' in this causation. Again, this is an even bigger field than definitions, so what I do here is simply list some of the theories, in order to be able to return to them later in their relation to education. Isenhart and Spangle (2000) provide a good summary of the theories and their various authors or protagonists; for the purposes of brevity I summarise their account even more here.

•

•

•

• •

Attribution theory: People make sense of their world by assigning qualities and causes to people and situations, frequently attributing positive consequences to their own actions and negative ones to the actions of others. They may develop overgeneralised labels to explain others' behaviour, and assign blame. Equity theory: Conflict is seen from the perspective of distributive justice. People become distressed or angry when they feel they are not receiving their fair share of something they value. Field theory: People's actions are a product of contextual forces, with a push and pull based on expectations, commitments and loyalties. Each setting, such as family, community group, work or educational context,

serves as a psychological field where competing attitudes create safe or hostile climates. Interacti onist theory: Conflict is a product of continuous negotiation about what is valued, how behaviours are to be interpreted and the meanings of events. Psychodynamic theory: People approach problems from one of many unconscious states, such as anxiety, ego, fear, aggressiveness or guilt. Internal tensions build up to a point where they demand release, often in destructive ways. Displacement occurs when parties unable to direct their anger to the source of their frustration direct it to a more accessible target (a pupil?). Social exchange theory: This is based on market analysis. People make choices based on self-interest and weigh up benefits and losses. Conflict arises when people perceive that their rewards are too low, their costs too high or when they anticipate resistance in meeting their goals. Phase theory: Conflict proceeds through a predictable sequence of behaviours; behaviours that ignite conflict can be identified; specific behaviours tend to perpetuate or escalate conflict. Therefore triggers and monitoring are important. Systems theory: Groups possess 'organisation' as do biological organisms. They are homeostatic in that parties will adjust their communication to achieve or maintain equilibrium. Conflict arises when the system or one sub-system breaks down, or members exceed their functional roles to create imbalances elsewhere. Transformational theory: Conflict is not necessarily dysfunctional, but a vital social function where tensions are released and new communal norms are established or refined. It forces parties to deal with deeper social issues.

In my view, complexity theory is able to combine many of these, and I will return to them in the next chapter. I will be proposing: Complexity shutdown theory: Negative conflict arises when there is a lack of connectivity, of feedback, of use of information and of willingness to benefit from diversity.

War stems from linearity, from simplistic purities, not from complexity. On President Nixon's wall was rumoured to be a sign saying 'I have made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts'. A joke then, but frighteningly salient now. `Frozen struggles' are those where resolution is unlikely and de-escalation difficult, because of rigid perceptions, incompatible values, poor communication, perceptions that the situation is win—lose and needs advantage over others, and rigid and unchanging perceptions of self in relation to the rest of

Introduction: the nature of conflict 17

16 The terms of the debate

the world. This would characterise Northern Ireland and the Middle East. It has been suggested that moving away from frozen positions can begin with gradual, reconciliatory initiatives, such as that used by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat prior to the Camp David meetings in 1978. This is to enhance trust to the point where at least communication can begin. It must be restated that not all the theories relate only to the 'negative' end of conflict, but can relate to positive conflict as well. A certain amount or type of conflict is necessary for a functioning democracy, whereby challenges are made to injustice or to incompetent governance. My concern is when positive or transformational conflict shifts to negative, or when there was never positive conflict in the first place. This relates to 'spirals' of conflict, or conflict escalation. Spirals of conflict

In relation to public policy disputes, Carpenter and Kennedy identify the sequence of events common to conflict spirals: 1 Problem emerges. 2 Sides form as controversy grows. 3 Positions harden as parties become narrower and more rigid in their perspective. 4 Communication stops and parties become adversarial. 5 Conflict goes outside the immediate context as parties look for support and power. 6 Perceptions become distorted and parties lose objectivity. 7 Sense of crisis emerges as community divides into factions and coalitions. 8 Uncertainty arises about outcomes as options for parties become fewer. (Carpenter and Kennedy 1988: 17) A specific sort of spiral occurs through triangulation. This is not quite the triangulation in research methods, but when one party seeks the alliance of a second party — a pupil persuading a parent that the teacher is unfair, unreasonable or abusive. This may perpetuate blaming. Isenhart and Spangle also identify lace-saving' — the defensive, image-protecting behaviours when parties perceive threats to their social identities. This is particularly true of school students, with fragile identities constantly under threat both from teachers and from peers. 'Face-threatening' occurs when one party casts doubt on the competence, motivations or truthfulness of another. Steps to end conflict get bogged down as parties devote energy to protecting their i mage instead of resolving issues. 'Threat inflation' is very evident in contemporary international hostility (Woollacott 2003) and will be returned to in Chapter 5 in the discussion of fear.

The notion of 'runaway norms' found in discussions of conflict escalation is an interesting one: the group conforms to patterns of behaviour that seem normal to members but appear contentious or polarising to others. The norms become justification for heightened distrust and insults directed at other groups. Behaviours produce reciprocal behaviours in the other groups, and conflict can spiral. Particular and specific requests or goals become or reach the level of a 'common cause' such as fighting injustice. One particularly important aspect is that of interpretation of conflict and of history, as we shall see. Isenhart and Spangle cite fascinating studies showing that married couples only recall 35 per cent of what they talked about in the past hour, and people recall only about 9 per cent of what they actually talked about days earlier. Hence there is much dispute about what really was said or happened. One only has to watch people of any age doing the endless 'Oh no I didn't, Oh yes you did' routine to be aware of the importance of writing and rewriting the script in the 'moves' of conflict. The use of language in conflict

Language is a vital issue in human conflict, both in justifications and in terminology for resolution. Poerwawidadgo (2002), for example, distinguishes six levels of the handling of conflict, moving through negotiation between disputing parties (without the help of a third party), conciliation (also without help), mediation (with help), arbitration (third party decision), litigation (through courts) and legislation (through legal codes). In this progression we can see a continuous decrease in the power of disputants to manage their own conflict. However, we can also discern interpretive questions here, for example in the actual difference between negotiation and conciliation, between litigation and legislation. This brings us on to the crucial question (particularly for education) of analysis of language choice. Who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters? It was interesting how Kosovan Albanians changed from being plucky little revolutionaries to hardened terrorists overnight when they started attacking Macedonia. Death becomes 'collateral damage' in US parlance, with 'surgically clean strikes'. Ronald Reagan apparently referred to one nuclear ballistic missile as 'the peace-maker' (Cohn 1987). Cohn's research on the language of nuclear scientists notes that these early bomb projects were permeated with imagery about babies that confounds humankind's overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create. This irony relates to the significant question of the use of metaphor — such as the borrowing of the notion of 'the war on drugs' or 'the war on terror'. Metaphor, as we shall see, is important for complexity theorists: as Waldrop (1992) drily commented, had policymaking is about finding the wrong metaphors.

18 The terms of the debate

Chapter 2

Conclusion

Complexity theory and conflict

This introduction, in discussing the nature of contemporary conflict and the various theories of causation, by definition paints a somewhat grim picture. The book tries to build up a balance sheet. There are three basic positions: that on balance education contributes to negative conflict; that on balance it makes no difference; that on balance it is a force for peace. As will be seen, education can do all of this simultaneously; but I am interested in the overall verdict, the tally. And, whatever the balance, I am interested in the spaces for positive conflict and for possible shifts in the role of education towards a `healthier' contribution. At the end of each chapter we will see where we have got to on the accounting. I can reveal now that formal schooling does not fare well. Yet the book will equally point to two, linked, aspects of hope: that schools arc capable of contributing to peace; and that we are not all, as individuals or collectivities, totally determined by structures of power or wider violence. The next chapter outlines the theoretical framework which supports this glib assumption.

A problem in educational theory is that there has been a neglect of theorising to explain the differential contribution of schooling to national or global tension. One strong emphasis within the sociology of education has been on its contribution to inequality, looking at reproduction of social class or gender relations. The reproduction of conflict has received far less attention, except in institutional terms with studies of deviance and labelling. Studies within the psychology of education can give us insights into individual conflicts within the school and the aetiology of aggression. Yet we lack a suitable theoretical framework which can explain the macro issues of how education can act to reproduce conflict on a global scale, or conversely how some educational arenas are active in the struggle for peace and how some schools in conflict zones are resilient while others crumble. It is interesting and significant that both those working on complex humanitarian emergencies (e.g. Roche 1996) and those generating new ways to analyse educational organisations (e.g. Fullan 1999; Brooke-Smith 2001) are drawing on the insights of chaos and complexity theory. This is perhaps more immediately understandable when talking of disasters and catastrophes, but has been shown to be equally relevant to complex and inherently unpredictable systems such as schools (Davies 2000a). This chapter sketches the theoretical framework of complexity theory which will underpin the rest of the book. Complexity is not just one body of theory, but a collection of often disparate fields of study, including artificial intelligence, game theory, computer science, ecology, evolution and philosophy. It is not a 'grand narrative' in terms of an overarching explanatory theory of behaviour, but more a way of seeing connections and possibilities. While it reveals vast global connectivity, one of the benefits of complexity theory is to isolate where small changes can have disproportionate effects. It is simultaneously depressing and exhilarating. As Byrne argues: Complexity/chaos offers the possibility of an engaged science not founded in pride, in the assertion of an absolute knowledge as the basis for social programmes, but rather in a humility about the complexity of

ms of the debate the world coupled with a belief in the potential of human beings for doing something about it. (1998: 45) In complexity and chaos theory, a central feature is the study of 'complex adaptive systems' (CASs), otherwise called dynamic or non-linear systems. These can be physical systems such as the weather or the brain as well as social systems such as the economy. This is more than just saying that institutional systems such as schools, or global systems such as economic relations, are complex — this would be a truism. Complexity theory has a number of specific insights which have profound applications both to education and to conflict. I will select only six, those that to me have the most relevance. These are non-linearity, amplification, self-organisation, attractors, information and the edge of chaos. Non-linearity

This is the insight — or insistence — that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In a linear system, the components can act independently, not affected by other parts of the system. Sound is a linear system, as is light. Yet much of nature is not linear, including our brains. As Waldrop explains, the sound of an oboe and the sound of a string section may be independent when they enter the ear, yet the emotional impact of both sounds together may be very much greater than either one alone — which is what keeps symphony orchestras in business. The economy is not linear, in that millions of individual decisions to buy or not to buy can reinforce each other, creating a boom or recession. 'Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, non-linear web of incentives and constraints and connections' (Waldrop 1992: 65). The misunderstanding of this is why the school effectiveness movement was destined to fail, in its simple cause-and-effect, factorial, decontextualised models of change (Harber and Davies 1997; Byrne 1998; Brooke-Smith 2001). The greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability. Schools as CASs are not easily subject to simple external changes towards 'progress'. History is littered with examples of curriculum innovation that has not had the effects intended, because the linkages inside or outside the organisation were not understood (or were deliberately ignored). A case in point is much vocational education, which disregards the status questions of identity as well as the economic questions of existing markets for skills and products. As Roche points out, natural and social sciences have tended to concentrate on those aspects of change that are smooth, linear, ordered and predictable — in other words, those that are easier to analyse, or those that have been described as leading to 'tame' problems. But rapid, discontinuous, turbulent

Complexity theory and conflict 21 change (such as a coup d'etat or a sudden currency devaluation) has tended to be ignored, basically because it is more difficult to analyse and handle. However, most development problems are 'wicked', not 'tame', and involve just such types of discontinuous change. An analysis of 'wicked' (or turbulent) change can illuminate how we can support people to cope with and promote change, and as well as how we might organise ourselves to do so. ( Roche 1996: 16) In looking at 'conflict and education we are of course looking at the 'wicked' end of change, not that related to marginal curriculum tweaking or changes to the staff duty roster (although those are of course turbulent to some). For Stacey, 'the task that justifies the existence of all managers has to do with instability, irregularity, difference and disorder' (Stacey 1996a: xx). Schools and education systems have to be acknowledged as not only inherently turbulent, but inherently unique in the way that they adapt to an external intervention (such as peace education or citizenship education). Complex systems are interdependent, such that regulation at one level produces characteristics at another level. It is not a one-way chain of events, but a two-way system of determinant interrelationships. Boundaries and boundary conditions are keys to understanding this. The inspectorate is dependent on schools for its survival, not the other way round. So changes in the ways that schools work will produce changes in the ways that a schools inspectorate works — a feature not often commented on. A concept therefore often used is that of complex nested systems, with each system nested within a larger one. Complex nested systems can be nearequilibrium, or they can be 'dissipative' or far-from-equilibrium. Stacey describes organisations as 'paradoxes': They are powerfully pulled towards stability by the forces of integration, maintenance controls, human desires for security and certainty, and adaptation to the environment on the one hand. They are also powerfully pulled to the opposite extreme of unstable equilibrium by the forces of division and decentralisation, human desires for excitement and innovation, and isolation from the environment. If the organisation gives in to the pull to stability it fails because it becomes ossified and cannot change easily. If it gives in to the pull to instability it disintegrates. Success lies in sustaining an organisation in the borders between stability and instability. This is a state of chaos, a difficult-to-maintain dissipative structure. (1996a: 349)

20 The terms of the debate

the world coupled with a belief in the potential of human beings for doing something about it. (1998: 45) In complexity and chaos theory, a central feature is the study of 'complex adaptive systems' (CASs), otherwise called dynamic or non-linear systems. These can be physical systems such as the weather or the brain as well as social systems such as the economy. This is more than just saying that institutional systems such as schools, or global systems such as economic relations, are complex - this would be a truism. Complexity theory has a number of specific insights which have profound applications both to education and to conflict. I will select only six, those that to me have the most relevance. These are non-linearity, amplification, self-organisation, attractors, information and the edge of chaos. Non-linearity

This is the insight - or insistence - that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In a linear system, the components can act independently, not affected by other parts of the system. Sound is a linear system, as is light. Yet much of nature is not linear, including our brains. As Waldrop explains, the sound of an oboe and the sound of a string section may be independent when they enter the ear, yet the emotional impact of both sounds together may be very much greater than either one alone - which is what keeps symphony orchestras in business. The economy is not linear, in that millions of individual decisions to buy or not to buy can reinforce each other, creating a boom or recession. 'Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, non-linear web of incentives and constraints and connections' (Waldrop 1992: 65). The misunderstanding of this is why the school effectiveness movement was destined to fail, in its simple cause-and-effect, factorial, decontextualised models of change (Harber and Davies 1997; Byrne 1998; Brooke-Smith 2001). The greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability. Schools as CASs are not easily subject to simple external changes towards 'progress'. History is littered with examples of curriculum innovation that has not had the effects intended, because the linkages inside or outside the organisation were not understood (or were deliberately ignored). A case in point is much vocational education, which disregards the status questions of identity as well as the economic questions of existing markets for skills and products. As Roche points out, natural and social sciences have tended to concentrate on those aspects of change that are smooth, linear, ordered and predictable in other words, those that are easier to analyse, or those that have been described as leading to 'tame' problems. But rapid, discontinuous, turbulent

Complexity theory and conflict 21

change (such as a coup d'ilat or a sudden currency devaluation) has tended to be ignored, basically because it is more difficult to analyse and handle. However, most development problems are 'wicked', not 'tame', and involve just such types of discontinuous change. An analysis of 'wicked' (or turbulent) change can illuminate how we can support people to cope with and promote change, and as well as how we might organise ourselves to do so. ( Roche 1996: 16) In looking at conflict and education we are of course looking at the 'wicked' end of change, not that related to marginal curriculum tweaking or changes to the staff duty roster (although those are of course turbulent to some). For Stacey, 'the task that justifies the existence of all managers has to do with instability, irregularity, difference and disorder' (Stacey 1996a: xx). Schools and education systems have to be acknowledged as not only inherently turbulent, but inherently unique in the way that they adapt to an external intervention (such as peace education or citizenship education). Complex systems are interdependent, such that regulation at one level produces characteristics at another level. It is not a one-way chain of events, but a two-way system of determinant interrelationships. Boundaries and boundary conditions are keys to understanding this. The inspectorate is dependent on schools for its survival, not the other way round. So changes in the ways that schools work will produce changes in the ways that a schools inspectorate works - a feature not often commented on. A concept therefore often used is that of complex nested systems, with each system nested within a larger one. Complex nested systems can be nearequilibrium, or they can be 'dissipative' or far-from-equilibrium. Stacey describes organisations as 'paradoxes': They are powerfully pulled towards stability by the forces of integration, maintenance controls, human desires for security and certainty, and adaptation to the environment on the one hand. They are also powerfully pulled to the opposite extreme of unstable equilibrium by the forces of division and decentralisation, human desires for excitement and innovation, and isolation from the environment. If the organisation gives in to the pull to stability it fails because it becomes ossified and cannot change easily. If it gives in to the pull to instability it disintegrates. Success lies in sustaining an organisation in the borders between stability and instability. This is a state of chaos, a difficult-to-maintain dissipative structure. (1996a: 349)

22 The terms of the debate

Dissipative systems are both 'limit-bounded' and 'limit-testing', which means they are constrained by their boundaries but also pushing at the edges and creating change — as children do with parents. In terms of conflict and postconflict intervention, the notion of complex nested systems has resonances with the ecological approaches modelled on Bronfenbrenner (1979). In their work with children who have experienced conflict, Miller and Affolter (2002) talk of 'nested layers of actors and relationships'. They recognise how the 'target population' of children is embedded in concentric rings of relationships and influence, with the child's well-being embedded in the welfare of the family, parents' well-being embedded in income-earning opportunities and relationships with peers, the efficacy of local institutions embedded in regional networks and national policy environments and so on. The degree to which political leaders engage in a type of governance at macro level that fosters security and trust — rather than retraumatisation and renewed violence — influences the well-being of children. Similarly, in looking at the effects of political violence, the complexities become apparent. Gibson (1989) puts forward a four-level 'dynamicinteractionist' model for understanding how the stressors of political violence interact. These levels are the actual events experienced; characteristics that affect the ability to cope, such as development, gender or temperament; the family and social support; and the political and economic context. He then adds a fifth level of the material and ideological structure of society, to understand the essential political nature of conflict. Not only are there different interacting variables, but children are active in processing and giving meaning to their experiences. A constructivist approach to the impact of violence challenges the view of children as passive reactors, instead seeing children as incorporating experience into an already constructed social context ( Richman 1993). We can start to sec the importance of complexity theory for 'agency' and action. Initial conditions and amplification

This relates to non-linearity in the revelation that the slightest change in one place can cause tremors everywhere else. A phrase used is exquisite sensitivity on initial conditions. This has been referred to as the 'butterfly effect' — the notion that the flap of an insect's wings in China could change the course of a hurricane in Haiti a week later. Tiny perturbations do not remain tiny. This is of course cause for both alarm and optimism, as we shall discuss later. In non-linear dynamics, there is feedback in which internal or external changes to a system produce an amplifying effect. A yawn, epidemic or lifestyle can spread through a population. Courtney Brown's analysis of US environmental policy includes data on a heap of variables such as environmental degradation, political structure, citizen attitudes and electoral outcomes.

