On
Peace Education &
the University for Peace
in Costa Rica
By
Vicky
Rossi - TFF Peace Antenna
Vicky Rossi's
conversations with peace visionairies around the
world
are listed at her CV page here
and collected here.
March 1, 2006
This is TFF Peace Antenna Vicky Rossi's
interview* with Ms Julia Marton-Lefèvre, Rector
of the University for Peace, and Prof. Abelardo Brenes
who is Head of the Peace Education Programme,
University for Peace.
The University for Peace (UPEACE) has its main
campus in Costa Rica. It was established by the United
Nations General Assembly in resolution 35/55, 5
December 1980. It has as its mission:
- "to provide humanity with an international
institution of higher education for peace and with the
aim of promoting among all human beings the spirit of
understanding, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, to
stimulate cooperation among peoples and to help lessen
obstacles and threats to world peace and progress, in
keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the
Charter of the United Nations."
UPEACE currently offers MA courses in:
International Law and Settlement of Disputes,
International Law and Human Rights, Natural Resources
and Sustainable Development, Gender and Peace
Building, Environmental Security and Peace and Peace
Education. It also holds short courses and in 2005
these were offered in: Human Rights, before, during
and after Conflict; Cultures and Learning: from
Violence towards Peace; and Gender, Security and Peace
Building.
Vicky
Rossi: Regarding the attainment of "peace", the UPEACE
Charter states that "(…) the best tool for achieving
this supreme good for humankind, namely education, has
not been used". Could you further expand on this
statement?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: State
sponsored education systems pursue "education goals", the
knowledge, skills and values that are to be transmitted
through the schools to prepare students to support, live
in consistency with and, where appropriate, work toward
the social purposes that guide and inform mainstream
curriculum. In most cases such educational goals are
primarily knowledge or content based and the curriculum
is designed accordingly in a transfer model. In most
countries these goals have been on social purposes for
promoting nationalism, militarism, productivism, and
consumerism.
Peace education openly acknowledges
its purpose as education to facilitate the achievement of
peace and a related set of social values, largely through
learning to recognize, confront and practice alternatives
to the multiple forms of violence. In that this purpose
is not the generally accepted primary purpose of most
educational systems, peace education calls for an
examination of existing purposes and assumptions and
welcomes the addressing of the same challenges to its own
purposes and assumptions.
UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan,
in a speech made at the Advisory Meeting of the Academic
Program of the University for Peace, 23 March 2001,
stated that: "Achieving decent, just and peaceful
relations among diverse human groups is an enterprise
that must be constantly renewed - and education for peace
is a fundamental part of that enterprise. Yet the world's
record on education for peace has been weak indeed…
That is why, in the next generation, we have a mission to
stimulate large numbers of students on every continent to
reflect seriously on human conflict, its causes and its
consequences, and ways to prevent its deadly
outcome…" Inspired by this message, UPEACE has
interpreted that it can help meet this challenge by:
1) addressing the critical shortage
of skilled people in conflict prevention and management,
particularly in developing countries; and
2) developing education for peace
directed to people in all walks of life and in all
regions of the world, from primary school upwards, to
transform values and attitudes, to reduce prejudices, and
to address critical environmental issues.
Vicky
Rossi: Would you agree that "peace" is not merely the
absence of war and if so what would your definition of
peace be?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: Definitely,
'peace' is much more than the absence of war. The
definition of 'peace' given by the Earth Charter is a
good starting point: "…peace is the wholeness
created by right relationships with oneself, other
persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the
larger whole of which all are a part."
This person-centred definition
recognizes that peace is an end in itself and entails
living with integrity, security, balance, and harmony -
with self, others, and nature to achieve
self-realization. A person-centred definition is a useful
reference point from a pedagogical point of view and also
reflects the human rights framework it is built upon.
From the point of view of our relationships, this
definition assumes that each person lives within multiple
dimensions of interrelationship and that we share a
common responsibility to live in peace in all of
them.
Vicky
Rossi: What are some of the main characteristics of an
educational system and curriculum based on the concept of
education for peace?
Prof. Abelardo
Brenes: Using the concept of
"holism", peace education makes clear the integration and
interdependence of all components of a given system. It
observes both the direct and indirect relationships
between forms of violence at all levels as well as the
values, practices, and necessary conditions needed to
overcome them. It calls for a systematic integration of
content and process, employing specific pedagogies
particularly relevant to the focus of the inquiry
problématique at the conceptual core of a peace
education course.
