Journal of Peace Education

ISSN: 1740-0201 (Print) 1740-021X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjpe20

Peace education in the present: dismantling and

reconstructing some fundamental theoretical
premises

Michalinos Zembylas & Zvi Bekerman

To cite this article: Michalinos Zembylas & Zvi Bekerman (2013) Peace education in the present:
dismantling and reconstructing some fundamental theoretical premises, Journal of Peace
Education, 10:2, 197-214, DOI: 10.1080/17400201.2013.790253

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2013.790253

Published online: 09 Jul 2013.

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Journal of Peace Education, 2013
Vol. 10, No. 2, 197–214, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2013.790253

Peace education in the present: dismantling and reconstructing

some fundamental theoretical premises
Michalinos Zembylasa,* and Zvi Bekermanb
a
Programme of Educational Studies, Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus; bSchool
of Education, Melton Center, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
(Received 3 September 2010; final version received 11 March 2013)

In this article, we sort through various fundamental premises about peace educa-
tion to figure out how those premises operate to normalize particular meanings
for peace, conflict, education, and other related concepts. We argue that peace
education may often become part of the problem it tries to solve, if theoretical
work is not used to interrogate the taken for granted assumptions about peace
and peace education. For this purpose, we make explicit our own proposition of
critical peace education through explicating the openings that are created by
putting forward some alternative premises about peace, educational reform, and
schooling. In particular, we put forward a proposition consisting of four ele-
ments aiming to reclaim criticality in peace education: reinstating the materiality
of things and practices; reontologizing research and practice in peace education;
becoming critical experts of design; and engaging in critical cultural analysis.
Keywords: critical peace education; critical experts of design; educational
reform; critical cultural analysis

It has been recently argued that peace education as a field, a philosophy, and a
movement has to reclaim its criticality (Bajaj 2008; Bekerman 2007; Brantmeier
2011; Diaz-Soto 2005; Zembylas 2008); that is, it needs to become more critical
about its theoretical assumptions concerning issues of power relations, social justice
as well as the terms of ‘peace’ and ‘conflict’ themselves. Clarifying the theoretical
premises of these issues is valuable, because theoretical premises have important
implications in terms of our (in)ability to envision and enact particular pedagogical
responses to conflict.
Surveying the scholarly work on peace education over the past three decades,
one encounters a set of fundamental premises that seem to be taken for granted (Bek-
erman and Zembylas 2010; Ben-Porath 2003; Gur-Ze’ev 2001; Page 2004, 2008).
One such premise, for example, is that ‘peace’ is the opposite of ‘conflict’: peace is
‘good’, conflict is ‘bad’. If a strict dichotomy is drawn and any conflict is viewed as
evil or destructive, then there will be consequences in terms of whether individuals
become able to distinguish between productive and destructive forms of conflict in
their lives. A similar premise is made about peace or peace education as a general
deontological ‘thing’ to which humanity ought to be committed (Page 2008). This
‘fideistic’ approach, according to Page, appears to take for granted that it is impor-

*Corresponding author. Email: m.zembylas@ouc.ac.cy

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

198 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

tant to believe in peace and to believe in peace education. Such an approach may be
understandable, but it does not advance theorizing on peace education and its funda-
mental premises because it takes the ‘goodness’ of peace for granted rather than
exploring its contextual meanings and implications (Gur-Ze’ev 2001).
In this essay, we want to question some fundamental premises of peace education
in the present, as those are grounded in the western paradigm, and how they are con-
sequential for educational reforms and schooling. This sort of critique is certainly
not new; that critique in itself is not the most important contribution of this essay.
The more important contribution is the analysis and sorting through of various fun-
damental premises about peace education, to figure out how those premises operate
to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related
concepts. We will argue that peace education may often become part of the problem
it tries to solve, if theoretical work is not used to interrogate the taken for granted
assumptions about peace and peace education. For this purpose, we will maintain
that peace education needs to account for foundational educational issues which, if
go unaccounted for, risk consolidating the same reality peace education intends to
overcome. We will, therefore, make explicit our own proposition of critical peace
education through explicating the openings that are created by putting forward some
alternative premises about peace, educational reform, and schooling.

Problems of existing perspectives to research and practice in peace education

Peace education is now officially accepted as a distinct field of study in education.
Yet, it is misleading to speak about ‘peace education’ as if there was a monolithic
entity (Bajaj 2008; Gur-Ze’ev 2001), because the reality is that there is a variety of
(often unrelated) subjects amalgamated under the headline ‘peace education’
(Ben-Porath 2003) such as: human rights; women’s rights; environmental education;
international and development education; conflict resolution; and so on (e.g. see
Harris 2004). All of those are promoted ‘with a similar sense of urgency and good
will (Ben-Porath 2003, 527), yet one intriguing gap has been the ‘thin’ theoretical
coherence or the failure to develop and expound systematically the philosophical
premises of peace education (Page 2008) – that is, the propositions and rationale on
which peace education meanings and practices are grounded.
In a provocative article a decade ago, Gur-Ze’ev (2001, 315) argued that ‘many
of the difficulties and shortcomings peace education practitioners face are not chal-
lenged because of this lack of conceptual work and reflection.’ He went on to say
that this lack of theoretical coherence or philosophical elaboration is not always
viewed as a bad thing for peace education, as ‘at times philosophical work is under-
stood as unnecessary, artificial, or even dangerous for this educational cause’ (Ibid.).
Gur-Ze’ev developed a critique of peace education as a justification of the status
quo – what Gur-Ze’ev called hegemonic violence. As he further explained: ‘Many
versions of peace education work within the framework of modernist technical rea-
son, manifested through various positivist, pragmatic, and functionalist views of
knowledge, which pay scant attention to the social and cultural context’ (316).
Although in recent years there has been important new work – some of it published
in this journal – showing how peace education programs differ between regions of
relative tranquility and regions of conflict (Bar-Tal and Rosen 2009) or arguing for
the need to develop peace education as ‘critical’ (Bajaj 2008; Brantmeier 2011) or
as a solid educational philosophy (Synott 2005), we believe that Gur-Ze’ev’s funda-
 Journal of Peace Education 199