Complexity theory and conflict 23

It shows how political and policy choices in the USA can produce environmental damage across the globe. Such analyses additionally show how arms escalation also produces increased tension and the likelihood of war (quoted in Eve 1997). Human systems differ from nature in that in social systems, the perturbations of far-from-equilibrium conditions can originate in the values and actions of humans themselves. Byrne (1998) talks of non-linear transffirmation after the Second World War in Britain, essentially value driven and the product of collective actions. In the period of reconstruction, the majority of the British electorate (Labour and Liberal) recognised that through an act, the way they cast their vote, they could determine the kind of post-war society which would be created. This always begs the uncomffirtable question of whether war is then necessary for radical transformation. Certainly, war has enabled a gender repositioning of women, with women being central to a struggle in countries such as Eritrea or Vietnam - albeit sometimes slipping back, post-conflict, to a previous attractor state (see pp. 27 29). Formal definitions of chaos all include the notion of apparently random irregular but recurrent behaviour which amplifies small uncertainties, and 'frees analysis from the shackles of order and predictability' (Crutchfield quoted in Gleick 1988). It is certainly an end to a reductionist or determinist approach. For Lewin (1993), chaos is a subset of complexity. If chaos theory is about showing how a few interactions can produce immensely divergent behaviour which looks random but is not, complexity is about how interactions in non-linear systems may produce an emergent global order. This seems to have resonances with structuration theory, the 'recursive relationship' between the whole and the parts of a system (Giddens 1984). What scientists try to do using these concepts and theories is modelling as with computers, drawing up complex models of effect and probability. Sonic phenomena are unstable — the spread of AIDs, the failure of Betamax. Others remain stable — for example, the correlation between educational attainment and income level, between education and birth rate. What is being looked for in terms of policy and policymaking, when using complexity theory, is to identify the point at which a multiplier effect happens. In positive terms, this would be the search for the 'gentle action'. Relating this to the impact of education, its multiplier contribution to conflict can he deliberate (as in terrorist training camps) or it can be unintentional (such as selection functions setting off a train of events which alter people's perceptions of self and others on a large scale). I look at this more in Chapter 7, exploring how education contributes to war. Either deliberate or unintentional, there can be sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

24 The terms of the debate

Self-organisation

However, it is not just confusion and random amplification. What happens is matter's incessant attempt to organize itself into ever more complex structures, to adapt, to survive. There are 'forces' of order and self-organisation which form patterns, as in a snowflake — what Stuart Kauffman (1.992) refers to as 'order for free'. At the same time as chaos is the acceptance that life is robust, it is continuously overbalancing and correcting itself as we do, unconsciously, when walking on two legs. In social organisation, people who are trying to satisfy mutual needs unconsciously organise themselves into an economy through myriad acts of buying and selling — this happens without anyone being in charge or consciously planning it (Waldrop 1992). So we need a theory which is 'capable of seeing nature as a "self-organising" enterprise without succumbing to anthropomorphism or mystifying animism' (Reed and Harvey 1992: 359). Complexity theory, it is argued, can provide this. Complex systems for Fullan (1999) 'self-organize' and exhibit periodic consolidation because the process is driven by (a) intense interaction and communication, (b) knowledge creation in relation to selected problems and (c) a value system that knows a good outcome when it sees it (Fullan 1999: 24). Self-organisation has implications for 'leadership' of course. The brain, as the most complex adaptive system that we know (albeit one that is not known well) has no leader, no master neurone. Leaders may not actually direct anything but just be the grit in the machine, the deviancy amplification mechanism which kickstarts the system into new self-organisation. There is debate about whether fish schools and flocks of birds actually respond to a 'leader' or are good examples of self-organisation, whereby individuals react to movements of their immediate neighbours, and where group-level patterns of activity arise spontaneously. Does group behaviour in classrooms or football terraces have the same self-organisation? Stacey writes: Complex adaptive systems consist of a number of components, or agents, that interact with each other according to sets of rules that require them to examine and respond to each other's behaviour in order to improve their behaviour and thus the behaviour of the system they comprise. In other words, such systems operate in a manner that constitutes learning. (Stacey 1996b: 10) Such learning systems then form a coevolving suprasystem that creates and learns its way into the future. With self-organisation, a CAS is a system of semiindependent agents that interact more or less randomly to influence each other's behaviour. The agents then realise when their interactions have left them better or worse off according to a 'fitness criterion'. Kupers (2001), writing on complexity and management, gives the example of a group of door-

Complexity theory and conflict 25

to-door salesmen who meet randomly to exchange ideas and gossip. The right combination of a fitness criterion (more sales) and random encounters (feedback loops) leads to greater efficiency, much more efficient than the traditional method of having each salesperson report back to a central marketing entity. If we are an employee or an element in an ecosystem or a participant in an educational institution, we are 'bouncing around' randomly interacting with other agents in the system; the one thing you know is what is 'good' or enhances survival. This web of very local and random interactions, occurring without following any explicit directives, leads to an increase in the fitness of the entire system. This is contrasted to a system where you wait for an explicit instruction for every move. This has huge implications for learning and behaviour in complex systems such as education systems or schools. Senior decision-makers tend to assume that because they have imposed order (in terms of pupil groupings, timetables and curriculum) it follows that interactions are not random, and that the decision-makers' fitness of purpose is students' or teachers' fitness of purpose. Yet the more important interactions in terms of consequences may be the more random bouncing around against each other in playground or staffroom. This 'servant leadership' and acknowledgement of the contribution of all participants (including students) is the key to understanding both order and change. Kupers argues for 'having just enough rules to limit randomness in the organisation to where it is fruitful, but not so many as to put the organisation into a state of equilibrium. The organisation will function best when poised at the edge of disorder' (Kupers 2001: 18). Strangely, Kupers then goes on to say that 'designing the rules to achieve this balance is probably the most important and challenging task of the leader', which seems to negate the previous set of insights. My understanding of complexity in management and in conflict would be that any 'rules' would need to be established as part of a holistic, non-directive process (i.e. in schools by the students in collaboration with teachers) — not 'designed' by a leader. Rules would become part of 'emergence' — the creative recognition of new order. There is admittedly a debate here within those applying complexity theory to social science or management. Battram (1998) argues that organisations do need some hierarchy — or the building burns down while we are in a meeting to decide the response to a fire. Can there be too much connectivity? Is it more roads, less speed? Apparently, it is more efficient to let pilots talk to each other and coordinate their own behaviour than to have air traffic control, particularly in a combat situation. But this works only in the context of an overall agreed goal — to stop the enemy. The question is whether you have every message sent everywhere, and people can pick what they want (like radio cab drivers); or whether the role of the hierarchy is to set the conditions and selectively remind of the goals. Complex adaptive systems apparently constantly make predictions based on their various internal models of the world. These are not passive models,

26 The terms of the debate

but can come to life and 'execute' in order to produce behaviour in the system. Obviously, efficient organisations try consciously to predict by making a business or marketing plan. Models are also often 'inside the head', 'as when a shopper tries to imagine how a new couch might look in the living room', or a timid employee imagines the consequences of telling off the boss (Waldrop 1992: 177). Anything that we call a 'skill' or 'expertise' is an implicit model — or more precisely a huge set of operating procedures that have been inscribed on the nervous system and refined by years of experience. All CASs 'model their environment' — constantly seeing and imagining patterns, testing ideas, acting upon them, discarding them again. They acquire information about their environment and their own interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing them into a 'schema' and then acting on the basis of that schema. There are competing schemata, and the results of the action in the real world feed back to influence the competition among those schemata. (Would an example be punishing students and their parents for truancy versus making schools nicer places to be in?) There is an 'outward urge' of the system, seeking to improve, not to retreat to the core of the identity like a hedgehog. But, as Waldrop asks, where do the models come from? Who programmes the programmer? Ultimately the answer is no one. This was Darwin's great insight, that an agent can improve on its internal models without any paranormal guidance at all. It simply tries the models out and sees how they work in the real world — and, if it survives the experience, adjusts the model to do better next time. This is the basis of cognition and learning, and hence the hallmark of the 'learning organisation'. Clearly, 'trying the models out' involves an element of risk, and the fearful or highly stable organisation will not reach emergence, not strike the equilibrium between balance and turbulence. It needs to be acknowledged here that morality is not automatically part of education as a complex system, or as part of emergence. When a CAS changes, it does so for survival and new order. This has nothing to do with whether such change leads towards social justice. In one part of the education system perhaps new tests are introduced (supposedly in the interests of standards). The net results are an increase in polarisation and an increase in corruption. Schools seek to maintain their place in the league tables, and hence falsify the results or leak the questions. This is new, creative, behaviour for some schools. It may be evolutionary, but there is nothing inherently progressive about it in terms of the greater sum of human happiness. As Lewin points out: Competition abounds, each species jostling with its ecological rivals . . In the end, each species may be improved — that is, be faster, tougher to eat, or smarter than it once was — but none would have achieved an absolute advantage over others. Progress has occurred (if we may use that

Complexity theory and conflict 27

word), species may be better at what they once did, but none is any better off. Leigh Van Valen's Red Queen effect— all species running continually to remain in the same place — is a popular image. So is an arms race, for obvious reasons. (Lewin 1993: 148) Lilian (1999) perhaps recognised the essentially amoral nature of complexity by putting together complexity with 'moral purpose' in his argument for democracy in schools. Yet while I agree with him that equity makes sense economically, in terms of the social cohesion which can help economic growth, I am less sure that it is destined to happen in evolutionary terms. 1 t depends what sort of society we are evolving into; and the level we are looking at. Fullan draws on Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, which concludes that as work becomes more complex and collaborative, companies where people work together best have 'a competitive edge'. Fullan sees this a possible 'profound evolutionary reason for being optimistic' (Fullan 1999: 41). Yet at the next layer up, competition is then apparently still the game: he collaborative organisation has become more competitive (that is, creating winners and losers) and is surviving through not collaborating with competitors. I suppose the logic is that if all organisations were collaborative, competition would reduce and only collaborators would be left. I hope, but am less optimistic, that it is the cooperative rather than the self-centred evolution that will prevail; but the jury is out. It depends whether we want to wait for the long-term evolution. Apparently even predator/prey relationships are generally beneficial for both species, although destructive for immediate prey. If evolution is adapt' mg to meet one's needs, coevolution is adapting to meet each other's needs. Again, this is where a simple Darwinism does not work, nor a simple market economy view. It is not the survival of the fittest, because if the foxes eat all he rabbits, foxes will also die in the end, as there are no more rabbits to eat. Parasitism and symbiosis are important. It is not a dog-eat-dog world, but one with strategic alliances. However, I argue that in school clustering or higher education consortia, such alliances may be just competition one stage removed. The agency and reflexivity that distinguishes us from rabbits means little acceptance by human rabbits of their long-term value in the Great Scale of Things, and every likelihood of conflict.

Attractors Most complex systems exhibit what mathematicians call attractors, states to which the system eventually settles, depending on the properties of the system (Lewin 1993). 'Strange attractors' (strange because they are not always explicable to us) are the system's 'preference' for an organisation of microstates (such as atoms, or possibly individual people) into a specific

28 The terms of the debate

range of macrostates. Research and models have been drawn up, not just in mathematics, but in children's friendships, teenage pregnancies and the `collapse' of the Soviet Union. As Eve (1997) comments, in a sense, the Soviet Union is still there. None of the populations was destroyed, the towns still exist. Perhaps the Soviet Union just entered a new phase, like ice becomes water. An attractor is not a 'force' of attraction, but depicts where the system is heading — like a boat drifting in a slow current, rather than a magnet. A dynamic system has 'multiple attractors'; and cultural evolution would have attractors equivalent to bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. An education system is itself a strange attractor, but contains within it other attractors, periods of stasis punctuated with periods of change, like sea creatures caught in a whirlpool. We are so accustomed to mass education systems as permanent features of our society that it takes an effort to remember that they have been (and may remain) a very temporary constellation. They have been with us a shorter time than Coca-Cola (invented in 1857), and may indeed be a `hiccup in history'. Complexity theory enables us to see education systems as particular sets of strange attractors coming together to enable adaptation to new turbulences in society. An attractor is not the same as being 'attractive' in the sense of 'nice' — often quite the converse. One important area for conflict is the nature of social exclusion. Social exclusion is an attractor state for individuals, households and even neighbourhoods (as systems nested within spatially more extensive containing systems). As Byrne (1998) points out, this is not a matter of personal capacities, and not solvable by supply-side labour-market-oriented policies. Work can be excluding if it is grossly exploitative. Work paid at a rate below the cost of the social reproduction of the labour power might be better regarded as concealed unemployment, as the OECD (1997) acknowledge. Social exclusion is a system property which arises when key social parameters, or control parameters, such as unemployment, pass crucial values. It can be challenged by redistributive economic or fiscal policies, by post-tax incomes and by benefit levels, strong job protection and labour market inflexibility — not features of many contemporary capitalist societies. Social exclusion of course impacts on schools and on school order in terms of the cultural/social capital of students and their orientation towards education. Linked to attractors is the notion of bifurcation. At crucial transformation points the system seems to have two possible trajectories into which it can move and it 'chooses' between them on the basis of very small differences in the values of controlling parameters at the point of change. In science, control parameters might be temperature, pressure, volume, etc. In social science, control parameters can be labour markets, degree of social inequality, ethnicity and unemployment. In educational institutions, Brooke-Smith (2001) talks of control parameters as connectivity, variety and diversity, power differentials, rate of information flow and anxiety.

Complexity theory and conflict 29

Conflict affects systems all the way down a nested hierarchy. Here the bifurcations may happen at the 'top' of the system, as a government decides to go to war or not, or a political or military wing decides to take violent paths or not; the likelihood of people being involved in conflict is at the same ti me random (as in Kashmir) and patterned (male, poor, of a particular ethnic/religious group). AIDS, war and terrorism can 'jump over the fence' and affect everyone; nobody is isolated in a complex society. Bifurcations can lead to 'butterfly attractors'. In educational terms, we have a discontinuous/polarised pattern of inequality, and the tendency in educational systems to reward high achievement and penalise failure operates as a positive feedback loop in intensifying social divisions. The whole argument about whether education can or cannot 'compensate' for society is based on a false notion of independence: instead education is part of that society, densely interacting and nested — and implicated in inequality. The butterfly attractor is so called because of polarisation into two 'wings' or extremes. Tuberculosis is a disease of societies which are in the attractor state of being relatively highly unequal. This, as is argued on pp. 41-42, is t rue of conflict too. Information

What is critical in complex systems and their ability to adapt and survive is i nformation. Survival has to do with gathering information about the environment, and responding appropriately . . . bacteria do that, by responding to the presence or absence of certain chemicals and by moving. Trees communicate chemically too. Computation is a fundamental property of complex adaptive systems . . . any complex adaptive system can compute; that's the key point. You don't have to have a brain to process information in the way I'm talking about it. (Lewin 1993: 138) Again, there seem to be some parallels here with structuration theory (Giddens 1984), that is, the complex interplay between agency and structure, but complexity takes this further. Structuration theory does not of itself start to explain when people and their actions arc determined by social or economic structures and when they act agentically ---- only that the possibilities are there. One of the great insights of structuration theory is the exposure of how structures are dependent on agents on a daily basis for their continuation. The great puzzle then is why we 'choose' to continue, to reproduce, or not to challenge, and conversely why or at what point we 'choose' to upset the apple cart. Complexity theory starts to illustrate the power of information and feedback — for individuals, for organisations, for countries. In educational

Complexity theory and conflict 31

30 The terms of the debate

terms, for me the edge of chaos emerges when there is sufficient information to create doubt. This is not information just to bring order, homeostasis or reproduction, using simple feedback loops (and where, in the human world, discourse, ideology and discursive formations become central). This is instead information which shows that alternatives are possible — and that people can have agency. Particularly in trying to change or improve a system, one seeks the 'emergence' achieved through positive non-linear feedback. The obvious example is the human brain, which constantly organises and reorganises billions of neural connections and pathways in order to learn profitably from complex and sometimes confusing experiences. A school cannot reorganise its connections with anything like this speed and sophistication, but it can certainly i mprove its feedback processes. The most tantalising — but currently salutory — aspect of a foray into complexity theory is the realisation of how little we know about communication and the transmission of information in complex adaptive systems. The brain is not just 'a computer made of meat'. There is certainly a place for intuition. There is a place for feelings, and chemistry. We communicate through music, for example, but have little idea of how the information actually flows. 'Think of musical melodies; they are messages that we feel we understand, yet we are quite incapable of saying what they mean. The existence of music is a permanent intellectual scandal, but it is just one scandal among many others' (Ruelle 1993: 135). Music has a similar and even more mysterious role in complex systems, beyond the scope of this book (although see Tame 1984), but has a similar function to humour — of binding people together and enabling the expression of emotion. It is no accident that oppressive regimes sometimes ban music. For our purposes in examining the nature of information for conflict and peace, we have to look at 'truth' and 'myth'. The power of rumour and distorted information is significant. An instructive account of the religious conflict in Ambon, Indonesia shows how this was triggered by wrong information (Poerwawidagdo 2002). While there had been a centuries-long tradition of peaceful coexistence between Christian and Muslim, a quarrel between two young people quickly spread into a massive conflict resulting in hundreds of deaths and destruction of property. It was fuelled by rumours about impending attacks, purposefully spread to provoke fear and defensive violence. Wrong information can be used intentionally by the political elite or the military; fear has a strong amplifying effect. Our question might be how to spread a rumour about peace. Is fear so much more powerful than happiness? Poerwawidagdo argues that withholding information for the sake of social and communal peace is morally correct and ethically appropriate. But it is a debatable point. The power of information also includes the power of networks and networking. It is significant that Al-Qaeda has changed tactics. Previously there were training (educational?) facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the

recruitment of young men to go there. Bin Laden's main assets had been the training facilities he could offer to any young Islamist activist wanting instruction in terrorist techniques and a cadre of experienced motivated operators. 'But a new al-Qaeda is taking shape. It is dispersed, amorphous and composed of a huge range of different units who share little other than a fierce desire to combat what they see as the "Zulm" or tyranny of America and the West' (Burke and Beaumont 2002: 15). The tactic of sending men out to forge new groups overseas — instead of bringing volunteers to Afghanistan for training — has become the cornerstone of this new Al-Qaeda. New alliances of militant organisations are forming all the time, 'against the infidel'. As long as there are hot headed, angry young men susceptible to these people's message then there will be a problem . . . All you need is one man to convince six more that they have to strike and you've got a terrorist cell. In many countries there are people who are just waiting for contact and leadership. Often there are fully fledged terrorist organisations looking for new directions. (Islamabad analyst, quoted in Burke and Beaumont 2002: 15) I shall return later to a case study of Al-Qaeda; it is brought in at this point to demonstrate the complex interface between information, education, networking, group identity and a sense of agency which lies at the heart of initiatives for conflict or peace. The edge of chaos

Finally, in the search for adaptation or for survival, complex systems apparently get to self-organised criticality. This is sometimes called the edge of chaos, or phase transition. Here is a delicate balancing point between stability and total mess, one where change and new or 'better' order is possible. Such `emergence' is more than Darwin's natural selection. We are not just the product of random mutations, but something more: what apparently has been unearthed is a creativity within nature. In humans, culture emerges on a separate level of organisation or abstraction from the individuals, organisations or beliefs that constitute it. The edge of chaos is where information gets its foot in the door in the physical world, where it gets the upper hand over energy. Being at the transition point between order and chaos not only buys you exquisite control — small input/big change — but it also buys you the possibility that information processing can become an important part of the dynamics of the system. (Lewin 1993: 51)

32 The terms of the debate

The edge of chaos is not in fact an edge, but a zone, a class of behaviours. Learning operates on the edge of chaos. Complexity is the state that allows information to organise and reorganise itself, that allows the person to construct new and more complex meanings. Are we just a mass of information strung together? Chaos starts to explain how social systems are reproduced from cycle to cycle but never in exactly the same way: The dissipative systems paradigm assumes social order is not always possible, nor is it necessarily desirable. It does not begin, as does the Parsonian project, by asking the Hobbesian question, 'How is order possible?' Instead it addresses the more perplexing question, 'How do mechanisms producing social order, periodically produce chaos and pave the way for radical social transformations?' ( Harvey and Reed 1994: 390-1) In the emergence arising from complex adaptive systems, this can be relatively sudden, a 'spontaneous order'. Apparently, features such as the eye are difficult to explain through random mutation. Systems do not usually evolve themselves into nothingness, but typically add new features on. The mechanism for selection is 'communicative success' (which relates to the power of information mentioned above). Phase shift processes are differential leaps or evolutionary breakthroughs rather than incremental development. Interestingly, then, chaos does not mean randomness; it is a different form of order, or a precursor to order, not its antithesis. Chaos can actually contain order. It has been conceptualised as extremely complex information, rather than as an absence of order (Hayles 1991). Unpredictability comes not just from the magnification of infinitesimal local disturbances to create large global changes, but from our inability to compute all the variables. A week is a long time in politics. People come unstuck trying to explain and find patterns for 'economic miracles' — a year later and the economy might have collapsed. Chaos is liberating, albeit within boundaries: People can certainly make history because reflexive agency can influence crucial information changes in systems where the modulating role of information over energy is absolutely significant, but they do so from a given starting point, i.e. not in circumstances of their own choosing. (Byrne 1998: 6) Brooke-Smith very effectively developed the concept of 'mutation': The school perhaps is stable and mature with highly traditional leaders and deeply conservative stakeholders. All the agents have become well adapted to each other. There is little pressure for systemic change or

Complexity theory

and conflict 33

development. However the agents cannot forever remain static, because of the slow drip of time and eventually one or more agents may experience a 'mutation'. Perhaps an ageing head retires and a new person brings in a cascade of ideas, people and practices. Maybe a firm is in the same static condition, but there is a major technological breakthrough. (Brooke-Smith 2001: 10) And Outhwaite cites the virtue of a realist view here, in that it enables us to see the parallels between our own causal powers (and liabilities) and those of other physical objects: 'Like the higher animals, we can choose to initiate certain causal sequences made possible by our causal powers. Unlike them, we can reflect on those powers and formulate long term projects' (Outhwaite 1987: 22). Some effective behaviour therapy in schools is based on this insight: attempting to show firstly that antisocial behaviour does initiate a train of events; secondly that the disruptive child is (partially) powerful in this sense; and thirdly that he or she can reflect and has short-term and long-term choices. I was concerned initially that complexity theory did not contain a theory of power, but of course it is in these initiations leading to amplifications and bifurcations that power in social systems lies. It may be the theory of power par excellence. In talking of self-organisation, we should not however ignore the role of chance in bringing systems to emergence. Quantum mechanics apparently accepts uncertainty and chance. Much current management and accountability practice (such as quality control) seeks to model an organisation as accurately as possible and to eliminate chance. Random events are seen as a nuisance rather than a desirable instrument for change — and order. Yet in complex systems, chance has a much more positive role than its reputation in the mechanistic system (Kupers 2001). For conflict analysis, I like the concept of fro zen accidents: chance events from the past become an integral part of life. The carbon-based form of life on Earth is the classic example. CASs are affected by the incorporation of success ive frozen accidents as 'regularities'. A simple example of such 'lock in' is the QWERTY keyboard, introduced initially to slow down typing because the keys got stuck together. Rihani (2002) cites attitudes to women, multiparty politics, international trade, concepts of beauty, censure of incest and the family group as all being found appropriate at some stage and then included in the framework. I might add formal education systems as a `frozen accident'. The acceptance of market mechanisms as the 'only' form of social and economic structure is another frozen accident. There then is an unending contest between these eventually conservative elements and the need for adaptation. In the concern about peace in and through educational systems and institutions, what we are seeking for, paradoxically, is the 'edge of chaos' — where emergence occurs. All of us will have examples of where small perturbations

Complexity theory and conflict

34 The terms of the debate

can generate impressive effects — the relaxation of a rule, the pupil who suggests being involved in staff recruitment, the teacher who refuses to do the literacy hour, a school council that challenges the status quo. There is an irony that conflict resolution can be seen as a return to normality, whereas what we need is new departures and risk-taking. In complexity terms, it is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I mplications: AI Qaeda versus the post pessimists -

-

Let me take a 'case study' as an example. If schools genuinely wanted to engage in peacekeeping as a core emergent goal, how could they match Al-Qaeda? The destruction of the World Trade Center was an act which had disproportionate effects, not only in the number of people killed and the demolition of property, but in the billions of dollars wiped off economies across the globe. There was apparently a black joke going around the FBI that they wanted to find Al-Qaeda's chief economist in order to offer him a job. So if we take Al-Qaeda as an example of a 'successful' organisation in its own terms, how do we analyse this in complexity language? Briefly: •

Non-linearity: The whole of Al-Qaeda is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. Different rationalities combine: suicide bombers, the cult of the martyr, religious fervour, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and many more. • Strange attractors: This is the question of group identity, the need to 'join the cause', feel part of a divine mission. • Self-organised criticality: The US was wrong of course to assume that if it managed to get Bin Laden, or neutralised him, terrorism would cease. This is the mistake of a concept of a 'war on terror'. Terror is not a single nation state which can be 'conquered'. The Al-Qaeda network is huge and disparate, but is self-organising. It searches for supremacy, in a Darwinian survival of the fittest, but is also highly creative and coevolving in its strategy. • Initial conditions: That small turbulences have a disproportionate effect has been true of isolated acts of terror, and was true of September 11th. The awareness of initial conditions is what makes the network attractive to individuals: together with the mission is the knowledge that one can actually do something for the jihad; there is a feeling of agency. • Information: There is a very successful information system, hidden from the major agencies; there is an eleven-volume Encyclopedia of Jihad to provide practical skills; also a highly efficient training system in cells in many parts of the world. • Edge of chaos: Perhaps this is the archetypal example, in the search for emergence, for a new world order.

