The diminishing social role of universities in conflict-affected societies – the case study of Iraq.

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Role of higher education in society

Proposal

The aim of higher education continues to evolve around the needs of society, government and individuals. In post-conflict societies higher education seen as a catalyst for recovery that can engage in stabilization and securitization, reconstruction, state building, and peacebuilding’ in conflict-affected societies (Milton & Barakat, 2016). However, universities, like schools also have ‘two faces’ that can function as both a positive and negative force (Bush and Saltarelli, 2000), which could reduce the expected role universities have in their immediate societies. This is true during peacetime as well as during and after conflict. Many educational research ignore the pressures inherited in divided societies and doesn’t take full account of the inequalities and social problems that universities are able to generate (Millican, 2017). The purpose of this study is to explore how the social impact of universities in post-conflict societies is diminishing while responding to the needs of society, whether to provide equal educational opportunities, promote democratic practices or to engage in the social cohesion process. This study takes Iraq as an example of a divided society that has been in a continuous state of conflict since the 1980s.

The study uses institutional theory incorporating agency and change lens within organizational fields proposed by Burch (2007). This lens helps understand how universities adapt to changing conditions within their environments and the gap between universities’ design and actual practices and how broader cultural and political forces contribute to the stability of practices across higher education institutions (Burch, 2007). The main research question in this study is: How do policies and reforms strategies that aimed at responding to the post-conflict challenges and at improving the higher education system also reduce the social impact of the university?

This study tries to analyze institutions policies and directions in their complicated institutional environment that brought by the challenges and the immediate needs of post-conflict and the divided society, which are reproduced by the political conflicting agendas. It also analyzes data from interviews conducted in 2017 with eighteen faculty members and administrators in four public universities in Iraq.

The initial findings show that regardless of the continuous efforts to reform the higher education systems in Iraq, this process is challenged by the conflicting agendas of the political parties that creates an ethnic and sectarian homogenous culture at institutional, community and regional levels. The increased focus on neo-liberalisation of higher education and the discourse about international collaboration and competition, while are important reform agenda in Iraq’ higher education, have also undermined the importance of and interest in the social sciences and humanities, which affect the social impact of the university that could help in solving some social challenges.

This study is an excellent fit for CIES 2019 and also fits more closely the Education, Conflict, and Emergencies SIG’s call for proposals as it investigates the broader social impacts of university and the role it can play in which social and political development and sustainable nation building occurs.

Author

• Hayfa Jafar, University of Toronto