mental argumentation still holds nowadays. That is, there is an important necessity
for peace educators to address in their work the direct political, sociological, and
historical consequences of their theoretical premises.
For example, it is understandable that an ‘integrative theory of peace education’
(Danesh 2005) might attempt, in good will, to integrate divergent objectives and
concepts in peace education; yet, such a ‘universally agreed upon approach to
peace’ (Ibid., 56) would not only be practically impossible but also counter-produc-
tive, because it would undermine local understandings of how participants can
cultivate a sense of transformative agency on the basis of contextual values and
truth claims. This approach would imply a-historical or homogenized perspective,
as if there was one universal theory that could encompass everything. Therefore,
the perspective of an integrative theory does not necessarily provide any fundamen-
tal educational rationale for peace education, other than claiming ipse facto that
there are universal notions of problems and solutions with little attention to locality
and contextualization issues.
Another example is how many peace education programs often set peace as a
universal goal; yet, peace is usually defined as being dependent on the absence of
any conflict (Hayden 2002). That is, conflict is set as something that needs to be
‘resolved’ through appropriate knowledge and skills, otherwise there is no peace.
This striking duality bears remarkable similarities to paradigmatic dichotomies set
by western epistemology (male/female; good/evil; and us/them) and as such seems
only to be able to replicate a similar epistemology in peace education. Inasmuch as
there is an ‘integrative’ theory or approach of peace education, recognition and
dialog with the Other’s differences become an almost impossible task.
Even more importantly, differences are set in the realm of meaning and not in
the realm of power relations; the latter often falls victim to the former, and this is
why power inequalities and social injustices are often ignored in this approach. We
believe that when peace (education) is set in the ground as a universal utopia, it
stops its potential productivity, for it hides, by representing its values as universally
self-evident. This essentialist understanding of peace (education) not only rejects
the multiple representations of truth and the various understandings of justice, but
most importantly it disregards the tight connections between conflict and social
injustices. In short, such an essentialist understanding disregards the social
arrangements which institutionalize inequality and injustice and becomes instead
‘one version of normalizing education’ (Gur-Ze’ev 2001, 329).
Moreover, many peace education versions – especially conflict resolution ones,
psychologized interventions, and political documents such as UNESCO’s
declarations (see Bekerman and Zembylas 2012; Ben-Porath 2003; Gur-Ze’ev
2001, for detailed critiques) – have been founded on modernity’s fundamental
conceptions of natural law and the nation-state. As a product of modernity, the
nation-state has produced a distinct social form, characterized by very specific
forms of territoriality and surveillance capabilities that monopolize effective con-
trol over social relations across different contexts (Foucault 1983a, 1983b, 1984).
The nation-state can be viewed, in other words, as a political socio-economic phe-
nomenon that seeks to exercise its control over the populations comprising it by
establishing a culture which is at once homogeneous, anonymous (all the mem-
bers of the polity, irrespective of their personal subgroup affiliations, are called
upon to uphold this culture), and universally literate (all members share the cul-
ture the state has canonized). Reflecting modern psychologized epistemologies
200 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

upon which it builds its power (Rose 1990, 1998, 1999), the nation-state creates
a direct and unobstructed relationship between itself and all its ‘individual’ citi-
zens: no tribe, ethnic group, family or church is allowed to stand between the cit-
izen and the State (Mendus 1989).
The implications of these ideas are striking for peace education, and, therefore,
one should question how or when western psychologized epistemologies (which are
certainly not monolithic) strengthen or weaken particular manifestations of peace
education (see, e.g. Enright et al. 2007; Kupermintz and Salomon 2005; Pettigrew
and Tropp 2011); undoubtedly, these manifestations answer to the demands of
scientific rigor and the test of empirical research, but do they pay attention to struc-
tures of inequality and injustice (e.g. patriarchalism and militarism) with the same
rigor? Our claim here is that some psychologized perspectives – as assemblages of
knowledges, professionals, techniques, and forms of judgment – are linked to peace
education as a ‘technology’ of conflict resolution, while they also constitute particu-
lar ways of organizing, exercizing, and letigitimating certain forms of political
power (see Rose 1999). Psychologized perspectives, then, would find their place in
peace education where individuals were to be administered not necessarily in light
of acknowledging social injustices, but on the basis of judgments claiming objectiv-
ity, neutrality, and hence effectivity (see Rose 1998).
In our own previous work (e.g. see Bekerman 2007; Bekerman and Zembylas
2010; Zembylas 2008; Zembylas and Bekerman 2008), we have pointed at Enlight-
enment’s moralistic and monologic philosophical grounding of many versions of
peace education, including some psychologized perspectives. In particular, we
emphasize the need to acknowledge the complex historical processes which have
brought the West, the colonial powers of old, to successfully replace the force of
arms with the force of homogenization and surveillance. These processes take place
nowadays not only by the coercion of currency and consumerism, but especially by
the chronic social proneness to create or construct the ‘other’ through rhetoric and
deed in a way that inevitably leads to the demonization of those who are not like
‘us’, who do not comply to the hegemonic standards of western white males. In a
similar manner, we suggest that we need to account for this historical and political
context of peace education efforts. The acknowledgment of the multiplicity,
contingency, and complexity of these efforts should be enough to prevent us from
expecting a straightforward narrative or an integrative approach through which to
understand the whats and hows of ‘doing’ peace education. We are not after recipes
but after interrogating present understandings which, if left untouched, can
only lead us into self-deception and problematic claims about universality and
objectivity.