31

The question therefore is that if one wants to replicate the efficiency of Al-Qaeda, except for promoting its direct opposite, peace, then does one play the same game? We have seen from Northern Ireland and from Israel/ Palestine, that in situations of uneasy truce or fragile peace, it takes only a couple of individuals to fan the fires and create disproportionate disturbances overnight. Unfortunately, the converse does not seem to be true, that a couple of individuals can create a disproportionate peace. For this, very broad and strong bandings of people are needed who are comfortable with notions of multiple identity, who have enough in common to work together but recognize enough difference to value and cope with diversity. How can one work towards a world as a complex adaptive system mostly devoted to cooperation and non-violent, democratic forms of conflict resolution? Do complex adaptive systems actually want this? The English education system does not seem to be self-organising towards a mode more adapted to the twenty-first century — quite the opposite, with the return to archaic forms of testing, selection and control. The world system (if it exists) similarly makes little progress towards fulfilling long-term survival needs. The knowledge that we are destroying the ecosystem is slowly having an effect, on some countries, sometimes. But others ignore the information, because of the power of other sorts of 'information' and networking — including emotional and territorial information. Within complexity theory, we can call on at least two directions for change. The first is the major cataclysm that can force a real radical emergence, a sudden leap to the edge of chaos, compelling reconsideration; the second is the small system nested in other systems which can work at the boundaries, and create the tiny perturbations which can have amplifying effects. It is this second possibility which is of interest to educators for peace. We would be looking at the groupings of people who can act and network to display alternatives. The dimensions are: •

•

Attractors: The need is for a secular group identity which is not exclusionary. There is a tension here. All of us need to 'belong' — but that may well construct 'the other'. In global citizenship education, there is the argument that we should therefore acknowledge multiple identities and multiple loyalties — in complexity terms, multiple attractors. An example to counter Al-Qaeda is a group of young people I met in Kosovo called `the post-pessimists'. These were school students, self-organising, comprising both Albanians and Serbs, working for peace across the divide. They acknowledged their inevitable national loyalty, but could put that together with a loyalty to the group and to its work. (I will look at similar groups in Chapter 8.) Faith in small turbulences: This is the view that every individual, even every child can make a difference. The post-pessimists flew in the face of despair in their optimism that they could and did act — and indeed they did have influence as far up as the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)

Complexity theory and conflict 37

36 The terms of the debate

administration, together with international campaigning and a website. Complexity theory gives a new meaning to the term 'value added', which here means the value that can be attributed to the agency of a student. • Non-linearity: This means the neurons firing on all systems, and school students being part of this, and equally able to make change; but it also i mplies much greater connections with movements outside schools and with networks in other countries. The UNESCO Associated Schools Network (ASPnet) is an example of such a non-linear network (also in Chapter 8). Schools' linkages with other movements has been a neglected area, in the UK at least, whereas in countries that have active school student unions, this enables alliances with other trade unions or representation on regional and national bodies (Davies and Kirkpatrick 2000). The European Youth Against Violence network is a promising forum. • The power of information: A crucial dimension of any group or any sense of agency is learning about society, power and how change works. Here is revealed the importance of education for democracy, and learning about the political system, rights, citizenship and global citizenship. Injustice is tackled through understanding of causes, not through tit for tat. • Fitness of purpose: Finally there is the tricky question of a value system. As said earlier, self-organising systems lead to improved efficiency, but that has no particular moral base. My view is that the argument and the demonstration for peace needs to be for what works, not for what is `good'. Here the counter argument to terrorism and revenge is the argument for compromise, for complementarity, forgiving something to enable others to gain security or save face. We teach conflict resolution skills not just to be nicer to each other, but because they are effective. In the end is `justice' perhaps a dangerous term, perhaps only marginally better than `fight the good fight'? Post-pessimism then is an attractive notion, but whether it has the appeal of a jihad remains to be seen. A secular peace has to be better than a holy war, but it is more difficult to find the conscripts. Complexity theory would by and large refute the notion of a leader, and would not suggest the 'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam' approach which implies no critical challenge. Any counter movement to Al-Qaeda needs criticality in two senses: self-organised criticality, and critical thinking. Conclusion

Complexity theory may indeed be no more than a frozen accident like a particular religion. But for me it has the 'best fit' for now. Its attraction is not just for analysing conflict and education, but for indicating avenues for change. It is not just a metaphoric transfer from the natural world. Chaos/complexity is inherently systemic, yet without being conservative, and acts as a challenge

to positivism on the one hand and to post-modernism on the other. While talking a lot of 'systems', it is not a simple return to systems theory in the Talcott Parsons sense. These models were of equilibrium or near-toequilibrium. Far-from-equilibric systems are very different. Mouzelis in Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? (1995) critiqued post-structuralism and demanded a sociological theory which related micro, individual action to macro society, related the conscious agency of individual, collective social ;tutors to social structure, and explained discontinuous and fundamental changes in the character of the social system as a whole. Byrne (1998) argues that complexity and chaos resolve these demands; and, for our purposes, the application of the concepts to conflict and to education seems to confirm the wssibilities. If as I posited in the introduction, 'complexity shutdown' is a source of itegative conflict, then opening up and recognising the power of connectivity alid information might be a radical means to peace. Unless the whole world suddenly gets to the edge of chaos, we appear to be stuck with schools for the next few decades at least: complexity theory enables a more refined analysis of their impact on global events and global futures while pointing to real enues in which they might make a 'wicked' difference. both

Chapter 3

Economic and class relations

The aims of the next three chapters are to outline some of the antecedents to conflict, and to identify the role of education within such roots. The section starts with economic and social class relations, not necessarily because I take a simple Marxist stance that everything comes back to the economy, or to the means of production, but because the economy underpins so much national and international tension. The struggle over scarce resources has an economic base, and, although there are resources of status and power linked to other social dimensions such as gender or ethnicity, the divide or polarisat i on between rich and poor remains the most stark and is at present the most prone to increase. The World Bank 2001 poverty projections suggest that up io one billion people might still be living on less than $1 per day by 2015 ( World Bank 2001b). Rich countries of course make war on poor countries; but internally to a country, both absolute and relative poverty are the critical sources of tension and violent demands. As Clements points out: The zone of conflict is one where there are fragile economies and weak politics subject to vigorous and unrestrained assertion of ethnic rights leading to secessionist impulses. Over the last three years 92 per cent of the world's most violent conflicts have been internal. (2001:9) Conflicts that appear to have a religious or ethnic origin can often equally be traced to economic divisions. Contributions to the UNESCO 2001 Symposium to mark the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and NonViolence demonstrated the complexity. Tanada (2001) recounted in her reflections on the Mindanao conflicts between 'Muslims' (Moros) and 'Christians' that it would be erroneous to attribute the centuries-long conflict simply to religious differences. She argued that unless the history of economic displacements of Moros from their ancestral lands during decades of colonisation is fully understood, peace will be elusive. Similarly, in Sri Lanka, the initial tactics of political, economic and social domination by the ethnoreligious majority contributed significantly to the rise of separatism by the

42 Roots of conflict: implications for education

minority. Any analysis of Northern Ireland will state that it is not just about Catholic versus Protestant in terms of religious belief, but about power and control, employment and housing. Both Catholic and Protestant factions claim that the differences are not only religious, they also are differences in peoples . . . All that being said, social class differences play a significant role; the Protestants having always been favoured by English colonial rule and having better jobs and housing . . . it might well be said that the British practised their brutal colonial treatment on the Irish before they took the show on the road to India and Africa. ( O'Sullivan 1999: 150) And while the Arab/Israeli conflict is about religious and national identity and 'place', it is also about the control of water. These are truisms, but they are important in any task of targeting educational strategies for non-violence and peace. If one makes the obvious connection that real and perceived economic injustices are likely to generate conflict, then where does education stand within this? The role is ambiguous. On the one hand, there is the conventional human capital analysis that education can serve to lift a country out of absolute and relative poverty (and implicitly therefore ameliorate poverty-related conflict); on the other hand, there is the argument that education reproduces— or actually exaggerates — social divisions, therefore contributing to the likelihood of tensions. Within this reproduction argument, there is however a strand which would claim a legitimising — and therefore palliative — role for education. By managing to attribute economic inequality to 'ability' and to academic success or failure, schools personalise inequality so that people do not challenge their position. This chapter briefly outlines firstly the now well-known analyses of the historical and continued role of education in social reproduction and social exclusion, examining the tensions arising from such exclusion and frustrations. It then looks to the future in two directions, the future of globalisation and the future of class conflict. For globalisation, it appears that in spite of over a century of formal education in most parts of the world, there is no evidence that gaps between rich and poor are closing, with increasing globalisation both of economic inequality and of conflict. Class conflict on the other hand is the analysis of where the action or disorder is directly between the working class and the owners of capital, not always an immediate offshoot of overall social inequality. While beginning to explore the future for participatory democracy in engaging productively with economic inequality and class tensions, my argument in this chapter will be that the balance sheet is currently not on the side of education. It is a somewhat depressing picture.

Economic and class relations

43

Reproduction, production and social exclusion

'There is a long tradition of analyses of the role of education in social reproduction, which need not be rehearsed too much here (Bowles and Gintis 1976; I3ourdieu and Passeron 1977). Writers such as Connell have now refined reproduction to talk of 'constant constitution', the dynamic interaction between the reproduction and production of social structures, highlighting our social practices within those social structures. 'Social structure must be seen as constantly constituted rather than constantly reproduced. And that makes sense only if theory acknowledges the constant possibility that structure will be constituted in a different way' (Connell 1987: 44). This has resonances with complexity theory of course; and the notion of our practices as educationists in the process of social constitution has parallels with Giddens's 'agents' (1984). There are other new complexities too: Byrne claims that we are seeing a 'Brazilianisation of advanced capitalism' — a threefold division among the very affluent, ordinary and poor. There is increasing socio-spatial segregation within cities, and that is the basis of problems of social order. The loss of blue-collar industrial employment (both male and female) has generated the urban form as 'butterfly attractor' in which neighbourhoods are either relatively secure and prosperous or socially excluded and deprived. Certainly it would appear that analysis more recently — and a lot of policy — has shifted to concerns about social inclusion and social exclusion. All ends of a political spectrum will be concerned about the socially excluded as a possible source of conflict or violence; the differences between them may lie in the identificat i on and treatment of 'the problem'. Apple (2000) argues that some of the favourite reforms of the Right — voucher plans, national or statewide curricula, and national or statewide testing — reproduce or even worsen inequalities. What start out as improvements arc usually transformed into another set of mechanisms for social stratification. Epp (1996) argues that stratification in school is part of dehumanisation, damaging to students who are 'other'. Diagnostic labelling of those who are not 'normal' may command an amount of government funding in Canada, but discards most of the population. 'The definition for "normal" provides a distorted picture of human offspring which includes aspects of society that are culturally relevant only for a small, Eurocentric, male portion of the population' (Epp 1996: 18). Even the more casual ordering of individuals as 'a little slow' or a 'disruptive element' is dangerous, because it allows for the further stratification in 'classist, sexist, racist and hetcrosexist' ways. In her discussion of pathology, Martineau (1996) rehearses the argument that we need to begin unpacking the multiple and insidious ways in which public policy has served to construct and maintain poverty, while simultaneously making its victims bear responsibility for such state-constructed poverty. The rhetoric around 'youth at risk' is a 'ritualistic chant of failure

44 Roots of conflict: implications for education

and salvation'. We need to be 'saved' from such children, and they need protecting. Instead, Martineau argues for a politics of 'childhood as praxis' approach, which interrupts our adult-centred images of human agency: Classifying children as deviant threats or innocent victims is misleading and short-sighted because it fails to nurture their abilities to act in the world. The politics of childhood acknowledges that children have the capacity to increasingly influence, participate in, and contribute to the larger social world. ( Martineau 1996: 45) Again, this is a more complex and interactive approach than 'intervention', with a restoration of agency. All over the world, formal education may contribute to the multiple processes that lead to social exclusion and divisiveness. This can be deliberately built into the structure, as happened in South Africa under apartheid. Unequal access to school formed a complex pattern according to whether schools were in rural or urban areas, white farms, homelands, townships in white-designated areas and so on. It was not a straightforward ethnic divide (Graham-Brown 1991). Following the state of emergency in 1986, militant young people began to build a semi-underground youth organisation, and widespread intimidation, troops and police patrolling schools, detention and imprisonment of young people did not deter them from resisting (Adams 1991). More often now there is a more subtle and less overt form of educational di &rentiation and tension. Heynemann and Todoric-Bebic (2000) argue that a structure of inequality gives rise to differential identities, posing a challenge to a unified sense of national identity. The failure of formal education in its nation-building and distributive functions undermines the legitimacy of existing power structures and exacerbates political and social tensions. Bernal is very direct in her analysis of cause and effect in Colombia: 'Marginalisation, social inequity and exclusion, fomented by the school, deprive many Colombian citizens of legally participating in society. As a result, they may then adopt illegal ways and carry out violent acts' (1997: 37). Wright (1997) has the same analysis for Sierra Leone, as does Graham-Brown (1991) for Sudan. In Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the inequalities led to demands for more and better education, but the authorities often regarded education as a direct threat to their domination, so that teachers, academics and indeed books were targets of repression and censorship. 'All parties in the conflict regard education in its broadest sense as part of an ideological battleground' (Graham-Brown 1991: 142). Students who protested were 'disappeared', and teachers received death threats. In Honduras, the government eliminated courses in sociology, economics and political economy after student strikes.

Economic and class relations 45

Before the 1990-1 civil war, Rwanda was regarded as one of Africa's educational achievements, with more than 60 per cent of children in primary school and a government which spent 22 per cent of its national budget on primary education. Unfortunately, some of the factors which incited the war can also be detected in the school system: only 6 per cent of children could enter secondary education. The frustration was heightened by a biased quota system for secondary and further education, aptly spelled out by an Oxfam analyst: 'No-one feels they are being treated fairly. Education is falling between quality and scope . . . it is neither democratic nor equipping the student with skills . . . It is no longer a guaranteed passport to a better life'. (Arnhold et al. 1998: 48) Likewise in Nepal, a study by Skinner and Holland (1996) found students' use of schooling both to support and to oppose the official agendas of the state. Young people have embraced schooling as a strategy to challenge dominant constructions of caste, religion and gender, and to assert their place as active agents in society. Yet entry into the new social category of what Skinner and Holland call 'the educated person' also opens up space to generate 'new divisions, new distinctions of privilege, and new forms of disdain' (Skinner and Holland 1996: 274). Formal qualifications provide symbolic capital with which to impose alternative status relations. As always, then, people find ways not just to circumvent but to appropriate policies and structures that are supposed to generate inclusion. Private education is a particularly divisive element within UK society. The value system I hat justified the inequality, the buying of privilege, also rejects the ideas of citizenship, inclusion and universalism. The fact that the European Convention on Human Rights upholds the right of parents to educate children as they wish, does not mean that it was envisaged that a whole stratum of society would establish a near monopoly of access to the key positions of power. (Porter 1999: 72) The intersection of class with religion can be another source of monopoly of wealth. Apple, in his book on the new right in USA, explores how religious interests and conservative Christianity have appropriated neo-liberal economic agendas, that is, 'the combination of capitalism and . . . the moral life as ordained by God' (Apple 2001: 16). 'Thick democracy' is replaced by the thinner democracy' of possessive individualism; communities are replaced by shopping malls. Capitalism and Protestantism are symbiotic in many ways. He quotes the conservative 'moral economist' Michael Novak, who

46 Roots of conflict: implications for education

stated in 1990 that 'personal economic initiative is a fundamental human right and to exercise that right is to fulfill the image of God inherent in every man and woman'. Novak's advice to 'intelligent, ambitious and morally serious Christians and Jews' is that 'they will better save their souls and serve the cause of the Kingdom of God all around the world by restoring the liberty and power of the private sector than by working for the state' (quoted in Apple 2001: 157). The commandment 'thou shalt not steal' is about preservation of property, not wealth redistribution to the less productive. Religious education of this type will act only to cement self-interest and inequality. The conclusion from this section is that even without market economics (but particularly within them), elites will appropriate education for their own ends; and there is no sign in some countries that social reproduction through education is decreasing. Indeed, social exclusion may be increasing and even condoned by right-wing education policymakers. Verdict: Education for Conflict 1; Education for Peace 0. Globalisation of economic inequality

How will globalisation impact on such economic differentials and the resulting conflicts? Although most of the world's most violent conflicts are on the surface internal, there are huge economic interests behind many (all?) international conflicts. As Toh pointed out, any attempt to rebuild a 'peaceful' Afghanistan must go beyond mere attempts to 'resolve conflicts' between leaders. It has to take into account the structural violence which pre-dated September 11 including the strategic interests of powerful states in a politically 'stable' and 'friendly' Afghanistan that is amenable to hosting pipelines that open up the huge oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian Zone. (Toh 2001: 5) th

,

Similarly, there are grounds for why America cites the breaking of UN resolutions in Iraq but not in Israel as a reason for their invasion, and that is oil. As one anti-war banner in New York read, 'How was it that our oil came to be under their sand?' Globalisation has severely undermined old concepts of national economic sovereignty, and there are few countries able to withstand external and internal currency flows, many of which have nothing to do with trade and everything to do with currency speculation. It was no accident that the September llth terrorist attacks were directed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Jenkins (2001) reveals, the rich world now spends $1 billion a day subsidising its farmers to shield them from Third World

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47

competition. This amounts to a $1 billion-a-day tax on poor countries, six ti mes the amount spent on aid (including educational aid). He points out that if you stopped the subsidies, you could forget about the aid. This would be an all-win game for the taxpayer, consumer and Third World alike. Yet western leaders will not do this, for fear of alienating their own constituents or voters, or their strategic alliances within the rich world. The hypocrisy of politicians' claims to want to alleviate poverty and to prevent povertyinduced conflict is picked up on in the press, but there is as yet no concerted mechanism to create policy change. And as always, such discussions rarely appear on the school curriculum. Our concern would be a particular version of globalisation — the spread of neo-liberal market economics — which has had particular impacts on national social and economic structures, including education. James Porter (1999) in his book Reschooling and the Global Future has an excellent and stringent critique of the unthinking acceptance of the dominant economic theories of competitive equilibrium and the free market as a 'partial and inadequate explanation of reality'. A fundamental error has been to continue to depend on the methodology adapted from the physical sciences of the late nineteenth century. 'It is also interesting to note that the linear methodology. . . was very different from the approach of the earlier classical economists who constantly referred to dynamic change, irregular fluctuations and catastrophic i mpacts' (Porter 1999: 30). As Porter points out, the techniques of nonlinearity are particularly appropriate for analysis of the economy. The competitive view is being promoted by the idea that the operation of a market economy is incompatible with collective responsibilities. In the countries most influenced by the concept of the perfectibility of the market mechanism there are also elites that are well served by the idea that any restraint on their freedom by the state is an intrusion on their personal liberty. The class system founded upon the merits of individual choice permits the higher class to choose exclusive education and to ensure a protected sub-culture that enables them to organise and sustain power and influence . . . the political policies derived from the economic theories of the New Right have led to an increase in the gap between richest and poorest, and the effects of the pursuit of a pure market economy have led to a value system based on exclusion and inequality. (Porter 1999: 31) Joseph Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel economics prize winner (together with the 2002 Nobel prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith), is a strong critic of the notion of the efficiency and rationality of markets. Stiglitz tells of how long ago, John Maynard Keynes had described the stock market as based

48 Roots of conflict: implications for education not on rational individuals struggling to uncover market fundamentals, but as a beauty contest in which the winner is the one who guesses best what the judges will say. Stiglitz emphasises that different market participants have different (and imperfect) information, and these asymmetries in information have a profound effect on how an economy functions (Stiglitz 2002: 17). The importance of information is of course a key element in a complex adaptive system, as we saw in Chapter 2. Yet it would appear that influential proponents of simplistic market economics are still with us. Currently in England, we see top-up fees, specialist schools, parental 'choice' and various forms of privatisation of education. Government concentration on nationalistic and economic factors in controlling public services has resulted in a reduction in the role of the state with regard to traditional democratic concerns of equity, justice, security and welfare. The link between conflict and this faulty model of economics is increasing polarisation (or bifurcation) between the elites and the dispossessed. The important insight from Porter is that the marginal efforts to ameliorate this divide are failing to stem the ultimately disastrous descent into a world 'that is so split that many will assume that violence is the only available way to seize wealth or power' (Porter 1999: 39). Structural adjustment, too, has taken the free market into the global arena. This has effectively forced countries to reduce all public expenditure on health, education and welfare. Many have experienced political and social crisis situations that have resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected governments in favour of regimes that can then deliver the deeply unpopular measures that have been required by the World Bank. Porter once more has a vivid description: It is the pervading hopelessness and cynicism of' the economically abandoned that may prove to be the most dangerous and ultimately destructive element — leading, as it is already doing, to irrational, hysterical, and dehumanising actions around the globe. Support for terrorism has its roots in the desperation of the reviled, the poor, the ignored and those that have no opportunity for a decent life or for influence or power in the existing situation. In such circumstances, education is marginalised and democracy is seemingly unattainable, but the conditions for destructive violence within and between nations will continue to grow. The means for creating destruction are daily becoming more sophisticated and global. (Porter 1999: 39) The conclusion from this section is that education not only appears powerless in these global forces, but through joining in (or being forced to join in) simplistic market ideologies, actively contributes to elitism, marginalisation and potential violence.

