C
Critical Peace Education and Emotion 2004). While there is strong evidence of how
Michalinos Zembylas
Open University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
University of the Free State, Bloemfontein,
South Africa
Introduction
Traumatic events, such as wars, conflicts, and
terrorist attacks, generate powerful emotions –
most notably, fear, grief, anger, shame, resent-
ment, and hatred. These emotions fuel people’s
perceptions and actions and make conflicts, wars,
and genocides imaginable. Emotions are impor-
tant components of historical consciousness and
ethnohistorical practices, especially in conflict-
affected societies, and strongly shape collective
narratives, identities, and memories. In fact, it is
argued that often these powerful emotions, rather
than material interests, pose the most serious
obstacles to peacebuilding, healing, and reconcil-
iation efforts.
The focus on the role of emotion as a site of
conflict and peace illuminates the ways in which
the relation between collective narratives and
individual experiences is fundamental to the for-
mation of groups and communities. Scholars in
sociology, anthropology, history, and cultural
studies have pointed to the lack of research on
how emotions contribute to creating ethnicized
and racialized groups and communities (Ahmed
# Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_592-1
emotions accompany historical matters in socie-
ties, there have been few sustained investigations,
especially in the field of education, concerning
how and with what implications emotions are
mobilized and performed in schools as a crucial
site of power, control, belonging, and identifica-
tion. In particular, there has been limited educa-
tional research on how emotions of trauma may be
addressed through peace education. Peace educa-
tion is understood here a field of social education
that is concerned about war and violence in the
world and has experienced considerable growth
over the past four decades (Salomon and Nevo
2002). At its most basic level, peace education is
taken to be the process of promoting the knowl-
edge, skills, attitudes, and values needed to bring
about changes to prevent conflict and violence,
both physical and structural, to resolve conflicts
peacefully, and to create the conditions conducive
to peace.
The aim of the present chapter is to show the
entanglement between emotions and what has
recently become known as “critical peace educa-
tion.” Briefly speaking, “critical peace education”
is understood here as the approach to peace edu-
cation that pays attention to issues of structural
inequalities and aims at cultivating a sense of
transformative agency (both individual and col-
lective) to advance peacebuilding. In general, the
word “critical” denotes a sustained commitment
to highlight issues of inequality, injustice, and the
possibilities of personal and social transformation
2 Critical Peace Education and Emotion
and to interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions
about these issues. The purpose of this chapter,
then, is to provide an overview of the emotional
aspects of peace education and its implications for
enacting critical peace education.
Historical Trauma and the Role of
Education and Pedagogy
Educators are increasingly faced with “post-
traumatic” cultural moments that infiltrate our
current pedagogical work as teachers, students,
and scholars. These moments, marked by unprec-
edented historical trauma – such as genocides,
terrorists attacks, wars, and conflicts around the
world – shape a culture’s emotional landscape in
ways that make us more likely to fall into reduc-
tive binaries (e.g., good–evil, victims–per-
petrators, oppressed–oppressors) rather than to
question our emotional investments into particular
ideals or ideologies. It is in the context of such
moments that educators are offered both the chal-
lenge and the opportunity to think more deeply
about the complex ramifications of pedagogy in
relation to emotion, trauma, conflict, and peace.
Trauma and its impact had been investigated
by Freud, who showed that the ways in which one
reacts to a traumatic event depends on his or her
personal psychic history, that is, his or her mem-
ories and fantasies. Psychoanalytic theories that
built on Freud’s work treated trauma as an
unclaimed individual experience that needed to
be somehow dealt with, using various therapeutic
strategies (Caruth 1996). However, work in the
post-Holocaust era has begun to engage historical
trauma in a way that respects and contributes to its
politics; thus, the idea that trauma is “owned” by
an individual is deeply contested. In light of stud-
ies on the cultural politics of emotion, the concept
of trauma has been redefined to include how
traumas work to shape individual and collective
bodies.
