What is peace, what is peace education?
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A peaceful society is a functioning society, where there is equality and equity. When there is peace, people can participate in public and professional life and live their private lives without being afraid of discrimination or violence, regardless of their social identity. In youth work settings, peace means that it is safe for young people from diverse backgrounds to participate in activities and they can expect that they are treated with respect by adults and other young people. Lack of peace can manifest itself as issues like violence, hate speech that no one seems to be trying to tackle, or as negative, stereotypical thinking about certain identity groups that can lead to exclusion. Peace is something we can influence on many levels as professionals working with young people.
Equality means that each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities in a society.
Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances and allocates the resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Peace education aims to give ourselves and others skills, attitudes and knowledge on how and why to make, keep and build sustainable peace. Peace education acknowledges that peace is something that we work for, it seldom happens by itself. Working for peace includes maintaining and keeping peace, restoring peace when it has been broken and building conditions for sustainable peace. Keeping peace means protecting boundaries and wellbeing on a personal level, community level and global level. Making peace means addressing and solving conflicts non-violently and providing opportunities for building and rebuilding trust. Building conditions for sustainable peace means building capacity for developing and maintaining healthy relationships with diverse others and learning how to take care of ourselves, others and the planet.
The three categories of violence by Johan Galtung (1964) are:
Negative peace is absence of direct violence (category 1 of violence). -Johan Galtung (1964)
Positive peace refers to integrated, well-functioning, equal society, and absence of indirect violence (categories 2 and 3 of violence). Positive peace enables persons to be integrated, and is true, lasting, and sustainable peace built on justice. -Johan Galtung (1964)
Peace education means education and training that strengthen and build resilience and trust in society, encouraging active and participatory citizenship and aiming to solve everyday life’s conflicts in a non-violent manner. It calls for making power structures and privileges more visible, and recognising, managing, and dismantling hate speech, racism, and exclusion in society and fostering inclusion.
Peace education aims to strengthen peace by learning and teaching skills, knowledge and attitudes that are needed for building positive peace based on human rights principles. Peace education activities build and strengthen knowledge, skills and attitudes that will help prevent the occurrence of conflict, resolve conflicts peacefully and create the personal and social conditions for sustainable peace. These skills, forms of knowledge and attitudes create possibilities for cooperation, problem-solving and critical thinking. In practice, in peace education activities we teach ourselves and others and explore together how heads, hearts and hands can work towards new ways of living sustainably and peacefully within our various communities.
Peace education is carried out at an individual level, group level and even at a global level. We can educate ourselves so that we are more capable of finding routes to inner peace. We can educate ourselves and others to communicate in manners that build peace and cooperation. On top of these, we can educate ourselves and others and learn the skills, attitudes and forms of knowledge that we need in building sustainable peace on a global level. Peace education is divided in this online course and in many other peace education courses into building, maintaining and protecting inner peace, peace at a community level and sustainable global peace, including all living things.
Peace education refers to educational strategies aimed at transforming societal divisions and conflict into peaceful and sustainable relationships.
This pyramid of peace education illustrates different levels of peace education that are covered by this online course. All levels of the pyramid are equally important. In all levels of peace education, we teach ourselves and others how to maintain peace, restore peace if it is challenged and how to build sustainable peace.
The lower part of the pyramid is wider to show that there are elements of peacebuilding that we can influence the most. At the bottom of the pyramid is inner peace, wellbeing and self-care. These are the basic elements of personal peace. When we experience inner peace, we can interact with the world and all the people in it in a more constructive way than when we are out of balance. Challenging times and crises we witness and experience can shake our inner peace and we will probably have to take care of ourselves in a more conscious way than before. Peace education exercises relevant to this lowest part of the pyramid include embodied practices for inner peace and self-regulation, validation of emotions, creating a self-care routine as well as recognising our boundaries and maintaining them.
The second layer of the pyramid is the level of communication and community. This level contains the aspects of peace education that are focused on behaviour, communication, listening, diminishing discrimination, and promoting equity and equality, dialogue and safer spaces. This layer also includes positioning your own identity to the surroundings: becoming more aware of your own perspective and position in relation to others. Through recognising our own background, privileges, prejudices and other assumptions, it is easier for us to recognise the existing norms, structural inequalities and the discrimination that happens in our society. Only by recognising the inequalities and discrimination all around us can we prevent these inequalities from escalating. Exercises in this layer include methods for enabling respectful encounters in safer spaces, and tools for active listening and for becoming more aware of our own assumptions, prejudices, and worldview.
The third layer of the pyramid focuses on global and ecological peace. In this layer of peace education, interest is turned towards recognising injustice in the distribution of resources, protecting the planet and its ecosystems, reconnecting with nature, global peacebuilding and peace negotiations and structural dialogue. This layer also includes posthuman topics such as sustainable multi-species future or climate change.
This online course is most focused on the first lower layers of the pyramid, because these are the topics closest to youth workers' professional life. While this online course gives youth workers knowledge and skills on how to build and foster peace on the individual and community levels, we keep in mind that youth workers are working with individuals and groups, whose lives are affected by global crises. Youth workers themselves also live in this era where various crises affect us and the causes and consequences of these crises affect everyone, including those of us who work with young people. In this time and age, we are constantly reminded that we need to care for the planet, care for those who are fleeing from war, cooperate with diverse groups of people and at the same time, take care of ourselves so that we can keep going and lead fulfilling lives, even if the world around us is changing rapidly.
Now it is time to take out your notebook and start reflecting on how these themes relate to your work.