Critiquing educational reforms and schooling in present peace education

approaches
We would like now to suggest a different perspective, one that critiques those
a-theoretical or overly psychologized perspectives in peace education that do not
acknowledge their social and political consequences for educational reforms and
schooling. If we acknowledge the historicized and contextualized nature of all
human activity, we realize that educational activity in general and more specifically
that which is constrained by the institution of schooling has serious limitations (e.g.
see Popkewitz and Brennan 1998). Yet, the educational rhetoric we have come to be
 Journal of Peace Education 201

accustomed to in modern societies hides these limitations and usually argues that
education through schooling is the best option to deliver unlimited social achieve-
ments and change (Apple 2006). This argument is not new and it is tightly connected
to the rhetoric developed by the sovereign (nation-state) around the times of the
industrial revolution, when it finally chose to support universal free and compulsory
education for the masses in need of basic skills to fuel the new industrial (thirsty for
cheap human power) era (see Popkewitz and Fendler 1999). In those times, the
schools and massive education were perceived as agents/factors of change – the
change needed by the state and industrial masters. Schools were agents of change
also in the preparation of the local elites which would ultimately support the nexus
between the, now, free colonies and the old colonial powers.
Indeed, schools can be agents of change but they are usually so in the service
of hegemonic powers (McLaren 2006). It is these same hegemonic powers the ones
which present schools and the promise of universal compulsory and free education
as the epiphany through which the masses will ultimately benefit and better their
lot; and yet, it is unclear that what comes to happen for the masses may improve
their lot a bit but never enough to close the gap in ways which are significant. It
comes as no surprise, then, that education and its goals become the focus of
agitated debates. The arguments are often organized around either national or ethnic
distinctions, especially in conflict and postconflict societies (see McGlynn et al.
2009). Those in power need to preserve these distinctions in order to retain their
power (Davies 2004). Since the central sphere for the advancement of masses in
modernity has been the state-instituted, mass educational establishment, suggesting
its reform is parallel to taking a true interest in reforming society towards the
‘good’ (in our case ‘peace’), or so we are asked to believe.
There is one fundamental assumption, in our view, behind educational reforms in
the case of peace education that needs to be seriously reconsidered. This assumption
is that lack of peace, tolerance, justice, equality, and recognition is primarily consid-
ered a product of ‘ignorance’ rather than bad will; educational reforms, then, should
aim at transferring knowledge and skills to students and teachers. In particular, there
are two important implications of this assumption: first, it is assumed that peace, toler-
ance, justice, equality, and recognition can be forwarded through reforms in the edu-
cational system that focus on instilling the ‘appropriate’ knowledge to students and
second, with proper training, teachers can foster the implementation of peace, toler-
ance, justice, equality, and recognition values for all. Both implications, however, fail
to investigate and cultivate critical praxis and transformative agency in ways relevant
to the respective economic, political, historical, and social contexts (Bajaj 2008).
The above assumption and its implications rest on a second set of cultural
assumptions that are equally important in terms of defining the aims and
consequences of peace education initiatives. These assumptions refer to how peace,
tolerance, justice, equality, and recognition values are culturally perceived in a
particular setting. For example, in the case of the countries from which we come
from (i.e. the Republic of Cyprus and the State of Israel), this second set of
assumptions presupposes that the very basic values of the Hellenic or Jewish
civilizations deny racist perspectives while emphasizing respect and recognition of
‘otherness.’ The same could be argued for the foundational values of the western
civilization. If so, and in the absence of unexpected obstacles, it is perceived that
these civilizations can only produce peace, tolerance, justice, equality, and recogni-
tion and work only for the good. Given these assumptions, it is often considered
202 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