Given the multiple risks of representing histor-
ical trauma and the challenges in forming
empathetic connections between victims and per-
petrators, witnesses and testifiers, teachers,
and students in conflict-affected societies, one
wonders what forms of pedagogical engagement
may be constituted to deal with emotions of
trauma and what the limits of teaching and learn-
ing about trauma testimonies are. What is gener-
ally lacking in many pedagogical engagements is
a conceptualization of how to critically and stra-
tegically engage emotions of trauma in ways that
enable teachers and students not simply to feel
(often superficially) for victims and their loved
ones but also to understand how trauma operates
through affective connections and articulates its
differences from other places around the world
and the power relations involved in each case. It
is this context that provides a compelling basis for
a pedagogical exploration of emotion and trauma;
it is important, therefore, to develop pedagogies
that pay attention to issues of power relations and
social conflict as well as the entanglements with
emotion in critical and strategic ways.
One of the most productive concepts that have
been suggested along this direction in curriculum
and pedagogy is the notion of difficult knowledge
by Deborah Britzman (1998). Difficult knowl-
edge has emerged over the years as a key concept
to denote the affective and epistemological chal-
lenges in teaching and learning about/from social
and historical traumas. Jonathan Jansen (2009),
who writes in the context of post-apartheid
South Africa, has used the term troubled knowl-
edge, namely, the knowledge of a traumatized past
such as the profound feelings of loss, shame,
resentment, or defeat that one carries from his or
her participation in a traumatized community.
Therefore, the challenge in many traumatized
communities is often how to deal pedagogically
with the burden of students’ troubled knowledge –
namely, not only the students who experience
emotional challenges in their engagements with
historical trauma but also the students who resist
or reject critical perspectives and who openly
expresses racist or nationalist views because
their privileges are being threatened or lost or the
students who are so traumatized from racism or
nationalism that they feel that nothing can be done
to rectify the situation.
A more nuanced understanding of emotion in
peace education implies two important things:
first, the recognition that the work of dominant
Critical Peace Education and Emotion
“emotion pedagogies” in society and in schools
has a powerful impact on peace education efforts.
In other words, peace educators need to be more
critically aware of the emotional consequences
when they categorize individuals into “victims”
and “perpetrators” and “oppressors” and
“oppressed”; failing to understand how students’
emotional attachments are strongly entangled
with traumatic historical circumstances and mate-
rial conditions will undermine peace education
interventions. Second, there are many emotional
manifestations of peace education interventions
such as apathy, resentment, hatred, anger, nostal-
gia, sorrow, loss, shame, guilt and humiliation,
and generally the ways those emotions are orga-
nized and practiced across differences of race,
class, and gender (Worsham 2001). A form of
peace pedagogy that does not apprehend its own
limitations of the complex discourses and prac-
tices of emotion that are embedded in post-
traumatic situations is less likely to acknowledge
emotion as a crucial aspect of political struggle for
change (Zembylas et al. 2016).
Consequently, a basic premise of peace peda-
gogy in posttraumatic contexts should not be sim-
ply to question the dominant educational
arrangements (curricula, textbooks, policies); it
should also be “the people there, the bodies in
the classroom, who carry knowledge within them-
selves that must be engaged, interrupted, and
transformed” (Jansen 2009, p. 258). These bodies
and their troubled knowledge constitute the
starting point for peace pedagogy. The critical
interrogation of troubled knowledge in post-
traumatic contexts marks a valuable intervention
in the broad domain of pedagogy precisely by
focusing on identifying and challenging the affec-
tive technologies and emotion-informed ideolo-
gies that underlie possible responses toward
troubled knowledge – by students and teachers
alike – and seeking to make a concrete difference
in the lives of those who still suffer from carrying
the burden of this knowledge. These emotional
attachments need to be engaged and interrupted in
sensitive but critical and strategic ways. It is pre-
cisely in this context that the notion of critical
emotional praxis intersects with critical peace
education.
