Unlearning civil war: educational reforms, youth identities and post-conflict reconstruction in Sierra Leone

• In Event: Schooling in conflict & post-conflict societies: the politics of knowledge

Proposal

Since taking office in April 2018, newly-elected Sierra Leone President, Julius Maada Bio has launched the Free Quality Education School Programme, making schooling free to over 1.5 million primary and secondary school children across the country from September 2018 onward. In addition, the President revealed that he would almost double the annual education spending budget from 11% to 20% (The Sierra Leone Telegraph 2018). These unprecedented and ambitious reforms garnered national, regional and even global recognition after the country’s experience with the devastating 2014 Ebola epidemic and a brutal civil war that lasted from 1991-2002. Several other countries have undergone similar large-scale educational reforms after civil war as a means of mending cleavages in society.

Two months after the genocide ended, the Rwandan Ministry of Education re-opened primary schools in September 1994, and issued several educational reforms that placed emphasis on unifying students on the basis of nationality, citizenship and patriotism, instead of ethnicity. Reforms included banning the categorization of learners and teachers by ethnic (Hutu or Tutsi) affiliation, incorporating Banyarwanda children within Rwanda borders and gradually strengthening foreign language learning at all levels of the education system throughout 1995 and 1996 (Obura 2003). Similarly, in India, the Federal Government created and modified the common core curriculum for its’ National Plan on Education to include “the history of India’s freedom movement, the constitutional obligations, and other content essential to nurture national identity” (Government of India 1998, 5) following five civil wars that erupted across the country since Partition in 1947.

Educational reforms in Sierra Leone, Rwanda and India are just a few examples of how public education serves as a vital institutional mechanism for post-conflict reconstruction after civil war. Yet, an important distinction worth nothing is that civil wars in Rwanda and India are frequently coded as ethnic conflicts (Doyle and Sambanis 2006; Fearon and Laitin 2003) whereas causes of civil war in Sierra Leone have largely been attributed to greed over the nation’s illustrious diamond industry (Kamara 2000) and rebellion by a disenfranchised youth population (Bangura 2004). These differences in the categorization of civil wars lead to several questions for further inquiry: (1) How might the distinction between ethnic conflicts and non-ethnic conflicts inform the types of educational reforms that Sierra Leone has adopted, as well as how and where these reforms have been implemented? (2)What new insights about social identity formation beyond those formed along ethnic and religious lines can we gain from analyzing the specific example of youth in Sierra Leone? (3) Have reforms been effective in mitigating tensions between young people and the state? And finally, (4) What are the economic and social benefits of national educational reforms in Sierra Leone?

This paper introduces theories of youth cultural formation to existing literature on social identification and conflict in political science to analyze the effects of post-conflict educational reforms on youth identities in Sierra Leone. Studies on civil war and ethnic conflict in the political science literature have focused primarily on elite, macro-level interactions between government forces and rebel groups (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2003). A growing body of work has shifted towards micro analyses addressing local dynamics at the sub-national level and exploring how the social identities of third-party intervenors, such as United Nations peacekeepers, impact peace-building success (Nomikos 2017; Ruggeri et al, 2017; Blattman and Miguel 2010). Yet, these theories do not adequately explain how governments contribute to shaping social identities and what role public education systems play in cultivating social identities after civil war.

Although schooling plays a vital role in shaping social identities, research on education is quite limited within the political science literature on civil wars and ethnic conflict. Lai and Thyne (2007) investigate the negative effects of civil wars and the post-civil war environment on educational expenditures and enrollment. Alexander and Christia (2011) conduct a public goods game experiment with Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks students in partially integrated secondary schools in Bosnia-Herzegovina to assess cooperation in ethno-religiously diverse groups after conflict. While these works introduce education as an important topic of analysis within the civil war literature, they provide little insight into how schools shape identities before and after armed conflict. The comparative and international education literature has been more effective in addressing some of these questions.

Over the last two decades, the field of education and conflict has gained traction amongst practitioners and scholars invested in learning about and responding to the effects of violent exposure on learners and educators in conflict-affected nations. Research on education and conflict highlights both ameliorating and reinforcing effects of schooling and armed conflict. Some scholars argue that education can prevent or minimize ethnic conflict by cultivating strong national identities (Paulson 2011; Smith 2010; Green 2000). As a result, schooling is seen as an important step towards state formation and peace-building. Others highlight the ways in which schools fuel ethnic tensions by limiting access to education for minority groups, using biased curriculum content, and establishing discriminatory or exclusionary language policies (Matsumoto 2015; King 2013). This research is grounded in the theoretical framework of school as a part of post-conflict reconstruction.

As a first step to answering my research questions on the effects of post-conflict educational reforms and youth identities in Sierra Leone, I conduct a review of the political science literatures on civil wars, and focus on those that discuss education and social identification. Theories encountered in these texts then proceed to inform the conceptual and operational definition of post-conflict educational reform that guides my research. Following a discussion on my research design and chosen empirical methods, I present the conditions under which I code post-conflict educational reforms using Nicholas Sambanis’ 2004 civil war dataset. To conclude, I discuss the future of my research study and outline the steps for a successful ethnographic study on post-conflict educational reforms and youth identities in Sierra Leone. The goal of this paper is to bring forth a more nuanced conceptual and empirical understanding of the role of education in peace-building and reconstruction.

Author

• Christiana Kallon-Kelly, University of Pennsylvania