Constructing Citizenship in Post-Conflict Contexts: The Cases of Rwanda and Liberia

• In Event: Education Reform for Healing, Co-Existence and Human Rights in Transitional Justice Environments

Abstract

Objectives
In post-conflict and fragile contexts, one central goal of education is to prepare citizens to rebuild society and manage conflict. In this paper, we discuss the ways that citizenship education, and students’ civic skills, attitudes, and practices, vary across two post-conflict contexts in sub-Saharan Africa: Rwanda and Liberia. First, we consider the complexities of citizenship education in these two countries drawing on literature from the field of education and conflict and on citizenship/civics education, and focusing on social and political constraints that cause tensions between theory and practice. Next, we discuss findings from survey and interview data with secondary students from two separate studies in the respective countries.
Theoretical Framework
We draw on a post-colonial framework and Osler and Starkey’s (2005) three dimensions of citizenship—status, feeling, and practice—to understand citizenship in a post-conflict context. Osler and Starkey’s argue that individuals are concurrently members of a wide variety of communities, and the extent of their membership varies according to these three dimensions. Post-colonialism recognizes that students’ civic identities and trajectories are deeply embedded in an unequal world system (Spring, 2008; Willinsky, 1998). Combining these two views recognizes that young people establish citizenship status, feeling, and practice, in the context of power inequities – for example, that young people with citizenship status in one country who experience ethnic discrimination may establish feelings or practices of citizenship that do not align with their citizenship status.
Methods and Data Sources
These two studies were both conceived as vertical case studies, incorporating mixed-methods, multi-level, and multi-site work, and analyzing national level policies, curricula, textbooks, and school level data. The first, a 2012 study in Liberia, involved surveys of 286 secondary students from four urban schools. This survey data was contextualized via interviews with teachers and students at each school, and an analysis of the main textbook across the schools. The second study, based in Rwanda, includes survey data from 536 secondary school students across 15 schools in three different provinces. In addition, classroom observations were carried out and interviews were conducted with both teachers and students in 7 schools. Surveys used in both Liberia and Rwanda were developed using internationally normed items as well as items adapted to the local contexts. For both studies, findings from school level data are contextualized within the broader policy and curricular context.
Results
Based on comparative analysis of these two studies, we find differences in student conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement across the country contexts, as well as variation by gender, ethnicity, and type of schools. Student responses highlight differing contextual values of economic progress, security, freedom of speech, and civic action across the two country cases. In considering the survey and interview data, we discuss the ways that the education policies and structures, as well as the social and political realities of the focus countries, shape and relate to student responses.
Significance
Although there are often gaps between communities and schooling, this study highlights the ways that citizenship education, in particular, is deeply contextual. In line with the conference theme of Ubuntu!, citizenship education is often designed to promote values of mutually beneficial cooperation in the target society. However, citizenship education is experienced differently by students across schools and country contexts . As policy makers and educators in post-conflict contexts seek to help students strive together to achieve a greater good for their society, they will want to look to the variety of ways that citizenship education can be implemented in similar societies. Understanding how civic/citizenship education is implemented and understood by students in post-conflict contexts carries important implications for how countries can draw on education to foster inter-group tolerance and peace-building.

Authors

• Laura Quaynor, University of South Carolina Aiken

• Susan Garnett Russell, Teachers College, Columbia University