that reform efforts need simply to achieve technical changes such as the restructur-
ing of the curriculum, the reorganization of the time devoted to old and new school
subjects, and the training of teachers. That is, the aforementioned assumptions are
taken for granted and are never interrogated in theory or how they are actually
enacted in practice.
In spite of efforts for educational change, however, it has become increasingly
clear over the years that, save a few exceptions, educational reform in general has
failed to deliver the goods promised, letting us realize that what education is asked
to correct has little to do with education and a lot to do with the world in which
schools exist, the very world they are asked to support. For better or for worse,
present research supports this critique showing that educational reforms developed
in the West over the last half century have achieved very little, if anything, at all
(Anyon 1995; Apple 1999; Berliner 2006; Hirschland and Steinmo 2003; Ravitch
2000; Sarason 1990; Tyack and Cuban 1995).
For this reason, it is vital to expose the consequences of the aforementioned
assumptions about peace education, educational reforms, and schooling. Undoubt-
edly, education as a discipline has moved forward; at least within some construc-
tivist traditions, the normative and the ideal have been left behind and the
activities and practices of education have taken central stage. Contents might be
still in focus but not as isolated subject-matter, waiting for the right opportunity
or the right conductor (i.e. a wonderful teacher and/or a perfect teacher proof cur-
riculum) to enter the innocent heads/brains of young individuals. Instead, activity
and practice is at stake and has become the center piece of serious research. The
path towards this still new approach to education has not been easy and the poli-
tics of education – the elite’s ongoing attempt to use education as a homogenizing
tool for the creation of passive and obedient citizens – are always around to battle
for particular knowledges and values. As if this is not bad enough by itself, it is
even worst when discussing education for peace, we add to ‘regular’ education a
‘qualification’ (i.e. ‘peace’), yet for the most part we end up focusing on peace
while ignoring education. Idealism and fideism are back with all their faults (Page
2008), as if education is too complex by itself to survive other added complexi-
ties such as peace, while retaining criticality at the same time. A retreat from crit-
ical educational approaches can only damage educational efforts towards peace
education (Brantmeier 2011).
We raise these challenges to existing perspectives/paradigms in peace education,
because we want to interrogate the usual rhetoric that puts on schools and education
the responsibility to find solutions to societal problems which ache modern
societies. Peace is rhetorically constructed by nation-states as a necessary and wor-
thy goal, achievable through education and schooling. It is exactly this rhetorical
construction (so consequential for the achievement of peace) that we worry about.
For, similarly to the fact that social reform equality has not (yet) been achieved
through schooling and education, we doubt peace can or will be. However, this
approach of ours should not be considered pessimistic – we are not pessimists; we
are rather pragmatists. The other option, the one traditionally considered antagonis-
tic to pessimism, is optimism. But, we perceive optimism to be blind to hegemonic
power and, therefore, we are in agreement with those voices in peace education
who argue for the need to reclaim critical peace education. Given that there are
many understandings of critical peace education, in the rest of this essay we present
our own proposition of how to reclaim criticality in peace education.
 Journal of Peace Education 203

Our proposition
So far, we have seen that the engagement with the rhetoric of reform through
education within the nation-state usually implies embracing the ‘dogma’ (it is a
dogma, because it is never proven) that education can be a ‘solution’. This dogma,
however, is somewhat similar to a double bind in which while education (universal,
free and compulsory) is pointed at as the path to change, the contexts within which
education evolves are set in such a way as not to allow schooling to produce the
needed, the desired change. We need to ask, then, what we can (realistically) expect
to achieve in peace education, if the situation is so gloomy.
Our point of departure is that what we should expect for is little and modest
and deals with the struggle to change pedagogical practices and strategies, knowing
very well that these changes might have very little influence; yet, these possibilities
are the most that can be done at this point, at this level, given present contextual
relations and our limitations as educators. Educators cannot do it all, they cannot
change the world, but they should do the most they can in changing, a bit, their
immediate contexts. The explicit acknowledgment of this important philosophical
premise is valuable as a starting point for a reclaimed critical peace education,
because it constitutes a pragmatic call to prevent one-size-fits all approaches that
can only enhance the gap between the elites and the rest. What follows is an outline
of the possible philosophical foundations of our understanding of critical peace
education consisting of four elements (as shown below in Figure 1), namely,
reinstating the materiality of ‘things’ and practices; reontologizing research and
practice in peace education; becoming ‘critical experts of design’; and, engaging in
critical cultural analysis.
Our proposition and its four elements are theoretically grounded in what has
been called postspositivist realism (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000) and critical

Figure 1. The four elements of our understanding of critical peace education.

204 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

realism (Bhaskar 1989, 2002). Both theories emphasize that our access to the world
is socially and conceptually mediated; therefore, it is important to examine critically
the concepts we use to understand the world. Such a perspective recognizes that
‘realities’ are constructed without ignoring, at the same time, that these construc-
tions are consequential and actively reproduce their social world. In this manner,
we avoid the dualism between the real and the nonreal, embracing the view that the
question ‘what is real or not’ offers little help in dealing with social entities. Thus,
if we accept that the world is real – e.g. that goods and resources are still distrib-
uted according to identity labels, be they ethnic, national, religious, and so on –
then we can focus on how we should act to change the underlying structures and
mechanisms that determine social arrangements and understandings. Seen like this,
this theoretical foundation mitigates the detrimental influences of strong forms of
constructivism that assume the world is purely a human construct, and the narrowly
calculative rationality of positivism that treats knowledge as simply the accumula-
tion of sense-experiences. This is why this version of peace education is critical for
us; in that we (educators, students, parents, policy-makers) in peace education need
to reclaim criticality for the prejudices, fallacies, and philosophical false trails that
have covered or disguised some realities in peace education such as social injustices
and power inequalities. Below, we discuss in more details the four elements of our
understanding of critical peace education.