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relations 49

I nternal class relations: the next frontier

But will there be a return of active class conflict to challenge such marginalisation and exclusion? Here we need to glance at neo-Marxist approaches, where the relations of production are both the cause and the arena of inevitable class conflict which is the driving force of history. 'Relations of production form the foundation for the legal, political and ideological superstructure of the state, all of which reflect and express class interests and so the law, politics and ideas are equally arenas of conflict' (Stewart 1998: 8). For Gramsci, the concepts were of domination, subordination and hegemony, with education and propaganda successfully winning the active consent of the ruled by the ruling class. As Stewart points out, 'This confuses the clarity of the pure Marxian class struggle by a chaos of conflicts between different groups and interests, based on status as well as economic advantage, competing for power and space' (Stewart 1998: 8). For Bennett et al., 'A hegemonic order prescribes, not the specific content of ideas, but the limits within which ideas and conflicts move and are resolved' (Bennett et al. (eds) 1981: 59). This is an important insight for our purposes and for complexity theory or structuration. We are not totally controlled or brainwashed, but are subject to attempted limitations on freedom of thought or intellectual mobility. We cannot think the impossible. Hegemony ensures that the attractor state remains static, or that, if there is movement, it settles into a not dissimilar attractor state. The reproduction of class interests is a classic and well-documented case. Education is, of course, central to this hegemony, as ideological legitimations of class are both conveyed and (re)constructed on a daily basis, through use and limitations of our cultural capital. This was well portrayed in Fuller's (1991) revealing book on Malawi, where acceptance of the colonial education system and its (stratified) outcomes was one device to shore up the 'fragile state'. Carnoy and Samoff's analysis of Mozambique also talked of fragile legitimacy, with all citizens accepting that schooling provided the most direct route to social mobility. `The maintenance of the exam system benefits urban dwellers and groups already favoured under colonialism, notably the public sector, but it also underlines that the schools-are-for-selection ideology has fairly wide acceptance, even in revolutionary Mozambique' (Carnoy and Sameff 1990: 298). Cuba, too, while promoting a socialist, collectively oriented society, does not always encourage the collective to participate in the larger political decisions that affect its future: the serious questioning of policy and bottom-up influence on political leaders is relatively absent, so much so that there is little motivation to exert undue energy in being innovative and highly productive, not only in politics, but in other aspects of daily life. . . . [W]e have little idea

50 Roots of conflict: implications for education

how school socialization in Cuba affects the expression of dissent, because dissent is not generally expressed openly and institutionally. (Carnoy and Samoff 1990: 192) What then is the future for class conflict and its resolution? For a very interesting and relevant analysis I turn to Rubenstein (1993). He argues that since the 1930s, conflicts between social classes in most modern capitalist states have been dealt with as 'negotiable interest-based disputes'. Those studying conflict resolution in terms of 'deep-rooted' conflicts have had little to say about class conflict. The studies that attract their attention have been primarily those between ethnic, racial, national, religious or ideological groups, particularly as relating to identity. These conflicts also pose 'quantitative' questions, that is, economic issues (as in Northern Ireland or Eastern Europe), but one cannot frame them simply as economic, `bargainable' differences. Suppose, however, that one or both parties to a conflict presents itself as representative of an entire class claiming the right to reorganize the politico-economic system. This 'class struggle' situation characterizes a number of conflicts of recent concern, including the violent struggles in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru and the Philippines. Or suppose that a prior 'social contract' regulating the labor-management relationship has broken down, and that no legitimized system has replaced it. This seems roughly to describe the state of affairs in the former Soviet Union and many nations in Eastern Europe. ( Rubenstein 1993: 148) It would appear that relegating class conflict to a clash of 'interests' acts in fact to reproduce social structure. The notion of 'interest groups' assumes general acceptance of the whole social framework and that human needs are satisfiable within this framework. It is not the province of interest groups to reconstruct the existing system of power, norms and need-satisfiers. Their role is to represent their members' interests and gain temporary economic advantages within the social contract. Interest groups may in fact be organised across social-class lines (such as women's rights, religious interests or even teachers' rights). The 'working class' has become little more than a sentimental fiction. And then at the point that these workers find their own interests threatened, 'they also discover that the absence of class-wide, classconscious organisation has rendered them defenseless — incapable of challenging the system that ties the output of goods and services to immediate profitability' (Rubenstein 1993: 152). Thus, what is sometimes called 'dispute resolution' in the labour-management field today frequently turns out to be a form of management consultancy in which third-party experts advise

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companies or governments how to minimise conflict with workers in the absence of an effective labour representative. Such consultancy is clearly not classical conflict resolution which begins with deep analysis of the problem, in the Freirian or transformative sense. The latter would have the goal of assisting severely alienated parties to analyse causes, to imagine methods of reconstructing or replacing the system that is generating it, to 'cost out' various conflict-resolving options, and to i mplement the options agreed upon. In class terms, this would mean complete social transformation; but as the ruling classes seldom consent to limit their own power, significant changes in the social constitution can, it seems, come only from mass violence. Marx of course always thought a peaceful transition to socialism was possible, and denied any invariable connection between violence and radical change in class relationships. This may be held out by normative and institutional changes in the former Soviet Union, the Eastern European states and South Africa. But where does this leave education? Are class conflicts played out in schools, or has the growth of 'interest groups' repressed any class consciousness? There is a tradition of writing on pupil resistance which has been linked to structural dynamics, such as Paul Willis's (1978) classic analysis of a group of working-class boys and their creative interpretations and reworkings of their positioning within schooling and within capitalism. My own book Pupil Power: Deviance and Gender in School (Davies 1984) attempted a similar subcultural analysis, only with a group of girls, and found some parallel resistances, albeit with a more nuanced repertoire of response. While the girls were certainly working class and while they were certainly resistant, they drew on a wider range of oppositional scripts than could be attributed to a unified social-class subculture (confirmed also in later analyses such as Quicke and Winter 1994, Callender and Wright 2000). Adams (1991), too, in his book on pupil protest, is uneasy about a simple link between social class and resistance or protest, or between outside movements and schoolbased resistance. For him: specific incidents are created uniquely . . . there are similarities between the activities of protesting pupils and the protests of adults at the time. Yet it is probably going too far to subsume resistance by young people as part of trade union or working class history. Not all school rebellions are linked to socialist movements . . . More fundamental probing is needed of the conditions under which young people are subjugated. Their circumstances need exploring in their own right. They are not merely a youthful version of adult working class experience. (Adams 1991: 25) However, Adams concedes that while the position of being a pupil (`pupillage') cuts across all social strata and there is common subjection,

52 Roots of conflict: implications for education

additional strata (such as class) implying extra conflicts are imposed. He quotes Humphries' work on pupil strikes: 'children's resistance within schools can best be understood in terms not of generational conflict but rather of a broader class conflict, in which the working class community became increasingly alienated from, and antagonistic towards, the bureaucratic state schooling system' (Humphries 1987: 257). Much will therefore depend on the degree of bifurcation, and whether it can be openly attributed to social class and economic positioning. It is significant that educational policy language in western countries such as the UK has shifted to 'inclusion/exclusion' rather than class, for this embraces a wider forum including ethnicity and disability, and draws attention away from the power-based roots of disadvantage. Yet such masking may be counter-productive in the long term. Rubenstein argues that the analysis and resolution of class-based conflict (along with racial, ethnic and religious struggles) constitutes the 'next frontier' for conflict resolution. For if class conflicts are left to be settled by the methods of power politics and dispute resolution, the incapacity . . . of all current industrial systems to satisfy basic human needs will generate both structural and political violence at increasingly intense and destructive levels. It seems astounding — does it not? — that so few commentators in the US have linked the growing anarchy in American cities, where death by gunfire has become a principal cause of youthful mortality, to serious problems rooted in that nation's system of production. ( Rubenstein 1993: 156) Is participatory democracy the answer?

There seems then an urgency in thinking about how to tackle class conflict and the growth of an impoverished 'underclass'. The alternative to power politics and dispute resolution appears to be proper participatory democracy (PD) -- and here is where education can be at the forefront. Hatcher (2002) describes the process of PD in Porte Alegre in Brazil. This is internationally known for its radical democratic participatory budget process, recently extended to the state level. Participation in budget policy doubled to 378,000 people over three years, and is still growing in both quantity and quality, because — as a community secretary explained — 'people start interacting and meeting each other and communicating with each other about this process and consequently calling more people to participate. That is why it is a process, it is not just a ready-made formula' (Hatcher 2002: 57). In parallel is the school constituency which aims to enable popular participation in education policymaking at two levels: the local school and the state education system as a whole. This has been a process organised since 1999, working out issues and themes through representatives of school communities,

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civil society organisations, public organisations and higher education institutions. This was followed by regional launch meetings and the election of coordinating committees in each school and at regional level. Sixty thousand people took part in local meetings to discuss the draft policy text, with the poorest areas participating most, and with a strong presence of women and young people. The education policy is extremely radical, replacing for example selective and classificatory evaluation (seen as an instrument of exclusion) by participatory, diagnostic, investigative and emancipatory forms of evaluation. Porte Alegre, interestingly, has rejected representative or western liberal democracy, and Hatcher sees this as a model of deliberative democracy. He distinguishes between negotiation and deliberation: while negotiation is a process of bargaining around fixed positions, deliberation is a process of dialogue aimed at agreeing on a common project. (This has parallels with Rubenstein's analysis of the limitations of `bargainable' positions.) The budget process does not just aim at each district determining its own needs, but forces each entity to place its demands in relation to others. Through dialogue — what is referred to as a 'network of conversations' — social solidarity is created. Hatcher admits nonetheless that the process of constructing a popular movement is not without conflict. It is a continual process of trying to identify and construct common interests and reconcile conflicting interests. There was resistance from teachers preferring traditional methods, and from unions who refused to participate unless teachers had a pay rise. However, this is seen as natural: Contradictions between the party, the movement and the government are normal, given the conditions we find ourselves in . . . We must deal openly with these contradictions, treating them as political questions. We can resolve them, but not eliminate them. Contradictions serve as a motor, enabling us to synthesise different factors, and move forward. ( Hatcher 2002: 60) PD is seen as a 'collective process of self education', a practical laboratory in which subordinate social layers — the working class and its allies are creating themselves as the potential future leading force in society. Hatcher warns however that it might crystallise class conflicts between the popular classes and the political and economic elite, if at the national rather than local level. Yet other countries too have started to provide clues into educational ways to tackle oppression and class exploitation. I give just one other example here, Bougainville. The freedom struggle of the people of Bougainville, according to Toh (2001), is not just an assertion of the right to political and cultural self-determination away from Papua New Guinea control. The massive opening up of Bougainville to mining by transnational corporations,

54 Roots of conflict: implications for education

with the blessing of Papua New Guinea, generated billions of tons of heavily polluting and health-damaging wastes. Thus effective resolution of the conflict would clearly be interdependent with environmental care and sustainability. Nonetheless, education can make a start. Examples are given of the 'coconut revolution' in which communities undertook grassroots and self-reliant initiatives to educate and restore or build more just and sustainable environments, including coconut-derived fuel and organic agriculture based on indigenous knowledge as well as human rights education. One hopes this will become an example of 'amplification'. While the above examples seem thin on the ground, they do give indications at least of the potential of education and educationists to take a radical position to challenge economic inequalities — through popular participation. Conclusion: educational strategy

If we accept the logic that social exclusion leads to conflict, and that much education currently reproduces exclusion and class differentials, then what are the spaces for change, and who should engage in this? Firstly, there is involvement in the pressure for economic change itself. Porter quotes Galbraith as arguing for an economy that has strong macro-economic action, public investment and job creation, in order to break the underemployment equilibrium. Education should contribute to a future that is unequivocally envisaged as inclusive and requires the conscious sharing of resources and power with those who are presently excluded. It can only be fully effective if there is a democratic government that is prepared to argue for such a vision, to challenge the hegemony of' the elites that currently control the economic agenda, and offer realistic alternatives to the prevailing economic system. (Porter 1999: 41) This means freeing education from the bogus quasi-market theory that has predominated in recent years. It also therefore means university economics departments being prepared to construct such different economic models and futures — unlikely, as Porter admits. Sociologists of education, too, might be singled out by Hatcher: A major limitation of the academic debate on education in Britain is the absence of a discussion of collective resistance. The focus has been on an analysis of changing configurations of power — government policies, modes of state regulation, market forces. The subjects of these processes have usually been conceptualised as individual teachers and parents, subjects of new forms of' regulation or more or less competent market players. The instances of collective resistance, albeit limited — campaigns

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by parents and teachers against cuts in spending, against privatisation, and opposition by teachers to merit pay — have seldom gained the attention of academic analysis. (Hatcher 2002: 63) This is indeed a crucial omission and silence. From complexity theory, we know that information and connections are key to change, and academic analysis would be part of that connectivity in the educational world and in the educational press. One has to ask whether the rise of the need to get funded research as opposed to unfunded investigation has led to limited arenas for investigation — those matching the managerialist government project and certainly not those revealing structural resistance. Has the UK government and their DFES looked at the Brazilian model, let alone paid anyone to research the implications? For Apple, we need to 'interrupt' dominant discourses (for example, making whiteness strange, not the norm). Interestingly, he argues for religious education in schools, as a way of forming strategic alliances — dangerous perhaps, but a way to pry loose some of the groups currently under the Right umbrella. For him, it would also show the good work various schools are doing. I would go along with this as long as religion is also taught as being strange rather than the norm, and humanism and atheism are not always categorised as strange or 'aberrant'. Currently, 'non-believer' has the same connotations as 'non-white'. In class terms, it would seem that making exclusion and hierarchy 'strange' would be a key task for schools. This is not pointing the finger at the child on free school meals, but an analysis of social division which enables the old collective 'class action'. Ironically, a full class consciousness openly taught in schools might avoid the more seemingly ` mindless' forms of violence which are the result of frustrated hopes or obvious hypocrisies. As Stewart reminds us in her book on conflict resolution, while the causes of conflict may be structural and/or ideological, emotions are a key ingredient. Greater ease of communication makes people aware of differences between living styles and this recognition has both intellectual and emotional components; people would not fight if they did not feel injustice and did not have feelings about their situation. Without the spark of emotion, the fire of conflict would not blaze . . . emotions produce behaviour patterns which signal motivations and intentions from one person to another and these produce reactions. (Stewart 1998: 10) This sounds an obvious point, but it is important to be reminded that class relations do not of themselves produce conflict, only firstly the perception of them as unjust and secondly the feelings generated that lead to sets of

56 Roots of conflict: implications for education

behaviours in response. This was the Freirian task, not just to 'raise the consciousness' in peasants of their exploitation, but to provide a literacy which would enable the expression of protest and pressure for change. The task was to turn latent conflict into real conflict. While some behaviour modification and some conflict resolution is tuned to suppress emotion, this is not the stance of this book. I like Oxfam's definition of the 'global citizen' as one who is 'outraged by social injustice'. If emotional literacy is to find its way into schools, it is not just to enable us to speak and voice, but to be sufficiently enraged and motivated to want change. Challenging information, as always, is also key. Lustick and Miodownik look at why some just absorb information and do not seek to influence, while others aggressively seek to exert influence and resist contrary evidence. For them, 'apathy and fanaticism act as brakes on the speed with which deliberative discourse can spread convincing arguments through a polity' (Lustick and Miodownik 2000: 28). What is needed is then the usual combination of widespread knowledge about class relations and exclusion together with outrage about their continuities and the skills in participatory or deliberative democracy to generate alternatives. This in fact would be the essence of good citizenship education — one that is 'interruptive' of class relations. It would be interruptive of unjust gender relations, too — to which I next turn.

Chapter 4

Gender and violence

This chapter explores the interface between gender relations and conflict. It has been argued that conflict analysis has tended to ignore the way a gender perspective could enrich understanding of the motivations of different actors and the links between the personal and the institutional/political (El-Bushra 2000). Immediately however the same debates emerge as with all gender and feminist analyses. Can 'women' as a category be analysed as having a special relationship to social phenomena (such as peace)? Or does this lead to an 'essentialist' approach which devalues women's (and men's) huge withinsex diversity? How does one recognise and respect 'difference' without reifying 'it' as perpetual, closed and unchanging? (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999.) Phis chapter will look at arguments from both sides of this tension, certainly being very wary of claiming that women or men are 'essentially' more peaceloving or aggressive, and being also wary of particular sorts of victimology. Reardon in her UNESCO publication Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective argues that: In a culture of war and violence, human inequality is assumed to be natural and violence in the pursuit of social and political purposes is legitimized as necessary and inevitable. Gender roles are cast in the mould of these assumptions and beliefs. Ideologies of 'gender apartheid' are deeply embedded in the war system and the culture of violence. ( Reardon 2001: 21) Her argument is that devising a peace system as opposed to a war system requires an 'authentic partnership' between men and women. She would appear to tend towards the essentialist approach in claiming that such a system would take fully into account the potential and actual roles of women in public policy and peacemaking as advocated in UNESCO's Statement on Women's Contribution to a Culture of Peace in Beijing in 1995. It seems incontrovertible however that women do have a different relationship to some of the elements which link to conflict: environmental degradation, poverty, human rights violations and war itself, including 'security'.

