Power-Sharing, Legacies of Violence, and Perceived Inequality in Post-War Burundian Education

• In Event: Changing Educations in Conflict and Peace: War, Violence, and Education Reform

Proposal

When access to education is unequally distributed across ethnic groups the likelihood of ethnic conflict is high (Alcorta, Swedlund, and Smits, 2018). Consequently, many scholars and policy makers contend that redistributing education towards equitable access can contribute to peace after violence (Novelli, et al., 2017; UNESCO, 2016). Such practices are often mandated in peace agreements (Fontana, 2018), including via ethnic quotas in schooling (King and Samii, 2020). Promoting equitable access to schooling has many potential benefits, including mitigating grievances against the state, increasing perceived post-war government legitimacy (Burde, 2014), and, in some cases, teaching obedience and respect for authority as a means of preventing future rebellions – for better or worse (Paglayan, 2022). Formal curriculum taught in schools may also promote narratives of reconciliation and social cohesion (Tawil and Harly, 2004). Such positive benefits of schooling may contribute to short- and long-term peacebuilding goals. Yet, schooling does not occur in a vacuum. Narratives of trauma and intergenerational legacies of violence are often passed down through the family (Dinas, Fouka, and Schlaepfer, 2021a; 2021b), especially in cases of interethnic violence. Further, government efforts to address inequalities may not align with changing perceptions of those inequalities (Langer and Mikami, 2013; Langer and Smedts, 2013), especially given past injustices. This may be particularly important in cases where ethnic group status has changed, though members of previously marginalized groups have yet to see tangible gains from these changes in power. That is, formal education and (at-home) informal narratives of current and past conflict may work in opposition to each other as countries aim to move beyond inequality to promote equality through education.

How do narratives of post-war equality and social cohesion intersect found in formal schooling interact with narratives of inequality, trauma, and past grievances in schools after civil war? How are these dynamics influenced by changes in relative group status post-war? I explore these questions using the case of education development in post-war Burundi. Before the 1993—2005 civil war, the elite from the minority Tutsi ethnic group (14%) excluded the majority Hutus (85%) from politics and economics (Nkurunziza, 2012). Exclusive education practices systematically removed Hutus from upper levels of schooling, one of the most notorious and controversial being the (Timpson et al., 2016). The war left nearly 300,000 dead and close to 1,000,000 refugees. In 2000 the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement was ratified and changed the ethnic power structure of the country by introducing interethnic power-sharing measures, including a 60/40 arrangement favoring Hutus in the executive and legislative branches of government (King and Samii, 2020; Vandeginste, 2014). In 2005, Pierre Nkurunziza, the leader of the CNDD-FDD and member of the Hutu ethnic group, became president. Since then, the government prioritized education development and addressing ethnic and regional inequalities in schooling, drawing legitimacy for redistributive education programs and peace and unity programs from provisions found within the peace agreement. Education access has subsequently increased, though regional inequalities (favoring former Tutsi power centers) remain in national exam participation (Dunlop, 2023), however, students in previously marginalized (and predominantly Hutu) areas now score higher overall on these exams (Dunlop, Bekkouche, and Verwimp, 2022). Burundi is therefore an important case to understand how informal narratives and formal narratives interact in schooling in given changes in ethnic power structures and mandates to address inequality in schooling.

In this paper, I explore how 114 youth (72 secondary school, 25 university, 17 out-of-school, ages 18 to 35) in Burundi understand their education access and the quality of education they received in school compared to those available to their parents. I also examine the implications of these understandings for efforts to overcome such structural legacies of violence and building peace in education. The interviews were semi-structured, and included Cantril Life Ladders asking participants to rank their educational experiences compared to others around the country and compared to their parents' era. I analyze responses across ethnicity as well as parental education and explore themes relating to anticipated gains in status and educational opportunity as well as how groups perceive a loss of status and quality relative to their parents. I focus on understandings of changes in education quality compared to the past, and implications of inequality embedded in the national exams in the past and (potentially) in the present.

Throughout, I show that while most youth believe that education opportunities are greater now compared to the past, the vast majority believe that the quality of education has decreased. However, those with parents who achieved higher levels of education pre-war offer different understandings of these changes (focusing on status loss) compared to those whose parents only achieved primary school (focusing on an unrealized potential in their education opportunities). Hutu and Tutsi youths also disagree on the extent of ethnic discrimination and role of national exams in fomenting inequalities (in education and beyond) in the past, and there are now interesting dynamics at play in terms of perceived inequalities in the national exams now. The fact that perceived inequalities in education both continue and now exist across multiple dimensions has implications for how addressing education inequalities across ethnic groups in schooling can overcome narratives of intergenerational inequality in schooling and reduce the likelihood of violence, without further intervention. This paper has implications for the study of ethnopolitics, education, and violence, in both scholarship and practice.

Author

• Emily Dunlop, Cornell University