Education for Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding: the case of Colombia

• In Event: Conflict, peacebuilding, and transitional justice: Colombia and Ecuador

Proposal

Scholars have documented the rise and institutionalization of transitional justice in post-conflict contexts, particularly since the end of the Cold War (Hayner 2011; McEvoy 2007; Minow 1998; Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena 2006). Transitional justice mechanisms include both judicial and nonjudicial mechanisms—such as criminal tribunals and truth commissions—that seek to address the legacies of human rights violations and to promote reconciliation. Scholars increasingly view education systems as serving a central role in broader transitional justice, peacebuilding, and reconciliation processes (Bellino, Paulson, and Worden 2017; Cole 2007; Davies 2017; Ramirez-Barat and Duthie 2016). A country’s education system can function not only as a venue to educate the public about past violations but also as an instrument that works in conjunction with other transitional justice mechanisms to address broader structural inequalities and discrimination linked to underlying causes of the country’s conflict.

Drawing on the case of Colombia, which signed a peace treaty in 2016 ending more than 50 years of civil war, my research seeks to examine the relationship between transitional justice and education in the post-accord context. Through a content analysis of curricular documents and social studies textbooks, as well as 18 in-depth interviews conducted with key informants from government, academia, NGOs, and international organizations working on issues related to transitional justice and education to answer the following questions: What is the national discourse around education and transnational justice? How do local actors view the role of the education system in promoting transitional justice and peacebuilding? Preliminary findings point to the importance of transitional justice within the national policy discourse but also to fragmentation in the incorporation into the education sector, which tends to focus on more general themes related to citizenship and human rights.

References
Bellino, Michelle J., Julia Paulson, and Elizabeth Anderson Worden. 2017. “Working through Difficult Pasts: Toward Thick Democracy and Transitional Justice in Education.” Comparative Education.
Cole, Elizabeth A. 2007. Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Davies, Lynn. 2017. “Justice-Sensitive Education: The Implications of Transitional Justice Mechanisms for Teaching and Learning.” Comparative Education 0(0):1–18.
Hayner, Priscilla B. 2011. Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. Second. Routledge.
McEvoy, Kieran. 2007. “Beyond Legalism: Towards a Thicker Understanding of Transitional Justice.” Journal of Law and Society 34(4):411–40.
Minow, Martha. 1998. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Beacon Press.
Ramirez-Barat, Clara and Roger Duthie. 2016. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace. Social Science Research Council.
Roht-Arriaza, Naomi and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds. 2006. Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth Versus Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Author

• S. Garnett Russell, Teachers College, Columbia University