58

Roots of conflict: implications for education

Women, with very few exceptions, have not taken part in the management of international security. The Women's International Network on Gender and Human Security is developing a 'security inquiry' to enable educators, students and all citizens who value participatory learning to work towards new concepts and policies of global human security (Reardon 2001). Thus initially two broad areas of the interface between gender and conflict emerge. Firstly, there is women's and men's differential relationship to the causes of conflict (including masculinity/femininity as a source of violence and including women's absence from the decision-making about war and peace). Secondly, there are the gendered effects of conflict (including different effects of war and changing gender roles). This chapter begins with discussion of such gendered contributions and effects, and then turns to education in terms of gendered violence and strategic responses. Dominant masculinity and militarism

I begin with the concept of multiple masculinities and hegemonic or dominant masculinity. There are many ways to be male and to be female, but some versions gain credibility and prominence over others. In many countries and contexts, hegemonic masculinity is that characterised by misogyny, homophobia, racism, compulsory heterosexuality, the importance of confrontational sport and the use or threat of violence and fighting. Constructions of masculinity frequently emphasise the ability to be violent and uncomplainingly to endure pain (Morell 1998). The idolisation of rugby, football and cricket players contributes to forms of masculinity which stress the importance of physicality, power and competitive success and which establish levels of aggression as socially acceptable (Messner and Sabo (eds) 1990). Not only this, but there is the message that disputes can be resolved by physical violence. While the 'New Man' image (the man who participates equally in childcare and housework and emotionally and practically supports his money-earning partner) is gaining ground, it is still not widespread. Similarly, as we shall see, women do have the capacity to be violent (in war, or punishing children) but hegemonic femininity does not stress this, instead promoting i mages of frailty or beauty. In complexity terms, hegemonic masculinity and femininity are attractor states' to which peoples and discourses are drawn. Fisher et al. in their book on Working with Conflict acknowledge that violence against women has deep roots in many societies. Tor example, the idea of what it means to be masculine is formed, in many societies, in opposition to the definition of femininity, so that violence against women and children is seen as the rightful exercise of authority' (Fisher et al. 2000: 48). Studies of male violence among Christian groups, similarly, have shown authoritarianis m in male—male relationships, but also how a nco-patriarchal sense of masculinity may be erected on a lay fundamentalist' basis. 'The ideology here is not only one of "I hit her because she is mine" but also often "I hit her because

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she needed it"' (Holter 2000). A revealing Norwegian survey showed that male acceptance of domestic violence was related to two main features: having experienced bullying, and having experienced violence in the family, mainly from the father. Patriarchy is therefore a two-sided affair — not only an ordering of men above women, but also an ordering within each gender, with patriarchal power-holders above men in general. Masculinity theory is a theory about how power-holders are able to use and exploit masculine traits (Holter 2000). Contemporary work on AIDS education has found that attempts to simply educate young people about AIDS, about taking precautions or 'saying no', often fail unless they take into account the culture of 'rightful' relationships in the local environment. Our work on Ugandan schools, for example, showed that expectations that girls would be empowered through knowledge of AIDS and HIV were not met unless girls were simultaneously given the skills and confidence to analyse their situation and to resist automatic subordination by males. Such subordination was only reinforced by the male domination of decision-making and of power within a mixed school (Davies and Mirembe 2001). Morrell (2000) also comments on the experience of AIDS education, where community based 'peer education' methods have proved the most effective in changing dangerous conduct. As we shall see in Chapter 11, skilled conflict resolution often requires skills in negotiation, but negotiation assumes some parity in power and status — which girls in an authoritarian and masculinised culture do not have. For O'Sullivan (1999), 'gender-specific forms of violence occur where male dominance is institutionalised in social, political and economic systems'. He argues that female genital mutilation 'violently discriminates against women' (O'Sullivan 1999: 26), and he draws attention to the World Bank's identification of violence as a major risk factor for ill-health and disease among women of reproductive age. This hierarchy of male dominance is accompanied by the presence of violent social structures. Eisler (1988) names this a 'dominator model', based on the use or threat of force — and characteristic of the human rank orderings in male-dominant societies. Interestingly for complexity theory, Eisler distinguishes between such domination hierarchies and what she calls 'actualisation hierarchies' — the progressions from lower to higher ordering of functioning (such as from cells to organs), which operate to maximise the organism's potential. Domination hierarchies, in contrast, inhibit personal creativity, reinforce the 'basest' human qualities and suppress compassion, empathy and the striving for truth and justice. The interesting feature of the analysis of hierarchy within and across gender is that it moves away from essentialism, in its location of violence in a social ordering rather than in a physiology. An important reminder is that hegemonic masculinity is not all-pervasive. Reviewing the figures on participation in war, in aggression and in domestic violence, it is clear that males predominate. But as discussed at the beginning, this should not lead us into the

60 Roots of conflict: implications for education

essentialist trap that all men are basically (or biologically) aggressive. As Connell points out: Almost all soldiers are men, but not all men are soldiers. Though most killers are men, most men never kill or even commit asssault. Though an appalling number of men do rape, most men do not. It is a fact of great importance, both theoretically and practically, that there are many non-violent men in the world. This, too, needs explanation, and must be considered in a strategy for peace. (Connell 2000: 22) Also it has to be remembered that, as has been analysed in South Africa, while the main victims of sexual violence are girls and women, the main victims of violence per se are boys and men (Morrell 1998). From this follows the logic that boys also have an interest in confronting violence. Yet dominant masculinity can be closely linked to militarism. Jacobs et al. (2000) state quite baldly that 'it is the case that, in a wide range of societies and cultures, being "a proper man" is inseparable from the capacity to use weapons' ( Jacobs et al. 2000: 11). This is not uniform, of course, and while some studies show the pleasure men get from killing, others trace conscientious objectors and dissent. Yet whenever the creation of boundaries between ethnic-national collectivities involves violent conflict, it is inevitably accompanied by militarisation (Korac 1999). As Enloe (1993) emphasises, militarising transformations are embedded in 'changing ideas about manlinesss — manliness as it supports a state, and manliness as it informs a nation' (Enloe 1993: 247). Cults of the `hero' become symbolic here, as Cohen (1998) analyses for Serbian nationalist propaganda. Klein (2000) talks of the link between masculinity and the military as the dominant gender image in Israeli society. A state of conflict is not the only factor that makes a society militaristic: One needs to consider the extent to which military training is seen as a necessary feature of the training of all male citizens, the extent to which political leaders have military backgrounds and the extent to which military uniforms are a persistent feature of the public sphere. (176) Dominant masculinity and militarism come together in the treatment of women in wartime. Women are not necessarily more protected. Interestingly, research done by several Serbian Orthodox Church women's phone services and women's centres in Belgrade showed that most family violence against women happened after the television news at 17.30. 'This result gives a very specific insight into the forms of victimisation of women during war' (Slapsak 2001: 178). Women's bodies can be seen as vehicles through which the nation/group can be reproduced, but can also be constructed as territory to

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6I

be conquered (Kelly 2000). Rape of women on the 'other side' is a key weapon in the humiliation of the opposing forces ( Jacobs et al. 2000). Rape in the former Yugoslavia was used to terrorise populations, but it was women who carried the shame and who were later shunned and excluded, because they embodied the failure of militarised men to 'protect' their homeland. Korean 'comfort women' abducted by the Japanese also suffered the same fate and 'shame' on their return. Kelly quotes Mezey's study of Bosnia: In Bosnia the women who are raped are feared, hated and despised. . . . This is all the more extraordinary given the close, fully integrated communities that existed before the conflict and the fact that the perpetrators are previous friends and neighbours, colleagues and teachers of the women they later rape and kill. ( Mezey 1994: 589) the word 'teachers' of course stands out for us. Gender, violence and economic position

A socio-economic analysis provides further clues. Some research work links women's economic position with their likelihood of being victims of violence. Godenzi (2000) claims that the lower women's relative economic power, the more likely they are to be oppressed physically, politically and ideologically, and the less likely it is that a culture of non-violence will come into being. The connection between equality and violence is that men's violence towards women occurs less often when men solve their conflicts with other men in a peaceful way; when the prospects of women facing divorce are good; and where women have organised themselves into separate economic entities which men do not enter and control. Education for non-violence may therefore at least partly be about providing economic opportunities for females. This can range from training in micro-credit and women's small enterprises to ensuring that an equal balance of women enter higher education and the formal labour market. But men need also to be economically recognised and stable. Kimmel (2000) suggests that ethnic nationalist violence is the expression of a gendered protest against proletarianisation by lower-middle-class younger men. Where autonomy is denied, or economic mobility thwarted, frustrations are expressed through a gendered and racialised political discourse. He cites the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Basque separatists in Spain, migrant workers in the Baltic states and urban unemployed youth in America. Maitse (2000) would also add apartheid to this list: it dehumanised generally, and it also afforded men i mmense control over women. 'The truth is, we all know that often men do not aggress against the source of oppression. In many respects the perfect victim is always a woman' (Maitse 2000: 212).

62

Roots of conflict: implications for education

A parallel link between gender, conflict and education is the conflict over female education itself. The classic case would be the history of female education in Afghanistan (Pourzand 1999). The Taliban's harsh regulations forced the closure of many programmes, including even classes for women in landmine awareness. There was closure ofschools in Kabul, including boys' schools, since many of their teachers were women who were no longer permitted to work. As a result more children were playing outside, risking mine injuries (Ikramov 2001). Amid attacks and even arrests of their staff and the impossibility of continuing many programmes involving mothers and children or girls' education, many agencies had to reconsider their work. In November 2002, nearly a year after the fall of the Taliban, and nearly a million girls having returned to school, there were reports of attacks by 'suspected Taliban sympathisers' against girls' schools near Kabul. Rockets were fired and schools raided and set on fire. Leaflets were left warning parents to keep their girls at home. Analyses were unclear whether this was really about education or about western influence, although it appears that conservative communities in the south still remain hostile to girls going to school. Earlier, in Kandahar, there had been an explosion at a school, and the burning of school tents, attacks normally preceded by warning pamphlets about girls not going to school and women not appearing in public without a burka (Harding 2002). While this attack on the education of girls is depressing, in some ways of course it reveals the power — or at least potential power — of education in liberation. Women's education is resisted by certain groups of men precisely because it can demonstrate alternatives, give routes to empowerment or economic independence and challenge oppression. In an extremely patriarchal society, schooling is not all about reproduction of gender roles, as even basic literacy can provide some avenues to a widening of available roles and relationships. And, as was seen in Afghanistan, underground schooling for girls was designed precisely so that they should not continue to suffer from the extreme exclusion that was otherwise their fate.

Women's role in peace and violence

But are women simply struggling in men's wars? Ikramov analyses Afghan politics as continuing to be dominated by armed organisations recruited from ethno-regional networks: All of these armed networks, of course, are led and composed entirely of men. . . . The principal role of women in Afghan politics during the last 18 years of war has been to function as symbols of legitimisation for political groups led by men. . . . Efforts to resolve the conflict have also suffered from the lack of a domestic constituency for peace, as all of the political actors are warriors. (Ikramov 2001: 32)

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Yet we must be wary of simply portraying women as the bottom end of a hierarchy, as victims, or as excluded from war politics, on two opposing counts: firstly, that they can be active and influential in peace movements, but secondly that they can be at the same time active and influential in war and violence. There are many inspiring accounts of women engaging in conflict areas to try to forge peace. Examples are the Women in the Community joint groups of Arab and Jewish social/community workers (Ozacky-Lazar 2001) and Cockburn's (1998) study of women's groups working across the divide in Northern Ireland, in Israel/Palestine and in Bosnia. The collection by Mathews (2001) provides other examples — the Liberian Women's Initiative, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Wajir Peace Group in Kenya and Coalition for Grassroots Women's Organisations in Somalia. Networks often include educationists: in Sri Lanka, Samuel (2001) described the Women for Peace formation which included networks of leading academics, lawyers, writers, teachers and media people. Some of this involves working in the spaces — between formal organisations or between formal positions. In the Yugoslav war, Slapsak (2001) reports that women's refusal to subscribe to stereotypes concerning ethnic groups made communication between women on the warring sides not only possible but in many cases the only existing channel of communication. E-mail networks were key, as was the 'patriarchal mentality' which offered unexpected possibilities to women who were considered less capable in politics, missions or even smuggling. These spaces are central to complexity theory of course. Phis was not an idealised picture, more a 'spontaneous creation' of a kind of women's market of information and services — a sort of emergence. However, discussions of male violence and female peace should not ignore the reality that women do participate in violence. We need a far more nuanced understanding of gender within oppression, violence and conflict than is assumed by the earlier Reardon-type position. The edited collection Stales of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance ( Jacobs et al. 2000) provides some disturbing analyses of women's participation and agency in violence and in the oppression of other women, as well as their challenge to it. These include women's involvement in the Klu Klux Klan and in fascist and Nazi movements (see also Rommelsspacher 1999). Both Protestant and Catholic women were present in intimidatory mobs in Northern Ireland; middle-class women supported the Pinochet regime ( Jacobsen 2000). Nuns in Rwanda assisted the police, retired soldiers and other killers to burn alive and massacre in excess of 6,000 refugees (Willoughby-Mellors 2002). We do not need a long list to show that women's positioning within a violent conflict is a complex one, and deeply linked into the class and caste aspects discussed in Chapter 3, as well as the nationalism which I will look at in Chapter 5. Any essentialist link between maternalism and pacifism has to be viewed with some doubt. These denials are painful for feminists. Jeffreys and Basu (1998)

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64 Roots of conflict: implications for education

contrast the highly limited impact of feminist protests against dowry deaths in India with the numbers of women mobilised to support the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, which sparked massive outbreaks of communal violence. Mukta has a disturbing account of the role of women in the rise of the Hindu right in India, which 'raises salient questions of women's embeddedness within aggressive and violent political movements aimed against the women and men of subordinate castes and the minority religious communities' (Mukta 2000: 164). This has important insights for complexity theory. Other structures are not simply 'overriding' gender, but combining in new ways — there is a more complex caste-gendered politics taking place, where women are carving out a political space for themselves. The analysis has moved from seeing women as 'being used' by men in political movements to concede the 'agential capacity' of women. El-Bushra (2000) makes a si milar point, that women's involvement in violence should be considered not as an aberration but rather as a component of 'agency'. This is an important insight, which can still get overlooked. My own study of female deviance in schools (Davies 1984) examined some of the earlier theories of female criminality which stressed the abnormality of women who deviated from the acceptable norm of feminine passivity or nurturance or motherhood. The study found that in schools such notions were still prevalent, so that girls who were difficult or violent were subject to 'double labelling' in that they deviated not just from norms of the ideal pupil but from norms of the ideal female. Not all teachers had a big enough repertoire to deal with them, especially as the girls could switch between scripts to achieve power or agency — sometimes using femininity, sometimes a more `masculifist' aggression with each other or with teachers, and sometimes pulling a ` maternal' script out of the bag and talking to male teachers as if they were s mall, irritating boys who were interrupting the more valuable work of their own conversations in class. I used 'script' theory — perhaps, in social science, a precursor to complexity theory. So, as always, it is the range within females and males that has to be recognised. Jacobsen (2000) similarly argues that the history of the Northern Ireland conflict does not produce convincing evidence of a categorical preference for peacemaking among women as mothers. 'On the contrary, their positions have ranged from irredentism, through a general "politics of avoidance" and an absolute commitment to non-violence, even at personal risk' ( Jacobsen 2000: 195). Inger Skjelsbxk in another collection, Gender, Peace and Conflict, has an article 'Is Femininity Inherently Peaceful?' and has to conclude from extensive research and oral testimony that it is not. She argues that a more constructive approach might be to look at values and discourses: There is general agreement that the dominant discourses and valuesystems which lead to war are male-related.... [B]ut they are not essen-

65

tially male. The value systems do to a large extent coincide with gender, but . . . some women might also be exponents of militant and war-prone values, even in the context of motherhood and care. (Skjelsbxk 2001: 65) So our educational implications would be around discourse and value; and the fact that men can be peace-loving is something to work on, and a cause for hope and anti-essentialism. Salla (2001) therefore points out how some feminists have challenged the arguments posed by Gilligan, Reardon, Brock-Utne and others that women have a special role to play in securing international peace as a result of their socialisation and 'relational thinking'. He contends that women policymakers are just as capable as their male peers of making decisions concerning the use of force, and resort to a variety of ethical and political justifications for doing so. For Salla, women's enhanced participatory role is not just about achieving a 'critical mass' of women, but about reforming power networks so as to eliminate the use of force in resolving conflict. A shift in the analysis thus comes from the fact women in western countries are increasingly forming part of the 'security' arm of their states, whether the police, the military or the various surveillance and control agencies, such as those dealing with immigrants and refugees ( Jacobs et al. 2000). In some contexts, women are actively seeking a role in front-line combat. Jacobs et al. worry that, given the classic liberal or Weberian formulation of the state as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory, there has been so little specific feminist examination of the state's machineries for the exercise of violence. We might want to argue that education is part of this machinery of legimitat ion (see Chapter 7). Yet the very complexity and shifting nature of the gender/conflict interface also means a capacity for change, and Jacobsen points out for Northern Ireland that some of the most noticeable changes have been among men. She quotes Cockburn's observation that women were not on the whole pacifists, but that what they were looking for was 'an opening to justice, so that words can replace weapons sooner than might otherwise be the case' (Cockburn 1998: 8). This has implications for dialogue, democracy and education which are developed in Chapters 8 and 12. Gender and violence in schools

As with class, the 'gender regime' in schools is not a pure system, or even a nested system, for as Epstein et al. point out, masculinity and femininity are complex concepts, so that cultures of masculinity are `racialized and classed (and race and class are sexualised)' (Epstein et al. (eds) 1998: 102). Yet gender violence is significant enough to be treated as a phenomenon in its

66 Roots of conflict: implications for education

own right. As I argued above, there are different scripts and different resources drawn upon in the struggle for identity; Giddens's (1984) discussion of resources and routines would be relevant here. In terms of education, there is increasing study of direct and indirect, real and symbolic violence that occurs on a daily basis. Our work on gender, management and culture of schools has shown the prevalence of particular types of management cultures which, like sport, stress competition, aggression and control rather than care and compassion (Davies and Gunawardena 1992; Davies 1998a). Corporal punishment is still a phenomenon in schools in many parts of the world, and is supported by parents and teachers. The restriction of the administration of corporal punishment to the (often male) headteacher only emphasises the power involved. The message that problems can be solved by the abuse of the weaker by the stronger is a highly dangerous one. Sexual violence is also a patriarchal feature which can take place in the school, often by male teachers. There can be the expectation that teachers' sexual 'needs' can and should be fulfilled through relationships with — or rape of — schoolgirls. There are also cases of boys rampaging through girls' schools, with rape almost condoned by teachers (Davies 1992; Astill 2000). Clearly, such cultures of power and oppression can only reproduce wider cultures and behaviours in society. Amy Stambach in her fascinating and deeply nuanced ethnography Schooling, Community and Gender in East Africa describes not only the physical abuse of girls through caning, but also (or alternatively) sexual 'demands' by male teachers which the girls did see as abusive and indeed illegal while admitting they might profit by acceding to these demands (for instance, by getting to see exam questions in advance). One student observer of a disciplinary exchange between a male teacher and a schoolgirl speculated that 'he will probably tell her later that she should come home with him, saying that he let her off lightly at school by not beating her' (Stambach 2000: 145). This however is not just about male lusts, but part of the 'cultural system' of school (and non-school) which 'helps reinforce and revise relationships of power and authority between men and women, between various social spaces and activities, and even between material and ideological differences between local and larger world systems' (Stambach 2000: 132). Student culture, drawing on far-away themes (music, adulthood), acts oppositionally, and is cracked down upon by teachers as anti-authority, and by greater displays of power. In South Africa, the government's Gender and Equity task team, reporting at the end of 1997, found widespread evidence of sexual harassment and violence in the education system (reported in Harber 2000). Harber also reports a survey in 1999 revealing that one in three Johannesburg schoolgirls has been raped or sexually assaulted, but that just 12 per cent knew that sexual abuse was illegal. A large DFID ( Department for International Development) study of abuse of girls at schools in three African countries (Zimbabwe,

Gender and violence 67

Malawi and Ghana) has catalogued male teachers and older male pupils aggressively propositioning female pupils for sex, 'sugar daddies' preying on schoolgirls and generally high levels of corporal punishment and bullying (Leach 2002). The abusive behaviour of boys towards girls (and also towards more vulnerable boys) is seen as in part the product of a peer culture which stresses male competition and sexual prowess as part of 'learning to be a man'. This is a 'worrying' socialisation process in which male violence is accepted as the norm in adolescent relationships, while obedience and tolerance continue to be expected of girls. This can lead to aggressive male behaviour being normalised and perpetuated in adulthood. Leach of course does not confine gender violence to these three countries, and indeed cites research in the USA, the UK and Europe as well as South Africa and Papua New Guinea which also demonstrates how much this is a reality of life for young people. Sexual abuse is inextricably linked to other forms of violence by teachers, and to verbal abuse (Human Rights Watch 2001). The findings from the DFID study suggest that an environment which tolerates one illegal type of violence (for example, corporal punishment) is also likely to be permissive of other sorts of violence (for example, sexual abuse). The study also recorded abuses such as using girl pupils as free labour to clean teachers' houses or run errands (Leach et al. 2002). Of signficance in the study was that it was the very authoritarian nature of the school t hat allowed gender violence to flourish. Teachers were figures of authority and parents and pupils were discouraged from complaining. Teacher abuse of pupils was ignored or played down by other teachers or the head. Interestingly, the research in Ghana and Malawi showed that, despite attempts to move decision-making in education closer to the 'consumer' as part of the decentralisation process (through the creation of school management committees and strengthened parent-teacher associations) communities also ['eel relatively powerless to take action against abusers. They lack information on the correct procedures to follow in making a complaint and on their rights as parents, and they do not know where to find advice. Our own study of decentralisation in Malawi also found information a crucial issue in terms of knowledge of the meanings of decentralisation and who actually held power under different definitions (Davies and Harber 2003). Socio-economic status is also involved here, as if a girl has been made pregnant by a teacher, the parents' economic circumstances oblige them to ask the head not to report it so that they can negotiate with the teacher to marry the girl or pay maintenance. As said, sexual abuse and bullying in schools is by no means confined to developing countries. A revealing study by Duncan (1999) explored interand intra-sex conflict in secondary schools in England. He was overwhelmed by the seeming omnipresence of gender as a constituent of pupil conflict in school life. Even in interactions that bore no overt

68 Roots of conflict: implications for education

Gender and violence 69

reason for the deployment of sexualised verbal abuse, language was funnelled through this discourse. The interactions ranged from the socially trivial to the physically dangerous. ( Duncan 1999: 6)

an interesting idea, implying a need to take gender analyses far out of the local and national sphere.