3
Intersections Between Critical Emotional
Praxis and Critical Peace Education
“Critical emotional praxis” is a theoretical and
practical tool that recognizes how emotions play
a powerful role in either sustaining or disrupting
hegemonic discourses about past traumatic events
(Zembylas 2008, 2015). Critical emotional praxis
is theoretically grounded in a psychoanalytic and
a sociopolitical analysis of emotion and trauma
and provides a platform from which teachers and
students can critically interrogate their own
emotion-laden beliefs. This analysis exposes
privileged positions of psychic and sociopolitical
power and moves beyond the comfort zones in
which teachers and students are usually socialized
in a traumatized society.
Furthermore, critical emotional praxis recog-
nizes the emotional ambivalence that often
accompanies this process and thus creates peda-
gogical opportunities for critical inquiry into how
emotions of uncertainty or discomfort, despite
making the world seem ambiguous and chaotic,
can restore humanity and encourage peace and
reconciliation. Ambivalent emotions – for exam-
ple, resentment and bitterness with feelings of
common vulnerability and empathy – emerge
from teaching and learning that recognizes the
relationality of trauma; that is, if we can narrate
“our” stories of trauma to ourselves and to those
who have wounded us and listen to the narratives
of those we have wounded, we might set up better
conditions for imagining new political relations.
The ambivalence of emotion, then, highlights that
positive and negative emotions are provisional
readings and judgments of others that change,
when there are opportunities to rearticulate the
past in new ways. Critical emotional praxis, there-
fore, offers opportunities to produce transforma-
tive action, because teachers and students are
enabled to translate their critical emotional under-
standings into new ways of living with others.
As noted earlier, emotions of trauma are inex-
tricably woven into historically based ideologies
that teach students and teachers how to perceive
themselves and act toward others. This argument
indicates how pedagogical practices within a
community contribute to the conservation of
4 Critical Peace Education and Emotion
prevailing psychological and sociopolitical norms
in relation to another (the “enemy”) community.
For example, the teaching of us-and-them and
good-versus-evil narratives from an early age
imposes certain affective associations that stick
various signs and symbols together. These hege-
monic discourses and practices systematically
build a sense of ethnic identity and community
that rests on absolute us-and-them and good-
versus-evil dichotomies and encourages members
of one community to define themselves as the
only victims of conflict. In this manner, there is
no middle ground left for revolt or emotional
ambivalence – e.g., to acknowledge that the
other community has also suffered and its mem-
bers have been victims of the conflict too.
It may be argued, therefore, that school dis-
courses and practices that promote the normaliza-
tion of trauma are mis-educative and exert
pedagogic violence (Worsham 2001), because
trauma is politically used to reject the humanity
of the “other” and perpetuate hostile relations with
them. If students and teachers in traumatized soci-
eties want to create a new psychic and sociopolit-
ical order where they do not simply remain
traumatized “objects” of history, they need to
reconsider their affective relationship with the
“other” and how it is constructed. An important
issue of reconsideration in this process is coming to
terms with the emotional remains of past traumatic
legacies in both schools and the wider society.
Therefore, instead of taking ideas and feelings
for granted, teachers and students begin to inter-
rogate their emotional investments in core beliefs
(e.g., the belief in the exclusivity of one’s victim-
hood and the evil nature of the “other”) and exam-
ine the consequences in relation to existing
dichotomies and hostilities. These efforts expose
monological perspectives and move beyond the
comfort zones in which the teacher and her stu-
dents are often socialized. While engaging in this
critical interrogation does not guarantee liberatory
action in itself, the process challenges students’
understanding of emotions and the ideologies in
which they may be grounded (e.g., nationalism).
This critical interrogation creates openings for
different affective relations – such as empathy,
humility, and compassion – that may advance
peace and reconciliation in the context of “critical
peace education.”