Peace education is overt about its
intentions to educate for the formation of "values"
consistent with peace and the norms that uphold it. Peace
education identifies that social problems, at all levels,
local through global, are as much a matter of ethics as
they are of structures and that sustainable change must
be rooted in commitment to social values. Course goals
and objectives should be values explicit, demonstrating
how the specific values concerned in each substantive
area relate to more general value goals.
Posing content in the form of a
problématique, seen as a set of interrelated
problems deriving from a situation that violates a core
peace value, promotes broader and more complex learning.
Inquiry opens the curriculum to revealing multiple
perspectives or problems and to assessing a range of
alternative solutions.
Peace education seeks to develop
alternative modes of thought through developing
capacities of "conceptual thinking". It also uses
conceptual frameworks to deliver content in a holistic
perspective, emphasizing interrelationships in as organic
a way as possible.
Peace education is
"learner-centred". A peace education pedagogy
demonstrates a reciprocity of learning that is built upon
the assumption that both student and teacher are
learners. Learner-centred pedagogy fosters an awareness
of this reciprocity of learning, how it facilitates the
building of collective knowledge, acknowledges the
experiences of all learners involved in the process, and
increases the likelihood that the values the programme
seeks to develop will be adopted and internalized by the
learner. Methods of learner-centred pedagogy that are
emphasized in UPEACE programmes include, amongst other
possible approaches, futures visioning, critical pedagogy
or critical inquiry, creativity, and cooperative
learning.
Peace education seeks to nurture
peace related "virtues and capacities" constitutive to
the broader transformative purposes and normative values
of peace education. Virtues and capacities are seen as
individual qualities within each person, a basis of the
ability to learn and to behave consistently with the
values that inform peace education as a potential
lifelong mission. Peace education is especially concerned
with those virtues and capacities that inform peace
action.
Peace education attempts to
cultivate learnings that "transform" worldviews and
inspire learners to actively pursue the transformation of
the present culture of violence through considerations of
alternatives. Peace education strives to demonstrate the
futility of violence through the cultivation of peace
related values, virtues, knowledge, attitudes, and
behaviours.
Vicky
Rossi: In the UPEACE Charter, it states that peace is
unlikely "as long as the human mind has not been imbued
with the notion of peace from an early age". What
concrete steps are being taken by UPEACE and UNESCO to
ensure that peace-orientated education becomes more
widely available in primary and secondary schools as well
as in institutions of higher education?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: Peace
education explores multi-disciplinary and developmental
approaches to address violence in all its varied forms.
Approaches to peace education are both contextual and
situation dependent. The UPEACE Peace Education Programme
utilizes and endeavours to demonstrate multiple
developmental approaches suited to the level of maturity
and cultural circumstances of the learner, as well as
social and cultural modes of learning in identifying
social, cultural, and individually relevant approaches of
peace education. A variety of methodological practices
can be used, with special care being given not to
overemphasize Western practices. This coincides with
current UPEACE policy, which calls for all of its
academic programmes and courses to have a multi-cultural
perspective and for gender to be mainstreamed.
The strategy adopted by the Council
of UPEACE is aimed at gradually meeting the world wide
need for education for peace on a significant scale, by
"educating the educators" through Master's degree and
degree credit courses and also by developing course
materials and methodologies, testing these by exposure to
students at its headquarters campus, and then
disseminating the materials in collaboration with
universities throughout the world. A key element in
implementing the strategy is the establishment of
partnerships and jointly sharing knowledge for peace
through multiple channels of communication and use of
state of the art communications technologies.
We cooperate with UNESCO,
particularly through the U.N. mandated interdependent
educational action frameworks which UNESCO coordinates.
Jointly they constitute a holistic approach to education
and are very relevant to peace. These are:
•
the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and
Non-violence for the Children of the World
(2001-2010)
•
Education for All
(2000-2015)
•
the Decade for Literacy (2003-2012)
•
the Decade for Sustainable Development Education
(2005-2014)
All of these Decades share much in
common in their goals and aspirations and one can only
hope that they work together in close synergy. We at the
University for Peace feel very strongly that this synergy
is just what is required by educational institutions
addressing complex problems.
Vicky
Rossi: In your opinion, is there a "will" in our modern
day societies to make the necessary reforms to the
educational system to ensure that peace-orientated
curricula become the norm and not the
exception?
Prof. Abelardo
Brenes: This is a very
challenging issue, which we will be addressing in the
2006 International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE),
which is being co-organized by the University for Peace
and the Peace Education Center of Teachers College,
Columbia University (New York). We will be exploring the
theme "Toward a Planetary Ethic: Shared and Individual
Responsibility," recognizing that the international
community has reached key areas of consensus regarding
the challenges we are facing, the shared ethical
frameworks of values, norms and principles for meeting
them, and the contributions that education should fulfil.