Many distinctive socio-cultural practices were found, including sexualised name-calling and verbal abuse; rubbishing sexual performance; ridiculing physical appearance; criticising sexual behaviour; spreading rumours; aggressive propositioning; threatening behaviour; unwanted touching and sexual assault. What happens is the marking out of gender role limits: reminders that relationships are ultimately structured by power and that power is gendered. By incessantly expressing the expectation that boys should be served and provided for by girls, the boys knock back any advances by the girls to assert their personhood as independent of masculine supervision. (This expectation of girls' `serving' boys was a feature of Mirembe's work in Uganda too — see Davies and Mirembe 2001.) 'So, when a girl is called a "bitch" for not giving up her spare pencil to a demanding boy, invisible links are made between female autonomy and sexual perversity' (Duncan 1999: 128). This connection is not a theoretical conceit but a social and physical reality: the ratchet of male response clicks up from trivial name-calling to a denigration of sexual worth due to non-compliance, and thence, ultimately, to a state of 'social non-being'. There is a desperation in boys to control and disrupt inter-female relationships while struggling with their own competitive inter-male friendships. Yet Duncan does not essentialise, and acknowledges complexity: he reveals how only a few boys actually dominate proceedings with any degree of comfort and many girls win their own space in which to develop sociocultural power. This is done through language and insult, through slanders on male sexuality and linguistic role reversals, with girls 'shagging blokes'. Of significance in Duncan's study is the role of the school itself. There is among adolescents a rush for social inclusion in a high-status friendship group. Yet the school is central to this 'rush'. The compression of bodies in a controlled space means a power struggle for dominance. Banding in narrow age-groups takes no account of girls' earlier sexual maturity. School displaces any discussion of sexuality into moral order. This is Salmi's (1999) 'violence by omission', with the school culpable. Within this void, the peer group wrestles with the problem itself. Those damaged by conflict and pain continue their slow progress up the ladder towards socio-sexual maturity and uncertain acquisition of a culturally valued masculinity or femininity. Unlike Connell (1987), Duncan argues that there is a hierarchy of femininities like there is hegomonic masculinity. However, boys' status hierarchy is augmented by the macro-social advantages of masculine power and retains a blurred and fading ideology of global male supremacy which the girls' does not. This is

Increasingly, studies are pointing to homophobia as another feature of hegemonic masculinity in schools which results in violence. Boys who do not play or excel in sport, or who are not inclined to resort to physical strength to resolve differences or who refuse to have sexually oppressive relationships with girls are labelled as homosexuals, ostracised and victimised. Studies relating gender to class look at how some male groups, in particular urban working-class boys, seek confirmation of masculinity through self-alienation from the schooling process, contestation of school authority, low achievement and at times sexual violence, both against girls and against those who deviate from the masculine norm (Arnot 2002). Kaufman underlines the acute fear underpinning homophobia:

H omophobia

There is enormous terror that other boys will discover one's own fears. There is also the enormous fear of ridicule and violence at the hands of other boys. . . I do feel that this specific form of men's homophobia is a product of the broader fear of other men and the fear of not being ` manly enough'. In a culture that defines manhood as an ability to dominate women, dominate other men, control one's own unruly emotions, and display the heterosexuality that is compulsory in our society, it is no surprise that for many men, particualrly when they are young, there is an active hatred of homosexuality. (1997: 17) Kelly, in her study of war and gender, talks of the underpinnings to male supremacy, arguing that men affirm one another through the exclusion, humiliation and objectification of women, and demands that What we need to explore is whether any hierarchical grouping of men, organised as men, creates conditions in which coercive heterosexuality is promoted and enacted. These groupings would include sports teams, private clubs, gangs, secret societies as well as the military. ( Kelly 2000: 57) But I would argue that we would need to include boys' groupings in schools as a source of this affirmation, and certainly 'coercive heterosexuality', as we have seen above. Frank (1996) thus refers to the 'social terrorism' of boys and men in schools. Like analyses of masculinity since the 1980s, he challenges past theorising such as socialisation theory with its reductionist notions of how 'boys become

Gender and violence 69

68 Roots of conflict: implications for education

reason for the deployment of sexualised verbal abuse, language was funnelled through this discourse. The interactions ranged from the socially trivial to the physically dangerous. ( Duncan 1999: 6)

an interesting idea, implying a need to take gender analyses far out of the local and national sphere.

Many distinctive socio-cultural practices were found, including sexualised name-calling and verbal abuse; rubbishing sexual performance; ridiculing physical appearance; criticising sexual behaviour; spreading rumours; aggressive propositioning; threatening behaviour; unwanted touching and sexual assault. What happens is the marking out of gender role limits: reminders that relationships are ultimately structured by power and that power is gendered. By incessantly expressing the expectation that boys should be served and provided for by girls, the boys knock back any advances by the girls to assert their personhood as independent of masculine supervision. (This expectation of girls' `serving' boys was a feature of Mirembe's work in Uganda too — see Davies and Mirembe 2001.) 'So, when a girl is called a "bitch" for not giving up her spare pencil to a demanding boy, invisible links are made between female autonomy and sexual perversity' ( Duncan 1999: 128). This connection is not a theoretical conceit but a social and physical reality: the ratchet of male response clicks up from trivial name-calling to a denigration of sexual worth due to non-compliance, and thence, ultimately, to a state of 'social non-being'. There is a desperation in boys to control and disrupt inter-female relationships while struggling with their own competitive inter-male friendships. Yet Duncan does not essentialise, and acknowledges complexity: he reveals how only a few boys actually dominate proceedings with any degree of comfort and many girls win their own space in which to develop sociocultural power. This is done through language and insult, through slanders on male sexuality and linguistic role reversals, with girls 'shagging blokes'. Of significance in Duncan's study is the role of the school itself. There is among adolescents a rush for social inclusion in a high-status friendship group. Yet the school is central to this 'rush'. The compression of bodies in a controlled space means a power struggle for dominance. Banding in narrow age-groups takes no account of girls' earlier sexual maturity. School displaces any discussion of sexuality into moral order. This is Salmi's (1999) 'violence by omission', with the school culpable. Within this void, the peer group wrestles with the problem itself. Those damaged by conflict and pain continue their slow progress up the ladder towards socio-sexual maturity and uncertain acquisition of a culturally valued masculinity or femininity. Unlike Connell (1987), Duncan argues that there is a hierarchy of femininities like there is hegomonic masculinity. However, boys' status hierarchy is augmented by the macro-social advantages of masculine power and retains a blurred and fading ideology of global male supremacy which the girls' does not. This is

Increasingly, studies are pointing to homophobia as another feature of hegemonic masculinity in schools which results in violence. Boys who do not play or excel in sport, or who are not inclined to resort to physical strength to resolve differences or who refuse to have sexually oppressive relationships with girls are labelled as homosexuals, ostracised and victimised. Studies relating gender to class look at how some male groups, in particular urban working-class boys, seek confirmation of masculinity through self-alienation from the schooling process, contestation of school authority, low achievement and at times sexual violence, both against girls and against those who deviate from the masculine norm (Arnot 2002). Kaufman underlines the acute fear underpinning homophobia:

Homophobia

There is enormous terror that other boys will discover one's own fears. There is also the enormous fear of ridicule and violence at the hands of other boys. . . . I do feel that this specific form of men's homophobia is a product of the broader fear of other men and the fear of not being ` manly enough'. In a culture that defines manhood as an ability to dominate women, dominate other men, control one's own unruly emotions, and display the heterosexuality that is compulsory in our society, it is no surprise that for many men, particualrly when they are young, there is an active hatred of homosexuality. (1997: 17) Kelly, in her study of war and gender, talks of the underpinnings to male supremacy, arguing that men affirm one another through the exclusion, humiliation and objectification of women, and demands that What we need to explore is whether any hierarchical grouping of men, organised as men, creates conditions in which coercive heterosexuality is promoted and enacted. These groupings would include sports teams, private clubs, gangs, secret societies as well as the military. ( Kelly 2000: 57) But I would argue that we would need to include boys' groupings in schools as a source of this affirmation, and certainly 'coercive heterosexuality', as we have seen above. Frank (1996) thus refers to the 'social terrorism' of boys and men in schools. Like analyses of masculinity since the 1980s, he challenges past theorising such as socialisation theory with its reductionist notions of how 'boys become

70 Roots of conflict: implications for education

men', as this does not explain the complexities of 'getting gendered'. As with Connell's analysis, men's and boys' practice of masculinity is always local, temporal, 'ever shifting, intermeshed rather than sequential, with boundaries that materialize only in social interaction' (Frank 1996: 114). This is an adaptive and creative response, within gender as a complex adaptive system in its own right. Masculinity is not just a question of learning a role and carrying it out. Boys revealed how they hid things from other male friends and used violence to demonstrate that they were really male: 'authority and domination were merged into the structure of the personality itself. Fear was often the consequence: fear of physical harm, fear of being excluded, of being ostracized or abandoned, fear of persecution and ridicule, humiliation and rejection' (Frank 1996: 123). As Frank points out, many teachers fail to realise that the values of hegemonic masculinity are also woven into the personality of the boy who carries out the 'non-hegemonic practice'. This is i mmensely complicated, especially if we have to deal with the violence that some men and boys inflict on themselves, including suicide. 'This type of analysis would suggest that changing curricula, language practices or hiring procedures would not suffice' (Frank 1996: 124). Frank nonetheless was able to discover 'spaces' in the very contradictions and tensions of masculinity, where boys could reflect and manage to do things differently, be sensitive, caring, finding non-exploitative relationships, accepting diversity and so on. Yet, like Duncan, he finds the school culpable, arguing that there is little change because of the daily support of hegemonic masculinity, sport and competition in schools. 'Until we begin to withdraw support for it, both individually and collectively, and in the structural arrangements of schooling, we will not change much in the gendered and sexed relations of schooling' (Frank 1996: 125). This has resonances with Giddens's (1984) notion of structures needing support for their continuation. Strategies for dealing with masculinity and violence in education

The final section of this chapter starts to examine strategies for countering gender-based violence. There are some useful manuals for working directly with young men on their perceptions, attitudes and behaviours, including those concerning violence and war (e.g. Bramwell and Barton 1996). Communication skills are essential here, as much research shows that boys in `conversation' make statements to each other, rather than sharing and listening. It is nonetheless difficult for boys to embrace other forms of masculinity. The argument within policy is therefore to tackle the 'gender regime' in total, including decision-making, power, human rights and structures of grievance and anti-sexism. The Commonwealth Secretariat has outlined a training programme to combat gender-based violence (GBV), based on a participatory approach

Gender and violence 71

that brings together government ministries, strategic departments, intergovernmental organisations, multilateral agencies and other 'critical groups' ( Oguli-Oumo et al. 2002). This would match the 'conflict mapping' to be outlined in Chapter 11, identifying a range of stakeholders and not just the actual perpetrators. In this sense it can be seen as a nested system; and, if implemented, one that can lead to different sorts of emergence. Much relies on information: in this instance, it is collecting information about GBV, organising advocacy education and awareness campaigns, organising a GBV forum, disseminating information through newsletters, press conferences, local community radio, undertaking needs assessments, training of paralegals, and educating women, men and policymakers about the law. It is inevitably difficult to assess the impact of 'awareness raising' — always a pillar of feminist activity — but it would seem indisputable that more information at a range of levels can only increase connectivity and alter/challenge the 'rules' of interaction. While addressing the role of public education and of training programmes, the guide does not say much however about education concerning GBV in schools; this is a sensitive topic for teachers, but ought to be addressed directly. In 2002, the id21 website was giving examples of innovative work with adolescents to change gendered behaviour; however, none was part of an integrated government-sponsored school curriculum, and most were projects outside the school setting or by outside agencies and NGOs in collaboration with schools. However, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, South Africa does concentrate on school-based programmes, working often with young males in high schools on the challenges and problems they face. The starting point is to develop responsibility in those who have been violent and to develop a climate of openness and support to permit young men to confront and overcome the need to affirm their masculinity through violence (Harber 2001b). The work of the Zero Tolerance Project Trust in Scotland is a 'developed world' example which shows that violence in adolescent relationships and abusive behaviour in schools are endemic there too, with high acceptance by young men of violence towards females (Leach 2002). Would sport then be part of the problem or part of the solution? The answer is both. Sport which is single-sex, emphasises brutality, confrontation, aggression and status can act only to reinforce tough masculinity and scoring over an 'enemy'. As mentioned earlier, sport valorises violent and aggressive constructions of masculinity. Yet sport which emphasises development of skill, self-improvement and fitness rather than strength, and which can be played equally by both sexes, can in theory channel energy without necessarily promoting hatred of the other or contempt for the weaker. However, without the overall change in culture referred to earlier, it is unlikely that simply having more sport will reduce social violence. People and children will invariably subvert into competition or aggression. I read of a nursery teac

72

Roots of conflict: implications for education

reprimanding a boy for playing guns. 'Why don't you go and build with the bricks,' she suggested. A few minutes later, the boy was running about with some bricks going 'bang-bang'. 'What are you doing?' she cried. He said, `I'm shooting you with my house.' It seems clear that teacher training institutions should raise questions with trainees about masculinity, both as a means of developing alternatives to corporal punishment and to develop counselling skills to deal with boys' (or girls') disruptive behaviour, recognising the emotions and contradictions that lie behind such behaviours. We have been working with the only teacher training college in the Gambia on a project on democratising teacher education (Davies, Harber and Schweisfurth 2002), and it is evident that traditional cultural gender roles as well as intepretations within Islam will need to be surfaced and worked through to achieve a democratic organisation where trainees experience democratic learning for themselves. This is not to throw out all gendered attributes. As Morrell points out, `some of the qualities in "traditional" masculinity (e.g. courage, steadfastness, ambition) are certainly needed in the cause of peace' (Morrell 2000: 30). But a profound finding is that in those societies where men are permitted to acknowledge fear, levels of violence are low (Kimmel 2000). Post-structuralist feminists such as Weiner would attack the notion of fixed and unitary cultural identities, and argue for the recovery of 'hitherto underrepresented forms of the feminine' (1997: 150). I would want to recover under-represented forms of the masculine, too. Schools and colleges should not generate fear through repressive punishment and masculinist domination, but permit the expression of fear — most importantly the fear of war. Conclusion: education for democracy and equality

Gender relations may not be a direct 'cause' of war, but I would argue that they can be highly conducive to it. A very instructive list provided by Kimmel (2000) summarises the themes which anthropologists have isolated as leading to both interpersonal and intersocietal violence. It provides a clue to the holistic, democratic and equitable education which is needed to mitigate such violence. The themes are: 1 The ideal for manhood is the fierce and handsome warrior. 2 Public leadership is associated with male dominance, both of men over other men and men over women. 3 Women are prohibited from public and political participation. 4 Most public interaction is between men, not between men and women or among women. 5 Boys and girls are systematically separated from an early age.

Gender and violence 73

6 Initiation of boys is focused on lengthy constraint, during which time boys are separated from women, taught male solidarity, bellicosity and endurance and trained to accept the dominance of older groups of men. Emotional displays of male virility, ferocity and sexuality are highly 7 elaborated. 8 Male economic activities and the products of male labour are prized over female. ( Kimmel 2000: 245) I would like to suggest an obvious counter to each one of these eight themes which could take place in education: 1 The promotion of a range of differing ideals both of manhood and of womanhood. 2 Education for democratic leadership, with skills for both males and females. 3 The encouragement of females into public and political participation. 4 The acceptance of females as prominent and interacting in public life. 5 Coeducation. 6 Education for solidarity between the sexes, and for challenges to dominance. 7 Education for emotional literacy for both sexes. 8 Education for productive equitable economic activity and skill for both sexes, and in equal rights. All the above would begin the process of turning a society and its education system from a simple, rigid, disconnected and bellicose one to a complex adaptive system with possibilities for diversity, connectivity and emergence.

Chapter 5

Pluralism and identity work 75

Pluralism and identity work

As with gender and class, this chapter traces the connections between pluralis m — or diversity — and conflict, isolating where education may be implicated. The range of pluralism — ethnicity, 'race', tribalism, religion — shares with class and gender an importance for identity, but has even more potential for politicisation of conflict. After looking at this potential, the chapter focuses on identity before a critical examination of multiculturalism and antiracism Finally it explores the potential of citizenship education for enabling 'acknowledgement of hybrid identity and acting as an antidote to nationalistic -education Given that pluralism characterises virtually all societies (whether of ethnicity, religion, clan or tribe), the question to ask is whether conflict is endemic. Definitions of pluralism can be positive, as in the Swanultepor-Cs---uat-ien of pluralism as the basis for a harmonious, multiracial society (quoted in Gillborn T995): eittbOrn notes however, as does indeed Swann, the gap between the 'pluralist ideal' and the realities of life in Britain, stating that .

it is characteristic of most pluralist accounts that they rarely scrutinize the line between pluralism as a goal (as an ideological version of how things could/should be) and pluralism as a description of reality (as an analytical framework). ( Gillborn 1995: 7) It is the latter perspective which I am taking here, in looking at the relationship of 'real' pluralism to conflict. Both peace research and security studies have increasingly emphasised the large number of armed conflicts in which the division between opponents is to a significant degree defined by ethnic difference, or other types of difference in identity (Smith 2001). Huntingdon (1997) won a great deal of attention with his 'grandiose' thesis that future conflicts would be shaped by a clash between the worli;1' s v,ev civilisations, but Smith argues that it is important to avoid making a felidi6ut of identity, interest or any other single dimension. His analysis of Huntingdon relates to the problem that on both sides — West ),

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and Islam — leaders are similar in one crucial respect: they expect clash and confrontation. 'They are bitter enemies but best friends, for they need each other. One myth of confrontation easily generates another opposing one. This is why nationalism is contagious' (Smith 2001: 44). Interestingly, Collier in a paper on the 'political economy of ethnicity' (1998, quoted in Rihani 2002) challenges the assumption that diversity would lead to conflict in all circumstances. He suggests that ethnic divisions can have various detrimental effects, increasing patronage and lowering the level of trust among individuals. Yet the societies most at risk are those in the middle of the range of ethnic diversity. Homogenous societies do not have a problem, and those with a high level of diversity are just as stable. Conflict arises when there are a few ethnic groupings, especially when one monopolises most of the rewards. In practical terms, it costs less to initiate and coordinate conflict when there a few large groupings. Yet, as Rihani (2002) points out, on that count oppression and civil war should be lower in Africa — which is not the case. Clearly, there is more to tension than just the number of groups, such as the history of colonialism or borders, the degree of democracy in government and civil society and the overall economic condition of a society. For Rihani, the inescapable element of a functioning CAS is the freedom to interact. When there is oppression (of women, or of ethnic groups) then a nation cannot evolve efficiently. This links back to the conclusion of the previous chapter. Yet there are genuine dilemmas facing an open or 'free' cultural pluralism. Figuera (2000) talks of the conflicts of values, of cultures and of rights. Since cultural pluralism propounds openness to all cultures, how can it deal with a culture which rejects openness? However, the principle is that openness and situated, bounded rationality do not mean accepting any position proferred but mean instead being willing to give a genuine hearing to the reasons for any position held. The respect that cultural pluralism calls for is critical respect. The critique must be carried out in practice. The outcome cannot be guaranteed. (Figuera 2000: 56) For Figuera, there is an 'ultimate court', of reason and of using continuous discourse, not violence. These twin notions of critical respect and constant discourse will be returned to later. Without Rihani's `freedom to interact' and Figuera's 'critical respect' comes a hardening of cultural boundaries, and the politicisation of identity and group. Mustagrudic (2000) comments that the politicisation of every aspect of life by extreme nationalist groups makes the promotion and indeed celebration of democracy and pluralism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) difficult. In my experience, the sad aspect in BiH in particular is that the

