Human rights education: lessons from UNESCO’s history for the 21st century

• In Event: Critical encounters with environmentalism

Proposal

The growing importance of human rights in the educational context since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 is undeniable on the global level (Meyer, Bromley, & Ramirez, 2010). For decades, it has been an umbrella for addressing many fundamental issues, such as discrimination, violent extremism, populism and civic disengagement (Kiwan, 2008; Russell & Suarez, 2017; Wahl, 2013). In 1948, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was given a unique mandate of HRE promotion, aimed at justifying and protecting the values at the basis of the UN. However, the actual interpretation and implementation of HRE across the globe are very uneven. The conceptualization of HRE has been criticized for its inadaptability to actual practice, which in many local contexts has led to either the absence of human rights principles in the education or even the justification of human rights violations (Al-Nakib, 2011; Firer, 1998; Sevincer & Biseth, 2013).
For the last six decades, UNESCO has addressed the critique of HRE through the development of HRE policies, programs and projects, offering multiple solutions to the aforementioned challenges. In the literature on HRE conceptualization (Bajaj, 2011; Robeyns, 2006; Tibbits, 2017; Wahl, 2013) policies (Alfredsson, 2001; Claude, 2005; Hüfner, 2011; Kirchlaeger, 2017) historical methods are rarely used, which could be related to the understanding within the academic community of today’s urgency of HRE implementation, so more attention is paid to current developments in HRE policies and practice. The lack of historical studies leads to the assumption that the contemporary problems of HRE realization emerged recently and some authors even talk about the “endtimes of human rights” (Hopgood, 2014). However, a historical approach gives an opportunity to see that many issues were already at the center of the international discourse for decades and that various solutions were offered. In the case of UNESCO, the historical perspective offers the opportunity to learn from the experiences of the past (Kleven, 2008).
This project contributes to the fostering and development of HRE through a structural analysis of UNESCO’s HRE concepts, policies and projects, and a subsequent recommendation of alternative approaches for the future, based on best practices and lessons learned. More specifically, the project’s recommendations are based on investigations of three related aspects of UNESCO HRE practice, 1) the conceptualization of UNESCO’s HRE; 2) the workings of UNESCO’s HRE policies and programs; and 3) the trajectories of UNESCO’s HRE projects (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012). The project seeks to understand and explain how UNESCO HRE concepts, policies and projects inform each other and how these are reflected in overall UNESCO decision- making structures, responsible for the promotion of HRE - including the obstacles encountered and the solutions offered - in order to indicate possible paths for the future of HRE.

The overall question of the study is Which constructive trajectories and future paths for the overall improvement of HRE emerge from the history of UNESCO HRE practice?
The theory used for the project should allow understanding of global processes, but also offer instruments for a more focused analysis. Taking globalization seriously (Verger, 2018) but recognizing the role of states in the actual decision-making and practice regarding UNESCO policies (Sassen, 2003; Slaughter, 2010), means acknowledging the increasing role that UNESCO plays in the shaping of international educational norms in general but accentuating the role of particular state stakeholders in the formation of these norms. Historical institutionalism (HI) offers a theoretical combination of these seemingly antagonistic concerns in the literature (Verger, 2018). The main component for bridging the gap is the introduction of temporality. Taking the historical processes shaping the institutional outcomes into account, HI gives us tools to “(...) assess the legacies of founding moments, the consequences of new ideas and big events, the prevalence of incremental reform over one-off design, and the unintentional aspects of institutional formation and change” (Rixen & Viola, 2016, p. 4).
The theoretical approach informs the selection and analysis of the archival materials. The chosen documentation is to reflect both the general tendencies of policy-making within the organization as well as the epistemic/political communities behind the programmes and their actual enactment. Specifically, the research will be based on sources highlighting negotiations, decision-making and administrative solutions, including budgetary allocations, related to HRE in UNESCO policies. Within the project, the documentation will be collected from two archives – UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the UN headquarters in New York. Before 2012, the decisions regarding UNESCO HRE policies were made within the organization, but the elaboration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are now at the foundation of UNESCO educational policies, the final decision-making took place in 2012 – 2015 in New York.
Furthermore, the project draws on the interviews with focus groups and interviews within existing UNESCO projects with participants and project officers. The focus groups consist of 1) current and former UNESCO employees, acquainted with the formation of HRE policies at different stages, including the ones who were at the leading positions within UNESCO Education Sector and the ones who represented the organization at the UN Secretariat; 2) researchers who have been cooperating with UNESCO for many years about HRE; and 3) representatives of non-governmental organizations, specialized in HRE and involved in contemporary HRE policies formation.
The research is ongoing, so the final conclusions are to be made in the future. The conclusions will be published in an article-based PhD dissertation aimed at recognized international journals. At the same time, by presenting the research at the CIES Conference 2019, I would like to not only share the ideas at the foundation of the study and to contribute to the state-of-research in the sphere of HRE, but also to receive the feedback on the methodological, theoretical and organizational issues essentially important for international projects on their initial stages.

Author

• Elizaveta Bagrintseva, European Wergeland Centre