Reinstating the materiality of things and practices

We come from a philosophical and anthropological thinking that finds it difficult to
consider nouns (e.g. conflict) and adjectives (e.g. peaceful) as ‘true’ representations
of the world (Wittgenstein 1953). We are compelled to use representations for prag-
matic reasons – otherwise, we cannot be easily understood – and yet we know that
these representations are what their names says, that is, ‘representations.’ In this
sense, ‘peace’ and ‘conflict’ are not just ‘things out there’; they have no predeter-
mined or final forms that are simply reachable or erasable. If they are not ‘out
there,’ then where are they and why does this matter so much for peace education?
Being unhappy with the products of the western epistemological dualism that
divides meanings from contexts but unable to cope with it in its totality, we take on
words and their meanings not as prepacked discrete units readily available for
implementation in social life, but rather, as a reflective accomplishment. This
‘accomplishment’ is authored in-process and in-context by attentive makers, inter-
mittently reflecting on all: the process, the context, and themselves; thus actors are
being constituted and constituting the environments in which and for which they
have to make sense. We posit that raising actors to consider all these (indeed) com-
plex aspects might possibly ‘slower’ their ‘progress’, yet deepen their humanity.
For example, we do not believe that words such as ‘education,’ ‘peace,’ and
‘conflict’ can be taken as homogeneous units bridging referents and proper
meanings. Rather, we take these words to be tricky constructs whose meaning is
negotiated by active participants and put to work in complex social relations. In a
sense, we believe these words (and the meanings they seem to stand for), as all
other words, to be active verbs always making and in-the-making. Moreover, we
argue that this takes place constantly and it can be perceived when properly
attending to human (in our case educational) activity.
 Journal of Peace Education 205

Therefore, we argue that meaning is bounded in the materiality of ‘things’ and

the practices within which concepts are performed, contextually and historically. As
pointed out earlier, psychologized and idealistic perspectives in peace education
posit essentialized conceptions about individuals, peace, and conflict. In particular,
they identify the individual mind (personality, self, etc.) as the locus of the illness
which needs to be treated. The treatment, in the best positivist tradition, is to be
offered to solipsistic individuals, while ignoring contextual and historical factors
such as power inequalities and social injustices: ‘Fix’ the ‘sick’ (e.g. nationalist,
racist) mind of troubled individuals, and you overcome conflict. However, we are
critical of this epistemology which is responsible for describing the world in ways
that we find limiting; these ways are grounded in abstractions about the internal
minds of individuals and the external characteristics of cultures. Instead, we want to
highlight the materiality of things and practices and suggest that our efforts should
pay more attention to ontology rather than epistemology.
Historically, schools have represented knowledge as compartmentalized and
abstracted from reality (Cole 2001). We believe that peace education is neither pro-
ductive nor relevant, if it is considered as a subject-matter area similar to mathemat-
ics or science. This is so because: first, peace education is not a ‘thing’ (a reified
knowledge which can be transmitted – similarly, mathematics or science are not
reified knowledge either); second, peace education is a set of activities and not a set
of abstract ideas – activities in the world and not ideas in the head; and, third, if
we overlook the previous two points, we fall into the same epistemological mistakes
of the West which has idealized, conceptualized (as fix), and psychologized
(focusing on the head) that which is human and its education. The main difficulty
is that being trained as we (teachers, students, academics, policy-makers, etc.) have
been in the West, we find it very difficult to deal with a ‘thing’ without giving it a
‘proper categorical’ name. We seem to fear that if we do not speak about ‘peace
education’ as such, we will lose an area of specialization and thus go unrecognized
or perhaps delegitimized in the academy.

Reontologizing research and practice in peace education

We argue, therefore, for the need to reontologize what has been epistemologized;
that is, we emphasize the need to materialize abstractions and ask about their
consequences in everyday life. In other words, we are asking whether and how
(if it is possible) we can reontologize educational rhetoric about peace and conflict.
To put this differently: we try to convince people that the important things are not
‘in the details’ but ‘the details themselves.’ And, if this is true, in a way we are try-
ing to get researchers, teachers, policy-makers, and students (e.g. to convince teach-
ers to do this with their students in terms of pedagogy) to read the details of the
world, to try and understand how the world is build/constructed, instead of trying
to find what stands ‘inside’ or ‘behind’ things.
For example, consider a child belonging to a conflicting group approaching a
teacher and asking about the ‘other’: what is a Jew or a Palestinian? Given present
realities in many peace education curricula, the teacher may be inclined to provide
some culturally descriptive and benevolent characteristics of the group in case (for a
complete analysis, see Bekerman, Zembylas, and McGlynn 2009; Zembylas and
Bekerman 2008). Though this response might seem appropriate for accommodating
perspectives expected from a cross-cultural initiative, we believe that in the long run
206 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

