Decolonizing Peace Education in Universities in Korea: A Critique and Some Decolonial Pedagogic Strategies

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Peace education around the world

Proposal

In recent years, decolonization has become an important intellectual project in higher education as a response to the violences of modernity and the overrepresentation of the White, Western, male in academia (Andreotti et al., 2015). As a field of study and research, peace education in higher education is not excluded from the tensions and contradictions emerging from decolonization efforts. Victoria Fontan claims that peace education in higher education institutions is part of a “peace industry” that serves to uncritically infantilize the global South as an area in “need” of “help” from Northern White peace missionaries (Fontan, 2012). This perspective, she explains, implicates the “good work” of peace scholars as an instrument of neo-colonialism. This neo-colonial order comes with devastating consequences, not only in terms of the delegitimization of non-Western knowledges but also in relation to the marginalization of non-White faculty and students at both the material and psychic levels (Andreotti et al., 2011).

This paper reviews higher education literature detailing peace and peace education programming in universities in Korea, and compares the literature to the English-based scholarship to investigate Fontan’s claim of the peace education field as colonized. Anderson-Levitt (2017) and Torraco (2005) similarly call for comparative literature reviews to examine knowledge criss-crossing diverse cultural contexts, and Noah Sobe (2018) has developed this further to explain a method of criss-crossing comparison throughout an entire research project. Using Anderson-Levitt’s, Torraco’s and Sobe’s methods of comparison, we review peace education in the English-based literature with a focus on core concepts, scholars, and university-based peace programs. We then review the literature in Korean to complement and compare the two sets of literature.

The argument is focused on Korea in a global context (as the authors are practitioners within this context). Seen through the lens of ‘decolonial thinking’ (Mignolo, 2011, 2012), we highlight the need to identify and dismantle modernity and coloniality in higher education. Our analysis of the literature confirms that colonial ideology is reproduced in non-Western higher education settings. In the end, the primary contribution of the paper is toward an expanded conception of peace education beyond the English-based canon, particularly providing insights into peace education programs beyond national, linguistic and cultural boundaries, or what Benedict Anderson (1991) refers to as “imagined communities”. In this, the paper joins the call toward decolonizing education (Fontan, 2012; Wallace, 2013; Williams, 2017; Zembylas, 2018), and peace education specifically, especially within the Korean peninsular context. We additionally present two decolonial strategies for inclusive and transformative peace pedagogy in higher education today.

Authors

• Kevin Kester, Keimyung University, Daegu, KR

• Loughlin Sweeney, Endicott College of International Studies

• Kris Hyesoo Lee, University of Oxford