In doing so, the IIPE will critically examine various
interdependent UN based educational initiatives and
normative frameworks that provide a global basis for a
holistic approach to peace education: the Millennium
Development Goals, the International Decade for a Culture
of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World,
Education for All, the Decade for Literacy, and the
Decade for Sustainable Development Education.
The theme is inspired by the
principle of universal responsibility, stated in the
'Preamble' of The Earth Charter (a declaration of
fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable,
and peaceful global society), which is of fundamental
importance in meeting the critical challenges of the 21st
century. This principle provides a necessary complement
to the Universal Declaration of Human Right's recognition
of each person as worthy of equal respect and dignity and
with accompanying "duties" to the international
community.
The sub theme, "Shared and
Individual Responsibility", refers to one of the most
significant challenges entailed in giving practical
meaning to the principal of universal responsibility in a
world of asymmetric real freedoms and power, hence
differentials in capacities to respond in meeting
planetary challenges. This notion is reflected in the
principle of 'differentiated responsibility' stated in
complementary principle 2b of the Earth Charter: "Affirm
that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes
increased responsibility to promote the common good".
The IIPE will draw on the
experiences and insights of diverse peace educators from
all world regions helping us learn from each other's
experiences and innovative educational approaches and
strategies in addressing such key questions as: are the
U.N. educational initiatives based on ethical principles
actually shared by citizens? How can we educate within
the related action programs recognizing possible tensions
that may exist in balancing principles of cultural
diversity and integrity, personal autonomy, national
sovereignty, and universal norms? What pedagogies are
required to foster a consciousness of universal
responsibility?
Vicky
Rossi: Is this concept of education for peace a Western
construct or are there movements to promote education for
peace in, say, African, Asian and Middle Eastern nations
also?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: We
assume that living in peace is a basic need and universal
aspiration of all peoples, although the paths for
building sustainable peace are varied. Accordingly,
UPEACE has been undertaking action to promote sustainable
economic and social development; promotion of respect for
all human rights; equality between women and men;
fostering of democratic participation; advancement of
understanding, tolerance and solidarity; and promotion of
international peace and security in an integrated manner.
These actions are founded on the solid academic base of
its academic programmes and are further promoted through
its regional and national programmes.
UPEACE is the only UN institution
in Latin America with a global mandate. In line with its
mission from the General Assembly and the decisions of
its Council, it has prepared and initiated programmes in
regions and major countries so as to extend UPEACE
activities into Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Central
Asia, Latin America, India and Brazil.
In addition, UPEACE's Institute for
Media, Peace and Security is now being established in
Geneva with Canadian and Swiss support. In addition, the
UPEACE linked World Center for Research and Training in
Conflict Resolution in Bogotá is now initiating
its programme with the full engagement of the Colombian
Government. Finally, the UPEACE-affiliated World Centre
for Documentation and Information for Peace (CMIP), in
Montevideo, continues to be very active in the Latin
American region.
A substantial programme to
strengthen education for peace in Africa has been
developed through in-depth missions to ten countries to
consult with a wide spectrum of academics, civil society
leaders, researchers, officials, and the military. As a
result, a unique body of knowledge has been accumulated
on research and teaching activities in progress across
the continent and on the practical needs and the
obstacles to strengthening capacities in the field of
education, training and research for peace. A solid
network of motivated partner institutions in Africa has
been established.
This process has led to the design
of a major, five-year programme of support to African
universities and other formal and non-formal educational
institutions to build up their capacities to teach and
research the vital issues of conflict prevention, peace
building, environmental security, reconciliation and
human rights on which peace and social and economic
progress depend. The Africa programme is under way with
the support of Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
Many projects have been implemented
by the Africa Regional Programme. Three highly successful
curriculum development workshops have been held, two in
2003 and one in 2004 to develop Africa-specific teaching
materials in the field of peace and conflict studies. In
2003, a peace education and human rights curriculum
development workshop for the military and armed forces in
Sierra Leone was held, and an international workshop on
"Environmental Degradation and Conflict in Darfur" was
held in Sudan. Another achievement of the Africa program
is the development of a distance-education training
course on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide.
Additional, promised financial support is awaited to
accelerate the further implementation of the programme so
as to meet strong expectations and serious needs in
Africa.
UPEACE has also launched a
programme focused on education for peace in Central Asia.
Based on experience of a successful pilot year, a
three-year programme has been designed. However, donor
support for activities in the region appears to be
diminishing. Subject to the availability of funds, the
programme in its next phase will include a teaching
programme on peace and conflict studies, as well as a
further meeting of the regional forum on Education for
Conflict Resolution in Central Asia, and the extension of
teaching to the local level which has successfully been
initiated in partnership with UNDPA in
Tajikistan.