this response sustains the basis on which the conflict initially developed and thus may
not be as appropriate. We believe a better answer to be a ‘correction’ of the epistemo-
logical basis which, though potentially unknown to the child, substantiates his or her
question. Thus, a more appropriate answer might be that Palestinians or Jews are not
a (an essentialized/natural) ‘what’, but a ‘when’ and/or a ‘how’ (a becoming). In other
words, we insist on dealing with the little things rather than big universal statements.
The details, the materiality of things, and the practices rather than the abstract ideas
and the policy decisions constitute the focus of our interest.
This attention to details has first come up in our research when we have
observed that young students seem to have different understandings of the world
when compared to their teachers (e.g. see Bekerman, Zembylas, and McGlynn
2009). We have shown this when documenting how adult teachers emphasize
identity while young children, though knowledgeable of it, do not find it necessary
as a meaningful category in their immediate social settings and interactions.
Children in these cases seem to be less essentialist than teachers. In relation to this
point, then, we want to raise concerns about the dangers of developmentalist
psychologized perspectives in peace education. Similar to other psychologized
perspectives – such as Orientalism which positions nonwesterners as ‘primitive’ –
the developmentalist psychologized perspective holds children as the ‘primitive.’ It
is for this reason that we call attention to what children do rather than focusing
primarily on mapping how their thinking (supposedly) passes through distinct
psychological stages. What this argument offers is just another example of the need
to constantly revisit the theoretical grounding of our version of peace education,
that is, to moving away from limiting epistemologies to pragmatic ontologies.
Therefore, we suggest a return to children’s actions and practices for they seem
to be less dependent on prepacked categories to organize their social worlds. Chil-
dren, though never completely free from contexts in which adults play a central
role, seem to be able to organize subcultures which at least for some time are free
to develop with no high disciplinary cost. Adults even at times rejoice with
children’s normative mistakes, at least in those cases for which they believe ‘time
will correct mistakes’ such as language pronunciation and use. Yet, developmentalist
psychologized perspectives are also responsible for the view of children as ‘inno-
cent’ and developing towards adulthood, as if learning comes when someone
becomes ‘old.’ This perspective, heir of the same western tradition we criticized
above, also needs to be deconstructed. Plenty of research has demonstrated the
powerful subcultures children organize (Harris 1998; Hirschfeld 2002); sustaining
these cultures is a possibility adults need to consider, especially when it offers the
possibilities of overcoming some of the greatest ailments which trouble our society
and are conductive to intractable conflicts. Recognizing the children’s subculture,
and supporting it through teachers’ activities guided by the theoretical perspectives
delineated, might offer this chance.

Becoming critical experts of design

Related to our call for reontologizing research and pedagogical practice, we argue
that peace education and its main categories – identity, culture, and so on – need to
be externalized. This point of externalization is very important for, if we are right,
the nation-state holds to psychologized internalization and hides what otherwise
could be easily identified as something worked at in details, if we were trained as
 Journal of Peace Education 207

critical experts of design (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). We want all of us to

become what we call ‘critical experts of design,’ that is, able to recognize and
critique how the world is designed and how it can be redesigned, if it is reimag-
ined. For example, we would realize that nationalism and patriotism are not inside
people’s heads, but they are worked at heavily in popular culture, social practices,
school ceremonies, and so on (Anderson 1983; Billig 1995; Gillis 1994). Therefore,
we should be teaching people that everything which is thought to be ‘internal’ (i.e.
personal; an individual’s ‘trait’) hides the strategies and practices that interactionally
and dialogically create it and against this we should be fighting, if we want the
world to change a bit. Clearly, this is not only related to peace education, but it
relates to the wider picture of criticality in the western world that has become
monological.
Reclaiming criticality in peace education and encouraging students and teachers
to become critical experts of design implies confronting the whole spectrum of
activities which go under the category of education; that is, peace education cannot
be treated as a special educational track, but has to be considered within its macro-
level context and how this is in continuous transaction with micro-level practices.
That is, if students and teachers are to become critical experts of design, they need
to engage in an in-depth interrogation of these two elements – i.e. ‘context’ and
‘practice’ – and their consequences for peace education efforts. For the purposes of
this essay, we adopt Birdwhistell’s description of ‘context’ (McDermott 1980, 4):

I like to think of it [context] as a rope. The fibers that make up the rope are discontin-
uous; when you twist them together, you don’t make them continuous, you make the
thread continuous … The thread has no fibers in it, but, if you break up the thread,
you can find the fibers again. So that, even though it may look in a thread as though
each of those particles is going all through it, that isn’t the case.

The metaphor of the rope reminds us that when different threads combine, they
recreate and refashion the system of which they are a part, creating new patterns, in
concert, unknown up to that point in time. That is, without background (e.g. the
cultural context at the macro-level) there is no foreground (e.g. peace education ini-
tiatives) and without an appreciation of the fact that all parts of a system help
define all other parts of that same system, we lose the dialogic, the material, and
the intersubjective nature of human contextual activity (Bateson 1972). In other
words, teachers and students as critical experts of design need to become able to
view the wider political and social context and engage those contextual elements
that are important in deconstructing and reconstructing their efforts. This ever
ongoing constructive work of assembling the system is achieved through practices.
Our use of ‘practice’ relates to Marx’s use of ‘praxis’ and points at the ways
through which culture, local and at large, is constituted by human activity in
interaction. Through the use of practice, we try to avoid the limitations of psycholo-
gized approaches to educational analyses. We thus assume that the close study of
students’ and teachers’ practices is a valuable approach to understanding the
complexities of peace education activities as they are shaped in real-life situations
(see Lave and Wenger 1991). The concept of practice theorized in these terms over-
comes deterministic perspectives on the functioning of systems or agents within
social systems, allowing for resistance and change within hegemonic structures
(Bourdieu 1998) to take place. It is through the participation in these practices that
208 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

students and teachers as critical experts of design learn, become, constitute, and
reconstitute the world we all inhabit.
Putting an emphasis on the constructed/constituted nature of national identity, for
example, does not offer solace from the suffering or benefit arising from a
marginalized or centered status. Our educational efforts need to go further. They need
to bring the social to predominate over the ideological, without ignoring the power
relations involved that often make the social and the ideological difficult to distin-
guish. Critical experts of design understand and interrogate the ways social categories
are constructed and the ways in which their work is engineered in society and seek
ways to construct an alternative, more social justice-oriented ‘design’ of this society.