76 Roots of conflict: implications for education

differences are almost imagined: it is not so much toleration and recognition of 'difference' which is needed, but intolerance of the extremism which tries to invent and concretise this. What occurs as a basis of conflict is a forgetting of histories of coexistence and cultural hybridity: 'At the heart of ethnic conflict is a belief in the existence of cultural and ethnic purity, and a concomitant fear of mixing and borrowing. Hybridity, whether ethnic or cultural has to be suppressed, and becomes the site of anxiety' (Silva (ed.) 2002: i). Silva's edited collection on culture crossings and identity in Sri Lanka demonstrates very clearly the denial of a history of multi-ethnicity and cultural mixing which underlies eighteen years of armed conflict. For Cockburn, similarly, ethnicity seldom exists without `ethnicism' — the deployment of 'cultural markers' to differentiate the group from others, 'and usually to flag up superiority over them' (Cockburn 1998: 36). Promoters of ethnic culture are often in the business of including-in-order-to-exclude; when ethnic distinctions are stressed, it is always possible to detect a political project. This can be galvanised by injustice, and its engine may be a class elite. Religious apparatuses (all with male priesthoods) often serve as powerful agents of ethnic projects and use them in their own ways. As she points out, the ethnicisation of religious affiliation is something Ireland, Israel/Palestine and ex-Yugoslavia have in common. Jacobsen (2000) also confirms that while religious ideologies per se have not been the principal driving force in Northern Ireland, religious affiliation remains very largely `the touchstone' for locating oneself and others in everyday life. School is of course part of this: 'It is a truism of Northern Irish society that there is a constant process of "placing" people when meeting them in terms of religious affiliation through details of names, addresses, schooling, sports, even knowledge of particular songs' (Cockburn 1998: 184). The school one attended in a divided society is a 'cultural marker'. This leads into the question of how identities are formed and reformed and hybridity forgotten or resisted. Identity

A classic description of identity is by psychologists such as Staub, who proposes that human beings have a set of fundamental needs that press for satisfaction, including the needs for security, positive identity, effectiveness, autonomy, belonging, transcendence and the comprehension of reality. There is debate about whether these needs are actually universal, or reflect western cultural norms, but they seem pretty comprehensive and obvious. A sense of security and positive identity enables people to be open to others and to focus on others' welfare, rather than concentrating exclusively on themselves. When needs are frustrated, on the other hand, people may turn inward toward their own groups and seek fulfilment of their needs in ways that diminish or harm others — through scapegoating minority groups or

Pluralism and identity work 77

advocating exclusivist ideologies. The frustration of basic needs, when combined with other facilitating factors, is often the basis for mass violence (Staub 1989, 1999). Writers on conflict therefore often talk about 'vulnerabilities', and how hose can be played upon. It was not merely Hitler and Mein Kampf which led the Germans and most of Europe to hell. It was, to a large extent, the vulnerability of individuals, in their inability to reflect critically on the words and actions of Nazism and to turn their reflection into action. The same vulnerability led sane people to allow Churchill and Truman to commit those most cynical of atrocities, Dresden and Hiroshima, and to defend and honour these acts in the writing of history. This same vulnerability spawns all manner of bizarre, stupid, violent, anithuman groups, each of which is a crystallisation of individual pathologies consolidated in a manipulative, normative structure. ( Murphy 1999: 89) Anxiety is an objective daily-life state within conflict and also can be turned into a political instrument. Klein talks of Israeli policies, especially military ones, using the Holocaust as a mighty force. The 'enemy from outside', waiting for the opportunity to destroy Israel (according to the siege mentality), served to appeal for cohesiveness and unity within. Yet long ago Coser argued that 'groups engaged in continued struggle with the outside tend to he intolerant within' (1956: 103). Is this a contradiction? Does the identification of outside enemies foster simultaneously coherence and incoherence? Yet it may be that the particular sorts of intolerance that emerge are towards those who do not represent the national ideal (homosexuals, Minorities, refugees, travellers, opposition parties). Social identity theory suggests that how we think about ourselves tends to vary along a continuum, from the perception of self as unique to the perception of self as very similar or identical to in-group members — and stereotypically 'interchangeable' with them. In certain situations (vulnerability?) we become exemplars of them — a process of 'depersonalisation' (Cairns 1996). Collective identity (and identity politics) is therefore a disturbing force. Cockburn is very clear on its power: It is through the creation of.collective identities that ethnic and national movements, and the land-right claims they make, gain their force. The discourses emanating from influential social sources, such as intellectuals and the media, compellingly hail individuals as nationals — 'you who are one of us' — at the same time making it clear who is 'other'. They mobilize culture, tradition, religion, and notions of history and place to evoke a sense of unity, an ethnic or national identity. . . . When control

Pluralism and identity work

78 Roots of conflict: implications for education by any group is capable of being maintained without direct force it is always because compliance has been won through processes of identification. ( Cockburn 1998: 10) The women in her study of peace projects (Belfast, Israel/Palestine, BosniaHerzegovina) were suffering 'identity hurt' — a disjuncture between a woman's sense of self and the identities with which she was labelled, was held to account for, or felt seduced by. The women came to the projects strongly marked by highly mobilised ethnicities, 'knowing' each other to be members of exclusive national groups and to have different political affiliations. They had to construct a space which allowed distance, in which differences would be respected, not collapsed into a spurious unity. But it also had to be a space allowing closeness, even intimacy. This seems the classic challenge of pluralism, whether in a school, workplace or community. The question of 'identification' needs acknowledgement of the creative processes in constant identity formation. We are not talking here of 'socialisation', but how individuals and groups actively construct and reconstruct the self — 'a narrative of "I" that is modified continually, if each time only marginally' (Smith 2001: 36). In complexity terms, this is the notion of `autopoiesis' — meaning 'self-making'. The self-making urge is to maintain identity, constantly recreate the self, resist too much change and focus inwards. Our view of the world is controlled by our internal model of it, not si mply by incoming data. Data will at best cause a perturbation, but it will be ignored if the internal model is not interested (which has huge implications for education) — or if it appears to make no difference. Data is not seen as information if we think we already know it. Yet we do use agency to create a viable and satisfying life for ourselves in the context of, or in spite of, our alignment with particular identities. The key seems to be whether we acknowledge our own fluidity and selfmaking. We are uneasy with ambiguity, and may be reluctant to recognise any ambivalence about who we are. As we saw earlier, under pressure, we think more simply, or bind together. War acts like bereavement. Brian Murphy (1999) in Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World says that we live currently at the 'fulcrum of ambiguity'. This is a postmodern world, with, simultaneously, masses of knowledge and the inability to do anything. Directions are not clear. A great deal of the nostalgia we often see among people who have experienced 'hard times' or crises — war, depression, external emergency — relates to the fact that, for a time, there was no ambiguity; one could live and act with single-minded dedication to a cause and to survival. And I suspect that the recent phenomenon of the proliferation of cults, religious fundamentalism and psychic movements — let alone the conven-

79

tional slavish adherence to the norms of corporatism, meritocracy and the consumer society — is a response to people's need to avoid ambiguity, to escape from freedom. ( Murphy 1999: 35) This analysis goes back, as Murphy acknowledges, to Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941) and to Revel's The Totalitarian Temptation (1976). Accepting that we need certainty, a 'positive identity', how easy is it for this identity to be a hybrid one? We are probably happy to acknowledge multiple identities in terms of being a woman, a mother, a Briton, a Londoner, a teacher, etc., with these identities taking different saliences at different times; but it is multiple loyalties which are the more fragile. These can someti mes be easily nested — supporting a local football team and then the national one; but the usual test is the 'cricket test' — if you are of Pakistani origin living permanently in the UK, which team do you support? This seems a superficial question, but it emerges very strongly in identity questions such as those that arose immediately after September 1 1 th, and what being a ` Muslim' meant for self and for identification by others. In a useful teaching resource book about Northern Ireland, McLaughlin and Regan point out our multiple overlapping 'layers' of identity from the personal through to the international — and quote different interviewees' views on this. For one, British identity was totally alien and about oppression: ` The Northern Ireland state was built on just one identity and denied the other identities of its people' (McLaughlin and Regan 2000: 33). Another questioned the conventional dualisms: 'people here sometimes imagine that only Protestants can feel British and only Catholics can feel Irish'; while yet another was able to accept hybridity: I would call myself "British-Irish", or "Irish Protestant" or "Ulsterwoman" before I would call myself "British" on its own. "British" means nothing to me, only the Union Jack and the fact that me da was in the British Army. Other than that it means bugger all to me. ( McLaughlin and Regan 2000: 33) The particular importance of 'the Border' is drawn attention to in the resource book, again with people's perceptions inextricably linked to their identities — as a demarcation line, a deep scar, a mental wall, one of a list of crimes, a symbol of the existence of a no man's land. The importance of symbol is often revealed as crucial to identity maintenance and loyalty. The significance of 'the Border' also appears in Silva's (2002) edited volume on Sri Lanka. Such avoidance of ambiguity is a classic element of education, and, importantly, of some religious education. For Michael Apple, evangelicalism is crucially linked to identity, to 'self' and 'other'. He describes how in the

80 Roots of conflict: implications for education

USA, the Religious Right has a sense of justice which is guided by 'hate' for gays. Apple begins a section of his book by asking 'How can hate seem so nice?' `For the majority of conservative evangelicals, they themselves are "nice" people, "real Americans" who stand for things the rest of us have given up on' (2001: 161). The cry is then to pull children out of public (government) schools and put them through Christian schools and home schooling, to train an entire generation of people to understand that religious neutrality is, in essence, a fiction. Apple quotes a home school advocate as saying 'Sending our children to public schools violates nearly every Biblical principle . . . It is tantamount to sending out our children to be trained by the enemy' (Apple 2001: 167). There are satanic threats to family values and `true' motherhood — these threats being feminism or humanism or secularism. Politicians too avoid ambiguity or acknowledgement of hybridity. Smith (2001) points out how the idea that individuals share in more than one identity is inconvenient for a political strategy based on mobilising just one collective identity. Access to a range of identity categories may, depending on the case, be a privilege, an irrelevance, or a source of oppression. During 1992 and 1993 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, the decision to opt for either Serb or Muslim identity was forced upon people at gunpoint. Depending on their decision, they were either killed or had to prove their allegiance to their identity-decision by killing another (Smith 2001: 37). Closely linked to collective identity and purity therefore is the notion of revenge. The Hamas phrase 'We will stop killing their children when they stop killing ours' is a chilling one, but is not exclusive to that movement. The dynamics of the Israel/Palestinian conflict take the shape of retaliatory attacks on both sides — razing a village in return for a suicide bomb. A psychiatrist heading the Gaza community mental health project has studied the suicide bombers and finds two roots: firstly trauma, that they have witnessed suffering or suffered personal humiliation, and second they want to take revenge. 'Arab honour has to take revenge for family honour and dignity. The vehicle is usually Islam, and the trigger is anger' (Eyad Sarraj, quoted in Goldenberg 2002). The settlement of debts is a prerequisite for martyrdom, otherwise the gates of paradise are closed to a bomber. The shaming experience of living under Israeli occupation is also talked about. The first confirmed woman suicide bomber, Dareen Abu Eishi, persistently courted death, even when militant groups turned her away. 'She was a star English student, with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare, but the most important thing about her was her determination to die' (Goldenberg 2002: 5). Education and Shakespeare failed to direct such determination into more peaceful measures. Revenge is of course a key driver of the Al-Qaeda movement. A document reported in the Sunday Times (17 November 2002: 2) attacks America and its allies for supporting Israel, but also criticises US policy in Somalia, Kashmir and Lebanon:

Pluralism and identity work 81

If all these tragedies and mishaps form part of your attacks on us, then it must be legal and common sense that those who are attacked have the right to fight back . . . You should expect from us jihad, resistance and punishment. The document claims God has sanctioned such punishment, that they have the 'right' to attack and destroy not just villages and cities, but `the economy of those who have robbed our wealth and to kill civilians of the country which has killed ours'. Note how the economy is highlighted: this is not si mply a religious or ideological war, but an economic one. Civilians in America and elsewhere can be targeted because they `freely vote' for their political leader and voluntarily pay taxes that are used to conduct 'unjust wars' against Muslims. While in a multiparty state the majority may not in fact have voted for the leader, nor want their taxes spent on war, this is ignored by Al-Qaeda. It is a convenient justification for revenge. One can attack western democracy, economic domination, military might and nonbelief in Islam all in one go. Long historical 'memories' are implicated in revenge. Kate Adie comments on an interview with a Serb village librarian who was clutching a rifle, with a revolver in his belt and a knife in his boot. In his explanation of what happened the day before, he went back to 1943 at least, and also claimed foreign responsibility for the present-day woes. It was an object lesson and I heard it over the years from Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Kosovans. Everything grew out of history — the theft of a cow, the burning of a village, the driving out of hundreds of thousands from what they had always thought of as home. The events of yesterday — the previous twenty-four hours, such a vital element in my journalistic tradition — were but a recent drop in the ocean in the mighty historical flow. How could you possibly talk of a few hours when centuries were clamouring to be heard? (Adie 2002: 250) History textbooks are prime candidates for an examination of how histories are constructed, in particular who were the victims and who the oppressors (developed more in Chapters 6 and 10). Not only may history books perpetuate the essentialism of the other, and hatred of the other, but they say little of the folly of revenge. Nor do economics textbooks, in terms of how cycles of revenge wars and killings in the end destroy the economies of both sides in a conflict. This is a huge (and puzzling) omission. While such extreme examples of cycles of retribution seem a long way from `normal' schooling, punishment has been, and remains, a key part of the ideology of 'discipline' in the institutions of education and family. A child who 'attacks' the system (by refusing to do homework, be punctual, be polite

82 Roots of conflict: implications for education

to teachers) is subject to routine revenge by that system. The punishments are unrelated to the attack, and are about displays of power (the power of arbitrary arrest in the form of detention, even attacking all civilians by keeping the whole class in). (I will say more about the distinction between punitive/ retributive and restorative justice in Chapter 11.) People who want revenge do not by and large want peace or social change. I think it was Goethe who said, 'Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong'. Punishment is a short-term destruction — whether of an economy, or of a child's ego. In schooling terms, revenge is an attack on identity. Education and difference There would seem to be two tasks for education in not contributing to the essentialist identities which can be mobilised for conflict: the acknowledgement of ambiguity, complexity and hybridity within an individual self, and si milarly, the avoidance of stereotyped portrayals of 'the other'. Unfortunately, much of the historical and contemporary evidence finds schools performing badly on both counts. The problem may take the form of a direct policy for schools which segregates, divides and hence leads to conflict, or of an indirect set of policies which have similar effects. In South Africa, as the classic example of direct policy, education was used to make basic tenets of apartheid normal and acceptable, and also then became a site for struggle (Christie 1985; Harber 2001a). In the Soweto riots, language and identity mixed with overcrowded classrooms and unemployment for black youth to create a highly volatile situation. In Northern Ireland, the denominationally divided education system has long been explored in terms of its role in creating and sustaining community division (Dunn and Morgan 1999). Surveys in the 1970s and early 1980s showed how little young people knew about their counterparts and how few opportunities there were for interactions — even if open hostility was rare. The Education Reform Order of 1989 and initiatives in Education for Mutual Understanding offered an official basis for support of integrated education; yet this generated a new set of problems. When success draws attention to these developments, they then become embroiled in multiple levels of the conflict. 'Any initiative is the subject of scrutiny from every section of the political spectrum and inevitably the object of attack by some' (Dunn and Morgan 1999: 150). A different form of ambiguous policy is that of quotas. In Rwanda, competition for secondary schools and highly selective boarding schools was fierce. The 'national' policy allowed the ministry to set quotas according to ethnic, regional and socio-economic background. This discriminated against the Tutsi and urban families and favoured the Hutu-dominated rural areas (Arnhold et al. 1998).

Pluralism and identity work 83 Some of the continuation of racism is indirect, or, again, Salmi's 'violence by omission'. More recent analyses of schooling in South Africa argue that schools continue racism by not tackling it, or by the composition of teachers (in South Africa 78 per cent white, 13 per cent Indian, 7 per cent coloured and 2 per cent African) in the ninety desegregated schools across the nine provinces. The South African Human Rights Commission Report revealed that:

Hundreds of respondents regard racism as part of their everyday experience. It is manifested in rhetoric, name-calling, stereotyping, labels and anxieties in the classroom, corridors, playgrounds and extracurricular events. Often racialisation is expressed when displays of masculinity become associated with the ability to use racially abusive language and where the exclusion of some learners from (for example) certain sports serves to signify masculine and racialised dominance. (Vally and Dalamba 1999: 57) In the UK, the link to conflict comes from what has been similarly referred to as 'institutional racism'. There have been many studies relating to the continuing gap between high- and low-achieving ethnic groups (Gillborn and Mirza 2000). There is over-representation of certain groups, particularly African-Caribbean, among pupils excluded from school (Osler 1997; Grant and Brooks 2000). Because of this phenomenon, there are debates about whether this is actually institutional racism or a 'macho' anti-learning street culture; but the fact remains that there is differential experience of schooling based on ethnicity and that this differential experience will not foster social cohesion. Various sorts of government funding earmarked for ethnic minority achievement have been criticised as enshrining a problematic view of black people, placing them outside the community in cultural and linguistic terms ( Grosvenor 1997) . It is admittedly a complex arena, and 'institutional racism' is perhaps too si mplistic a notion. Callender and Wright (2000) provide data from two separate programmes of research in the UK, one on white teachers' interactions with black African-Caribbean pupils, the other on black AfricanCaribbean teachers' classroom philosophies. There emerge intersections with gender and masculinity mentioned in Chapter 4: black boys recognised that they were more likely to experience negative attention from teachers because of their masculinity; they appeared to respond forcefully to the label of 'marginalised other' (through interactions and school treatment) and admitted to more vehement responses to such treatment than those of their female contemporaries. Yet twin processes of inclusion and exclusion were being played out, with black teachers indirectly encouraging empowerment. 'As a consequence, when Black pupils move from school to school, classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher they are positioned, repositioned and position themselves according to their racialised and gendered identities' (Callender

Pluralism and identity work 85

84 Roots of conflict: implications for education

and Wright 2000: 233). In this sense, bifurcation is not necessarily occurring, but a creative process of identity formation, of 'self-organisation'. Where the bifurcation is more definitely taking place, and the threat to social cohesion is greater, is in de facto racialised schools. In Bradford, which was one scene of extreme ethnic tension after September 11th, Asian areas are segregated from white areas. Most schools are either mostly Asian or mostly white. One in four primary schools in Bradford is more than 70 per cent Asian, while half are totally white. One 15-year-old boy who goes to a school that is only one-third Asian reported, 'There's no mixing. There's just our gangs and their gangs.' A recent survey found that more than half of Bradford youth believed that they would never achieve their goals in life. Bradford City Council is therefore trying to set up a Youth Parliament to foster meetings from people of all backgrounds, and to twin schools who serve different communities. There are mixed-race football teams; and the local curry house is organising 'exchange visits' between Asian and white estates (Harris 2002). These attempts at some sort of mixing must be set against the growth of `faith-based' schools in the UK. This growth is fuelled by two interest groups: apparent evidence that religious denomination schools do better than secular schools and lobbies by Muslim parents for schools equivalent to voluntary aided state Christian schools. While the achievements of denominational schools are ambiguous, and student intake together with parental motivation certainly play a part, the simple but false equation being made is that more religious schools will raise standards. The Muslim lobby has an understandable set of arguments, that in a so-called multicultural Britain, they should have the same rights to state supported education as other religious groups. I would contend from all the international evidence of religious schools that this would be a highly regressive step. While religious schools will claim that they advocate tolerance of all faiths, nonetheless the central message is that their religion is so important that children must be educated separately from others, in order to maintain the mission. 'All faiths are equal but mine is more equal than others.' I would argue strongly that the only hope for education making a contribution to peace is a secular education which genuinely allows for religious difference while not privileging tin.e religion over others (or over a humanist or secular belief system). I would disagree with Tawil at this point. He talks of threats to social cohesion, related to the role of education. As an instrument in the process of nation-building, schooling destroys the traditional social bonds of the extended family, the clan or the group and institutes a direct relationship between individuals as citizens and the nation-state. Tension between the local culture and the national culture being imposed through schooling often leads to conflict. (2001: 295)

He mentions the collapse and reformulation of what Benedict Anderson (1983) called 'imagined communities' as at the heart of numerous internal armed conflicts, but indicts the schools here, in that the increasingly competitive and contradictory values, attitudes, beliefs and world views transmitted by schools and other agents of socialisation threaten social cohesion even further — especially as the relevance of the nation-state model of organisation to the lives of individuals and communities diminishes. I would agree about the competitive and contradictory values, but replacing these with 'imagined communities' of solid bounded religious groupings is a hostage to fortune. Gerald Grace, in his book on Catholic schools in England (2002), talks of the importance of 'spiritual capital'; yet Al-Qaeda also have spiritual capital, masses of it. Unless spiritual capital is set within a framework of universal human rights, then it can be yet another tool for domination in the same way as economic and cultural capital. Are multiculturalism and anti racism the answers? -