A Regional Programme is also being
developed for Asia and the Pacific. In a first phase, a
wide network of key universities has been brought into
being in the form of an Inter-University Consortium: the
Asia-Pacific University Network for Conflict Prevention
and Peace Building (APCP). A major conference was held in
China in June 2002 to consolidate the consortium. A
planning process began in 2004, with CIDA support, to
build on this first phase by designing a programme to
focus more directly on the needs of a number of selected
countries in the field of education for peace. In
February 2005, UPEACE collaborated with two universities
in India to co-host a highly successful curriculum
development workshop for Peace and Conflict Studies,
bringing together more than 20 universities from
Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.
UPEACE has also elaborated a
programme for Latin America which will have its principal
focus on practical measures to improve human security in
the continent. It will emphasize three main issues: human
security, security sector reform and the generation of
employment, particularly for youth. And it will mobilize
three instruments: strengthening education and training
for peace in the region; stimulating research to identify
the underlying causes of instability and violence as a
basis for teaching and policy; and consolidating the data
base and indicators required for effective policies on
issues related to violence and the preservation of
stability and peace.
A major programme has been designed
in Brazil which will focus on urban and rural violence,
with the support of the Presidency of Brazil and the
collaboration of a large number of agencies and
institutions
A specific programme on education
for peace has also been developed through consultations
with key universities in India. It is likely that the
recent change of government will make it possible to
accelerate this programme which has been held back by a
number of uncertainties in recent months.
Vicky
Rossi: Would you agree that religious dialogue and
understanding is as important as education "to help
lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and
progress"? Do any of the UPEACE courses - MA or short
courses - deal with this important topic?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: Yes, I
definitely agree that religious dialogue and
understanding is a very important topic for peace
building and we address this issue in several of our M.A.
programmes as well as short courses, both at the UPEACE
campus in Costa Rica and in our regional centers. For
example, the Department of International Law and Human
Rights teaches a course on Human Rights, Gender, and
Religion addressing these issues primarily through the
optic of the Convention on the Elimination of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which purports to
provide a body of international human rights provisions
on the non-discriminatory treatment of women. Through
CEDAW, we examine questions about how religion
complicates interpretation and application of CEDAW. We
also study ways to interpret CEDAW particularly in light
of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, which protects persons' freedom of religious
belief. The course also addresses the intersection of
gender, religion, and human rights by looking at
practical case studies, exploring the hijab, shari'a
courts, and honor killings.
Vicky
Rossi: Is UPEACE recognised by all the Member States of
the United Nations? Does UPEACE receive funding from UN
Member States?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: UPEACE
was set up by a UN General Assembly Resolution in 1980.
This does not require all Member States to recognize
UPEACE per se, nor does it require Member States to fund
the University. Funding comes from various donors,
including government departments from UN Member
States.
Vicky
Rossi: For clarification purposes, could you explain the
relationship between the United Nations University (UNU),
which has its headquarters in Tokyo, and UPEACE, which is
headquartered in Costa Rica?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: UNU is
primarily a research organization while UPEACE is a
teaching, degree-giving organization. The relations
between the two organizations are excellent and the
Rector of the UNU is a member of UPEACE's
Council.
Vicky
Rossi: Are there any plans for UPEACE to offer
postgraduate courses in Europe in the
future?
Julia
Marton-Lefèvre: There
are no immediate plans for this, but we are discussing
possible partnership arrangements with several European
Universities.
*This interview was obtained
through the email exchange of information.
For further information, please
contact:
Ms Julia Marton-Lefèvre
Email: jmartonlefevre@upeace.org
Rector, University for
Peace
Professor Abelardo
Brenes
Email: abrenes@upeace.org
Head, Peace Education
Programme
University for Peace
Apdo. 138-6100
Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica
Tel: +506-205-9000
Fax: +506-249-1324
Website: www.upeace.org
Links
UPEACE Programmes
Worldwide
UPEACE
Africa Programme
UPEACE
Central Asia Programme
Institute
for Media, Peace and Security
Branches of UPEACE
Worldwide:
New
York Office
Geneva
Office
World
Centre for Research and Conflict
Resolution
World
Peace Research Centre
Introducing
UPEACE Toronto
Peace Education
International
Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the
Children of the World (2001-2010)
International
Peace Research Association (IPRA)
United
Nations University
International
Institute on Peace Education (IIPE)
M.A. and Doctoral Peace &
Conflict Study Programmes
European
University Center for Peace Studies (EPU),
Austria
University
of Bradford, United Kingdom
University
of Tromsø, Norway
University
of Göteborg, Sweden
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