Engaging in critical cultural analysis

The path described so far implies a radical change in educators’ perspectives and
their educational activity. The individual mind is no longer the locus of attention.
Instead, we ought to consider and analyze the interactional practices and strategies
through which all involved in the contextual activities allow identity/culture to
make their appearance. Simply stating this as a fact will not suffice. We first need
some criteria which can be accepted by all and that are ‘objective’ but do not rest
on the positivist underpinnings of objectivism. Such criteria could be achieved
through an educational process directed at questioning: Who in our societal context
are exploited? Who are powerful and who powerless? Which cultural patterns carry
symbolic power? (see Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000) Who are labeled as ‘other’?
and Who defines the norms and categories?
The move suggested is similar to that taken in anthropology (Varenne and
McDermott 1998) when examining central paradigmatic perspectives in the study
and practice of education. It starts by restoring the concept of identity/culture to its
historical sources, thus deessentializing it. It follows by developing the restored
meaning into a methodology – cultural analysis – that is to say the gaining of skills
on how to read/describe the world through careful observation and recording of
practical activity, which in turn allows for a shift from the individual or the socializ-
ing group as the crucial analytic unit for (educational) analysis to the processes and
mechanisms of producing cultural contexts through social interaction. And finally,
this process leads to a new articulation of major policy issues related no longer to
identity/culture and its components (individual, texts, etc), but to the analysis of
particular identities/cultures and how these are produced/constructed in the particu-
lar context of particular societies. Looking at the world in this way, seriously and
critically, means being open to finding new criteria through which to name catego-
ries and their phenomena. The process could be liberating in that it could bring
about the understanding that identity and culture are not necessarily the right criteria
through which to describe the world, its inhabitants and events; not that they do not
necessarily exist or are only hegemonic constructs, but that though they are
legitimate, they need not result in individual suffering.
Untying these problems involves finding ways to offer our students literacies
with which to evaluate the world. In Burkean terms, we offer dramatism (Burke
1969): the realization that the relationships between life and theater are not
metaphorical but real and that understanding of symbolic systems holds the key to
understanding social organization. This literacy requires abundant theory and rich
descriptive faculties in order to uncover and cope with the complexity of the sites
and social phenomena that we expect the students to interpret. Thus, they need
 Journal of Peace Education 209

familiarity with a variety of disciplines and discourses. They need an economic

discourse for discussing commodities, supplies, and management; an esthetic
discourse, to discuss architecture, advertising, and display; a political discourse, to
discuss bodies, policies, planning, and discipline; and a historical discourse to talk
about change in organization, consumption, and community. They also need
interpretative discourses to articulate understandings of each of the texts and their
necessary intertextuality in practice, which, in concert, create culture.
Also, critical pedagogy, although not monolithic, can promote educational
experiences that are transformative, empowering, and transgressive (Giroux 1988;
Giroux 2004, Kincheloe and McLaren 2000; McLaren 1997). From Freire’s
‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ to bell hook’s ‘education as the practice of freedom’
and Giroux’s notion of ‘teachers as intellectuals,’ critical pedagogy keeps at its
center the questioning of how power relations operate in the construction of knowl-
edge and how teachers and students can become transformative democratic agents
who learn to address injustice, prejudice, and unequal social structures. Essentially,
then, our approach utilizes the theoretical achievements of critical pedagogy (of the
American or German critical theories and Freirian kind) to highlight the need, at
the most basic level, to improve the learning and life opportunities of all students,
notably the typically marginalized ones (Cochran-Smith 2005; Delpit 1995; Ladson-
Billings 1994).
In summary, engaging in critical cultural analysis in peace education can take
the following forms. First, teachers need to base programs for developing commu-
nity relations around an exploration of the role of identity and culture in real life.
Second, teachers need to challenge the notion of identity/culture as categories for
describing the world. Third, teachers and children need to develop the skills of cul-
tural analysis rather than ‘knowledge’ of the characteristics of the ‘other’; that is,
start not with the ‘other’ as a given but with collaborative processes that dismantle
rather than assemble existing categories. Finally, efforts need to be redirected from
a focus on the ‘other’ towards collaborative efforts for change for a better world.
In short, a school student should not be labeled Palestinian or Jewish, to
return to our earlier example. What we are suggesting is to direct efforts to the
sphere of daily localized and contextualized interactions in their historical trajecto-
ries, trying to identify the specific practices, discursive and material, that enable
them. We should be aware of the ways through which teachers ask questions,
give feedback, speak the ‘correct language,’ and decide on the criteria for identi-
fying students. These practices are skilfully enacted daily, so as to allow for the
identities/cultures of individuals to be organized and identified. The struggle for
nation building in our schools, the discourse of individuality in our media, the
unequal distribution of resources in our society, and many other deeply entrenched
perceptions and their consequent practices have first to be identified and described
and then offered to all of the interactants as tools through which change, if so
desired, might be achieved.