I want to examine now whether the varied educational strategies around pluralism solve the issue of identity formation without essentialism or the creation of 'the other'. During or after conflict (at local or national levels) there are three conventional approaches to 'race' and education: assimilation to the dominant group (as in Israel's 'melting pot' educational policy); multiculturalism (in South Africa, captured as the 'rainbow nation'); and antiracism (the active challenge to discrimination or injustice based on race, ethnicity or religion). I think there is a fourth, which I term `uneasy pluralis m'. This I found was the experience in BrCko in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where there was no_universal acceptance that the country was now multicultural, but recognition that they could not afford any more war. One policy problem is that the models of race relations often used in analyses of race and education stem from experiences of ,immigration rather than of civil war — it is difficult to expect tolerance and rainbow nation discourses when homes have been destroyed and families tortured and killed. At its best multiculturalism is an 'interruptive rhetoric' which destabilises the false liOniogeneity of the 'nation' and publicly highlights the fact that the political community is a complex cultural and ethnic aggregation of indigenous groups and immigrant settlers (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). It is an important antidote to assimilationist tendencies of the nation-state; however, ironically, there is a danger that it can reify cultures and communities as internally homogenous, fixed and bounded collectivities, rather than constantly dynamic and merging. While we all use cultural resources of social networking and exchange to create connections and power, these cultural resources are not linked necessarily to `one culture' — if that exists. I am uneasy therefore with Parekh's (2000) image of `community of -

86 Roots of conflict: implications for education

communities' as an ideal for the multicultural society: it still appears toreify `the community' as an identifiable source of bounded identity. Rather than multiculturalism, then, many working in or with the Council of Europe prefer the notion of 'interculturality', which looks at cultural relations and the more dynamic processes by which cultures and cultural titiCS ''hift through interaction (Camilleri (ed.) 1995). Yet the language of intercultural education can still stress 'otherness', as is sometimes found in Camilleri's collection — 'an appreciation of different cultures', 'approaches to other ways of life', 'communication between representatives of different cultures' — as if such cultures were solid enough to have representatives. The very identification of 'cultures' about which to learn and with which to interrelate can constitute an essentialist act. Here I would prefer to work within Homi Babha's (1994) case for acknowledgement of 'hybridity'. He challenges the constructions and `exoticisation' of multiculturalism and cultural diversity, which stress recognition of difference, and prefers admission of long histories of cultural and ethnic mixing. The 'hybrid subject' is to be valued for straddling multiple cultures and identities. We can see that this fits well with the agency and creativity of complexity theory, as the original 'is repeated as something different — a mutation, a hybrid . . . at once a mode of appropriation and of resistance [to the mother culture]' (Babha 1994: 111, 120). Many writers in Silva's collection on Sri Lanka draw on Babha, showing the 'hidden history' of hybridity of culture, art or music and challenging the notion of single or pure cultures. Hybridity inhabits what Babha calls the `inbetween' space, or Silva's `cracks' of identity. It is an empowering force for individuals (except of course when outlawed in extreme nationalistic or purifying times). Hybridity has some connections with Gillborn's (1995) 'plastic ethnicity'. He cites the critiques of school anti-racism, which, like the multiculturalism before it, assumes that racists can be made to see the error of their ways by educationists who simply provide better or more rational explanations. Ethnographic studies of multiethnic schools have suggested that racism can actually be a feature of staffroom culture and teacher perspective (Mac an Ghaill 1988). Racism for Gillborn 'comes into play as a reflection of wider stereotypes and in the working through of institutional pressures (e.g. to keep order; to select and encourage "able" students; to control "troublemakers")' (Gillborn 1995: 11). He thus questions simplistic forms of antiracism as just about colour or white racism or black victims, or about simple redistributions of power, and draws attention particularly to the 'symbolic, moral and doctrinaire anti-racism' which the Burnage report criticised after the racist murder in Manchester in 1989. He prefers the notion of 'plastic ethnicity' to demonstrate the uncertainty of the interaction with class, gender and race, and to show how ethnicity is 'fluid' and 'moulded'. 'Hence, the young Muslims protesting on the streets of Bradford are no less implicated in the creative politicized reworking of ethnicity than "Blacks" and

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87

"Coloureds" staking their place(s) in the new South Africa' (Gillborn 1995: 19). Presumably, if ethnicity is fluid and multidimensional, then strategies to counter ethnic oppression must be equally fluid and multidimensional. The attractor state of racism is a hard one to shift, and a massive information load will indeed be necessary. Also, it may be that economic differences and bifurcations take over in terms of causes of violence. One question then would be how anti-racism tackles migration. In globalisation terms, while the spread of particular economic ideologies can be a negative force (as I argued in Chapter 3), the spread of human rights as underpinnings for policy can be a positive force for peace. Increasing migrations and mobility of people (and languages) may be another. Admittedly, refugee populations and 'asylum seekers' will often mean the mobilisation of fearful racism by neo-Nazi groups, and may be seen as 'problematic' for schools. Yet in the longer term, intermixing can lead to useful hybridity. Singh (2002) reminds us that most first-generation Americans (or Australians or Brits) are fully versed in the dominant popular culture, even when their homes are a tight, conservative connection with 'the motherland'. 'They may encounter. racism and discrimination, but they still consider themselves Americarrs or Australians; they are Americans or Australians with a difference, and this difference is something only they can define' (Singh 2002: 135). This is an important insight. Education should not be in the business of defining people's creative working of difference for them, under simplistic portrayals or defences of 'mother culture'. Efforts to 'preserve' or 'celebrate' distinct cultures, as in some multicultural policies in the UK, may be counterproductive: it would be better to acknowledge hybridity as a positive identity, not as a source of tension or reductionism to a lowest common denominator. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses were shocking to some in their challenge to purity, celebrating instead hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, peoples, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and that, is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world. ( Rushdie 1991, quoted in Rajasingham-Senanayake 2002: 45) This identification of 'how newness enters the world' is complexity theory's `emergence'. The favourite food in England at the moment is apparently Tikka Masala. But only we in Birmingham could have invented the Tikka Masala Balti Pizza. With chips. English, on the other hand, is the Tikka Masala (or McDonald's) of the linguistic world. While there are concerns about globalisation and the imperialism of 'international' languages, I would argue they are within themselves

88 Roots of conflict: implications for education

Pluralism and identity work 89

great hybrids and have a force for creative working of both differenee--and unity. Feuer Verger, while talking of the importance of bilingualism few Jewish and Arab Israelis, also comments on how English is perceived as essential by both sides: -

of the nation for which it speaks several hundred years into the past and claims the same long life for national traditions — even when these traditions may be barely one century old. Rajasingham-Senanayake (2002) usefully breaks down the 'invention of modern national histories into three strands: a) selective forgetting of culturally mixed and hybrid pasts; b) constructing authentic, pure and stable present 'ethnic' identities; and c) projecting far hack in time scientific identity categories and classifications that are essentially modern socia-political formations. Werbner and Yuval-Davis (1999) would perhaps aclil or incorporate emotional invention to this, the evocation of sentimental beauty of landscape, cuisine, music and language as well as sacrifices of national heroes and collective moments of joy, mourning and extreme danger — all deep passions. The question is whether the citizenship or civic education curriculum can do much to challenge nationalist subjectivities and identities — whether it would have the emotional appeal and 'passion'. In being a 'citizen of the state' or even a 'global citizen', do both nationality and citizenship then imply 'imagined communities'? Nations are imagined 'because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion' (Anderson 1983: 6). Whether nationalism is a force for good or ill depends on its exclusionary or open nature, and what sort of regime it generates. Citizenship may be the same. Will citizenship acknowl; edge real hybridity, or become another superficial ragbag of unchallenged pure states'? And will the twenty-first century be a century of regionalism as the twentieth century was of nationalism? (Clements 2001). The key dilemma is the treatment of difference. Citizenship is supposed to provide a set of common universals. Implicit in it is a charter for human rights which envisages a 'humanity without frontiers'. For Heater (1990), the idea and practice of citizenship derives from 'identity and virtue', with identity based on social reciprocity and sharing of 'common interests, territory and pride'. This sounds dangerous; yet while Heater acicnowledges that citizenship is only one among many identities that an individual may feel, he claims its exercise can- satisfy our identity needs and has the potential to! moderate the 'divisive passions' of other identities that can generate intense„ emotions and antagonism, such as nationalist conflicts, religious wars, racist persecution, or subjugation of women. It is the 'political identity par exee i-' lence' (Heater 1990: 2). This sounds exemplary, although I am not clear that we yet have evidence of this. Can we spot citizenship at 100 yards, and distinguish it from nationalism? Citizenship education programmes will be based on this ideal, but we do not know it works, and 'tames passions'. What sort of research would enable the distinction between those with a predominantly citizen identity and those with a national one? Heater does argue that the national culture must come to embrace, though not suffocate, the group culture; but he also -

Its cultural imperialism is accepted by both sides, like it or not. Israelis are pragmatists; there is wholehearted agreement in this vision: English is neither yours nor mine; it is what we all need to succeed. English traniscends the conflict, the cultural borders, the animosity. English is the world. (Feuerverger 2001: 76) Where the imperialism might occur more would be in insisting on 'standard' forms instead of acceptance of Malaysian English, Taiwanese English or Mexican English. 'Possession' of English can of course be a source of differentiation and status (hence th--g-rowth of language schools); but this is so only ifwe curatirme -to demand ure' fowls— This has the same mythology as ethnic purity — and the same source of tension. —

From nationalism to citizenship

I want finally to look at whether citizenship education will resolve issues around identity, culture and difference. -Citizenship education has been revived for a number of contemporary reasons, many linked to real or p Otential conflict. Fogelman (1997) cites low levels of participation in local and national elections; a perceived rise in intolerance, xenophobia and racism; and the apparent alienation and marginalisation of some young people from mainstream society. Is then this new emphasis on citizenship education an antidote to extreme nationalism or to factionalism within a citizenry? Will it address the dangers of a facile multiculturalism? Much civic education or citizenship education has been geared to the strengthening of _the...nation)sta te, and to patriotism (Davies 2000b). This would seem dangerous for our concerns about national and international conflict. An emphasis on being !BriOsh', for example, immediately_saises questions about who belongs, as well as implying a superiority over other nationalities. It may play down other categories of difference and exploitation within a 'nation', such as gender (Manse 2000). It is interesting that nationalism is a comparatively recent phenomenon, in its strongest sense. Its emergence was a major political force in the nineteenth century, with the need for a larger identity than the village. The continued vitality in the late twentieth century seems to owe much to the impact of major socio-economic change, such as the collapse of state socialism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe (Smith 2001). Yet as was noted with regard to collective identity, nationalism almost always projects the existence -

-

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Pluralism and identity work 91

'90 Roots of conflict: implications for education

argues that we should rid ourselves of the obsession with the 'nation-state', and see citizen identity as applied at various levels through the national, the regional to the global. This seems to have parallels with the distinction made by McLaughlin and Jucevicience between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism: Civic nationalism is democratic in character, envisaging_ the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, patriotically attached to a shared set of political practices and values. In contrast, ethnic nationalis m sees national identity as based on ethnicity rather than citizenship and law. While civic nationalism can be rational, flexible, pluralistic and morally rich, ethnic nationalism is tempted by irrationality, fanaticism and authoritarianism. It is more likely to be 'nationalistic' in the sense of the term which implies the inherent superiority of one nation over others.;'' ( McLaughlin and Jucevicience 1997: 27) Miller in fact argues for the complementary juxtaposition of nationality and citizenship, since 'nationality gives people the common identity . . . to conceive of shaping their world together. Citizenship gives them the practical means of doing so' (1992: 94). But within citizenship, what are the 'practical' ways of tackling difference? Unterhalter (1999) argues that writers on democracy and education such as Patricia White have developed a notion of citizenship (and therefore education for citizenship) that fails to take account of difference. The tendency is to view citizenship in terms of universals that everyone, despite or because of their differences, should try to recognise and respect. There are strengths to this approach, but also problems. It tends to represent education as a homogenising process, where difference (such as gender) is viewed as an obstacle to be overcome. Difference can be empowering or it can be disempowering, but the universalist view proposes either 'tolerance' (and a suspension of critique) or accommodation with dominant paradigms: 'Neither approach subjects citizenship, education or difference to critical scrutiny; education is always linear, citizenship always the goal and difference always somehow deviant or marginal' (Unterhalter 1999: 104). Unterhalter's critique of linear causality and ignoring the richness of education's complexity 'even for the worthy objective of citizenship and equality' resonates with critiques of school effectiveness mentioned in Chapter 2. Werbner and Yuval-Davis's approach to democratic citizenship is much more about ambiguity and contestation, not bland commonalities. Democratic citizenship as a social and political construct . . . opens up spaces and arenas of freedom — of conflict, unpredictability, intimacy, the right to be different — while restricting and structuring these spaces

by procedural hedges about limits. It orders conflict, channels and tames it; it labels and classifies collective differences; it determines how, where and when difference may legitimately be 'represented', and who counts as 'different' in the political arena, itself a social construct. Citizenship defines the limit of state power and where a civil society or the private sphere of free individuals begins. (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999: 2) Flow to translate that into a curriculum would then be the big contemporary challenge. Is this the concept of 'service'? Much civic education material coming out of the USA talks of 'service to America' (e.g. CNCS 2002). Yet D'Amico (2000) rejects some of the current martial, social or maternal models of citizenship in the USA and argues instead for a concept of 'pluralist citizenship' attending not only to the legal equality of individuals but also to diversity and human rights for all in the larger global society. The interesting point about D'Amico's analysis, which moves it on from vague notions of global citizenship, is the subversion: she rejects a simple enforced 'national service' because it remains service to the state rather than to other people in communities. Rather, civic or community service (not as a sentence for those convicted of crimes, which delegitimises service) or work in a service profession should be recognised as an act of citizenship, as should public dissent and civil disobedience, which clearlyt 'a.ke seriously the responsibility of the citizen to hold the state accountable for its actions. (D'Amico 2000: 119) .

.

This has interesting implications on two counts: firstly that teachers would t hen be recognised as engaged in 'acts of citizenship' through their profession; but secondly, that they might have to teach skills of public dissent and civil disobedience, in order to encourage future generations to insist on the accountability of the state. This is not part of the current National Curriculum in England, and indeed, I could see a proportion of teachers at least being wary of such promotion. But it is a lovely idea. From all the above discussion, citizenship education therefore will be an improvement on nationalistic education only if it: (a) values hybridity and plastic ethnicity, including regional and global identities (b) has a critical approach to difference, enabling analysis of when this is valuable or destructive for individuals, groups and social cohesion (c) promotes skills and dispositions towards public dissent as well as public service.

92 Roots of conflict: implications for education

Part III

Conclusion

the balance sheet of education for conflict or peace, I would then indict schooling on many counts: segregated education, whether by ethnicity or religion; creation of 'identity hurt'; perpetuation of essentialist notions of `the other'; reinforcement of acceptance of revenge; and promotion of nationalism. Yet while this chapter has shown how pluralism can be a source of conflict, it has also indicated how conflict and hybridity can be sources of creative working towards peace. The search for identity is inevitable, but is easily harnessed into antagonistic, dualistic attitudes; education has instead to valorise how we are all 'special' in the way that we creatively put together a number of different markers to form and reform our own complex, hybrid identity. At a national level, complexity similarly shows how divisions traverse each other: class alliances cut across region or ethnicity; gender alliances cut across nationality or class; religious associations cut across ethnicity or region; political parties unite people otherwise divided by race or religion. 'Strategic essentialism' may be useful — mobilising temporarily around an identity in order make a protest (such .as gay or green rights) — but this is tactical, not rigid, and should in fact draw together diverse groupings. Paradoxically, then, conflict sustains a widensolidarity. Yet to counter essentialism and the fracturing of particularism, some ground rules are necessary — and I will argue in Chapter 12 that these come from democracy and rights. Constant dialogue across difference requires procedural frameworks, Figuera's 'critical respect' being just one. Citizenship education may provide this mix of hybridity and of rules essential for a peaceful working out of dissent, but much will depend on its interpretation and appropriation for particular ends. On

The education/war interface

Chapter 6

The effects of violence on educational institutions

This group of three chapters looks at the interactive, mutual effects between social conflict and education, beginning in this chapter with how conflict affects education and moving on in the next two chapters to how education can affect conflict. Just as the types of violence in a society will be reflected in school (Salmi 1999), the types of conflict will be reflected too. If it is ethnic conflict, then we will see ethnic tension in schools, or between students of separated schools/systems. If it is an arms culture, this will percolate schools. Repressive systems, where human, civil or women's rights are ignored, are hardly likely to have schools characterised by a respect for children's rights. Fearful societies have fearful schools. Yet while it would appear obvious that violent conflict must affect all social institutions, of particular interest to the notion of complex adaptive systems is that of adjustment and mutation. After outlining the various dimensions of effect — infrastructural and psychological — this chapter examines the notion of 'resilient schools': how some schools remain opeiational even in the midst of extreme conflict or danger. This will tell us something about the way a system responds to threat. I nfrastructural effects

Save the Children argue that children are damaged by war on at least three interrelated levels. First is the direct experience of war or violence against themselves or the adults who care for them. Second is the damage done to society round them, through which their ability to learn and develop is mediated because of the loss of security and sense of their place in the world. Finally is the disruption to educational opportunities, in that conflict destroys schools and school systems as well as people (Molteno el al. (eds) 1999). In some countries, schools and universities aresspecific military targets, the most striking examples shelling of the University of Sarajevo being one (Arnhold et al. 1998). The University of Pristina and the National Library in Kosovo were also badly hit by the war, although, as I observed, some of the decline in the buildings was because of neglect or occupation by soldiers.

96 The education/war interface

Educational institutions are often appropriated for other uses, such as military purposes, administrative use or refugee shelters. In Iraq, 5,500 (40 per cent) of the educational institutions were destroyed following the hostilities of the Gulf War 1991-2, sometimes from military action, but more often from looting or vandalism (Arnhold et al. 1998). The Iraq War of 2003 also saw looting of educational buildings, including museums. One principal in Kosovo talked to me of returning to take over his old school in July 1999 at the end of the NATO bombing. It is a graphic portrayal. Me and three or four other teachers met together, we came to the school, the door was locked. We didn't know what we would find inside. The military had been here during the air strikes. A cleaner, a refugee from Croatia, was here, living in one of the rooms. KFOR were nearby, and we asked them to come in with us. We thought there might be bombs. The classrooms were also locked, and we unlocked them with knives. We found signs of the military, uniforms . . . There wasn't much physical damage. Some materials had been taken — the computers, the printers, the photocopier. But we found some furniture — it had been taken from the shops by the military. . . . In September we started the school. The biggest challenge was we didn't know whether staff were alive, or the pupils. There was some information that one of the 16 year old students had been massacred. Many students had lost parents, and we did not know how to contact them, how to help them. In the private houses, all the documentation had been burned. So we had to make a new register according to how the teachers had remembered names. We see a destruction that was more than physical, encompassing systems, knowledge, networks in learning. Registers may seem a bureaucratic feature, but they are at least a list of who belongs and who should belong. In Somalia in the early 1990s, apart from the destruction of school buildings, all educational records were wiped out. Teachers left the profession en masse, and market traders would wrap their packages in pages torn from school textbooks. In Rwanda, schools were used as congregation points for mass killings; others were looted, occupied or mined by retreating soldiers to claim more victims and deter reuse (UNESCO 1999). The violation of 'the place of learning' seems particularly horrific in situations of genocide. The first target of the genocide in Rwanda was Tutsi men and boys. 'Educated Tutsi men and women were particularly targeted as the university was "cleansed"' (Arnhold et al. 1998: 48). Survivors of the genocide reported that in some cases teachers murdered children who attended their own classes. Schools were sought out as sanctuaries at the height of the genocide, only to become the scene of some of the worst massacres.

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97

Graham-Brown (1991) describes the common and disparate effects of conflict on education in Mozambique, Nicaragua, Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, South Africa and Namibia. Migration from rural war zones to the cities caused overcrowded classrooms, shift systems and the need for accelerated primary schools at night for those children who were working. For Mozambique and Nicaragua, efforts at transformation after liberation struggles were then overtaken by further destabilisation. In terms of infrastructure, it appears impossible to disentangle the combined effects of war and economic crisis, although effects specifically of war are the terrorising and brutalisation of children, as well as mutilation. In war zones in Nicaragua, the danger for teachers of being identified with the government were exemplified by the numbers of 'popular teachers' who were killed or kidnapped by the Contras. There is however an interesting comment by Wright (1997) on the 'abduction' of teachers and students by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. There is apparently an 'unusually high proportion' of exteachers and ex-students in its ranks — suggesting an element of free will. 'It is indeed one of the most cruel ironies of the rebel war that as the nation turns in on itself in conflict, so much of its useful human resource is being used to destroy so much that has been achieved in the past' (Wright 1997: 25). And reintegration of teacher-soldiers will perhaps be even more difficult than reintegration of child soldiers — although Chapter 7 will argue that a lot of schools across the world have teacher-soldiers anyway. Conflict continues to affect schooling on a daily basis in some countries. In January 2001, during the second intifada, teachers in Palestinian areas told British MPs that they were struggling to maintain a normal curriculum because pupil numbers had been affected by arrests of children by Israeli soldiers as well as by injuries and some violent deaths. On the days of big Palestinian demonstrations, attendance at schools was neglible and Israeli shelling prevented many pupils and teachers leaving home. Israeli security checkpoints often stopped them reaching school if they risked the streeets. One school near Bethlehem was missing twenty-one children, all in