Critical peace education pays attention to issues
of structural inequalities and aims at cultivating a
sense of transformative agency to advance
peacebuilding (Bajaj and Brantmeier 2011;
Zembylas and Bekerman 2013). Recent writings
on critical peace education emphasize that one of
the most important features of critical peace edu-
cation is its alignment with a counter-hegemonic
paradigm for social change through education. The
goal of critical peace education is to empower
young people to engage in practices and activism
that increase societal equity and justice, which, in
turn, foster greater peace. As Bajaj and Brantmeier
write: “What we term critical peace education. . . is
that which approaches the particularistic, seeking
to enhance transformative agency and participa-
tory citizenship, and open to resonating in distinct
ways with the diverse chords of peace that exist
across fields and cultures” (Bajaj and Brantmeier
2011, p. 222). The identification of critical peace
education with cultivation of transformative
agency highlights how injustice and conflict are
linked. Hence, the transformation of unjust societal
structures addresses conflict, just as the reduction
of destructive forms of conflict fostered through
critical peace education contributes to dismantling
unjust structures and eliminating inequities.
An approach grounded in critical emotional
praxis offers critical peace education the concep-
tual grounding to interrogate the “structures of
feeling” that prevent the advancement of peace,
because it critically analyzes power relations and
entanglements between emotion and traumatic
conflict. Critical emotional praxis addresses the
ways in which traumatic conflict is manifest per-
sonally and socially, and through the critical anal-
ysis of emotion, it encourages action toward the
emancipatory goals of critical peace education. At
the same time, as noted earlier, critical emotional
praxis takes into consideration the emotional ten-
sions and dilemmas in posttraumatic contexts. In
this manner, the notion of critical emotional praxis
intersects with critical peace education, enriching
the potential to engage critically and strategically
with the emotional ramifications of peace educa-
tion efforts.
Critical Peace Education and Emotion
Conclusion
This chapter emphasized the entanglements
between emotion and peace education efforts
and highlighted that an approach of critical
peace education that is enriched by the notion of
critical emotional praxis offers opportunities to
create spaces for peace and reconciliation in
schools. These spaces allow for the flow of alter-
native ideas and encourage students and teachers
to realize that what they share with those they had
classified as the “enemy” may be greater than
what divides them. Undoubtedly, these spaces
are messy, troublesome, and emotionally
discomforting, but they have three valuable fea-
tures that can promote peace and reconciliation in
schools: first, developing a willingness to meet the
other in humility and openness; second, acknowl-
edging not only one’s own pain but also the pain
of the other, as well as admitting responsibility for
having wounded the other; and, third, putting into
practice strategies that promote empathetic and
humanizing ways of reconciling past grievances
without establishing new moralistic regimes.
Schools are already political terrains in which
emotions are ideologically appropriated; how-
ever, the role of schools can be further humanized,
if they are turned into places of humane connec-
tions with adversaries. It is such connections
which constitute spaces that oppose polarized
trauma narratives and open possibilities for
remaining the sense of community and identity.
Destabilizing the rhetoric of binary opposites and
the hegemonic ways of thinking and feeling about
past traumas engages students and teachers in a
politics that radically reevaluates the emotional
culture in which they live. From this perspective,
reframing trauma stories can help restore both
one’s own and the other’s humanity and counter-
act the confrontational content of competing nar-
ratives that lead to dehumanization. The aim is not
only to understand what emotions of trauma do in
everyday school life but also to invent new inter-
pretive approaches and practices of relating with
“others” – peace pedagogies that do not fossilize
emotional injury but move forward.
Hence, an approach that places psychoanalyti-
cally informed perspectives and sociopolitical
5
conceptions of emotions and trauma at the fore-
front is an important resource for critical peace
education. Such perspectives are valuable in
developing pedagogical spaces that shift from an
uncritical adoption of trauma to an informed
insight that imagines the world differently.
Aware of the essentializing features of many ped-
agogical approaches toward peace education, this
chapter emphasized that rethinking teaching and
learning about traumatic conflict, peace, and rec-
onciliation requires a subtle understanding of the
complexities of emotional engagement in schools
and the need to rearticulate the meaning(s) of
emotions of trauma as well as their manifestations
in peace education.
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