Conclusion
This essay started with identifying that a set of fundamental premises seem to be
taken for granted in peace education and that, because of this, these premises oper-
ate to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related
concepts. Working in response to this problem, we put forward a proposition con-
210 M. Zembylas and Z. Bekerman

sisting of four elements aiming to reclaim criticality in peace education: reinstating

the materiality of things and practices; reontologizing research and practice in peace
education; becoming critical experts of design; and engaging in critical cultural
analysis. Our proposition is theoretically grounded in postspositivist realism and
critical realism, emphasizing that the world is socially and conceptually mediated,
yet our constructions have consequences and so it makes a difference how we act
to educate children and ourselves for a peaceful world.
It is true that at times the tone of our writing has been polemic, especially when
we have critiqued the taken for granted assumption that peace and peace education
are by definition ‘good’ while conflict is necessarily ‘bad.’ Also, we have criticized
the western psychological foundations of some peace education versions and argued
for a number of things that run contrary to these taken for granted assumptions –
assumptions that are ultimately counter-productive in that they perpetuate problem-
atic conceptions of theory and practice in peace education. In brief, the main points
which are raised and run contrary to the taken for granted assumptions in theory
and practice in peace education are the following.
Firstly, the (at times) perceived failure – or dissatisfaction with the products – of
peace education has little to do with the quality of individual teachers or students
and much to do with the quality of the systems we (all) cooperatively construct.
Failing to understand this means confusing failure with what are adaptive moves to
local and global systemic circumstances. Secondly, western positivist paradigmatic
perspectives in the social sciences are largely responsible for the present educational
perspectives which guide peace educational theory and practice (although recent
work in peace education has begun to distance itself from this paradigm). Change
will be available after western positivist paradigmatic perspectives are seriously
critiqued and there is more systematic engagement with postfoundational paradig-
matic ideas. Part of this process means realizing that everything is interactional,
contextualized, and historicized processes rather than isolated inside (individual),
static and well-defined outside (culture), and specific-task-oriented and measurable
transmissions (education). Lastly, peace education would do well to look for educa-
tional solutions in the organization of present western world politics rather than in
the limited parameters of their school settings or the solitude of their teachers’ or
students’ minds. When looking inside schools, we should be looking at contexts
and practices and not abstracted individual minds and their assumed values.
Our philosophical approach is aligned with what has come to be called ‘cultural
therapy’ (Spindler and Spindler 1994; Trueba 1993). The process of bringing one’s
own culture to a level of awareness that permits one to perceive it as a potential
bias in social interaction and in the learning of skills and knowledge. This is why
we have earlier called the teachers and students who engage in this critical aware-
ness as ‘critical experts of design.’ For teachers, cultural therapy can facilitate an
awareness of the cultural assumptions that they bring into the classroom and affect
their behavior and their interactions with students; for students, cultural therapy is
essentially a means of critical consciousness-raising which helps them identify and
critique unequal power relationships in the school, the classroom, and the society.
In general, cultural therapy encourages teachers and students (that is, everyone
involved in educational activity) to appreciate the relevance of culture to educa-
tional activity as well as to be able to identify the contextual obstacles which stand
in their way when trying to engage into a peace culture.
 Journal of Peace Education 211

In conclusion, it goes without saying that our approach has limitations, just as
any other approach; some of these limitations have been identified and discussed in
this essay, yet we are certain that others will find out more limitations. This debate
is fruitful in terms of discovering whether this (or any other approach) ‘works’ for
the purposes described here and specifically ‘how it works’ in terms of pushing
forward theoretical discussions in peace education. One obvious area for further
exploration is elaboration of each of the four elements outlined in our proposition
in terms of their practical implications. Although we provided examples, we have
generally avoided exploring the direct relevance to practical approaches for peace
education research and pedagogy, on the grounds that this was outside the scope of
this initial analysis. Future research may focus explicitly in making these connec-
tions between the theoretical premises of our proposition and specific pedagogical
implications. The elements outlined in our proposition, however, constitute an
important point of departure for reconstructing some fundamental theoretical
premises in peace education and articulating further how different versions of
critical peace education may have a pragmatic impact on the world.

Notes on contributors
Michalinos Zembylas is an associate professor of Education at the Open University of
Cyprus. His research interests are in the areas of educational philosophy and curriculum
theory, and his work focuses on exploring the role of emotion and affect in curriculum and
pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how affective politics intersect with issues of
social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education. He is
the author of numerous articles and books. His most recent book (with Zvi Bekerman) is
entitled Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace
Education and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Zvi Bekerman teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education and The
Melton Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His interests are in the study of cultural,
ethnic, and national identity, including identity processes and negotiation during intercultural
encounters and in formal/informal learning contexts. He is the Editor of the journal
“Diaspora, Indigenous, ad Minority Education: An International Journal. He has widely
published in these subjects and among his recently published books are: (with Michalinos
Zembylas) Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace
Education and Beyond (Cambridge University Press – 2012; (with Thomas Geisen)
International Handbook of Migration, Minorities and Education – Understanding Cultural
and Social Differences in Processes of Learning (Springer, 2012).

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