What do young people learn about peace in schools? Evidence from Belarus and Russia.

• In Event: Politics, Education and Citizenship

Proposal

This paper will present the insights from the analysis of peace education in secondary schools in Belarus and Russia to determine what kind of peace young people learn about and what kind of peace agents they are educated to become in the two countries.

Peace education is critical to prevent and transform overt and concealed conflicts and direct, structural, and cultural violence and to build and sustain peaceful, inclusive and equitable societies. Peace education instils in young people attitudes and behaviours that sustain a culture of peace and non-violence and equips them with skills to resolve and redress unjust conditions and lead peaceful lives (Bajaj, 2019; Bajaj & Hantzopoulous, 2016; Bickmore et al., 2017; Zembylas, 2018).

There is little research on matters related to peace education in Belarus and Russia. And yet, these are the contexts where peace education is critical to address populist, autocratic, and militaristic processes and practices and to build and sustain positive and just peace. According to the Global Peace Index (e.g., violence, conflict, militarisation, etc.) compiled by the Institute for Economics & Peace (2022), Russia is one of the least peaceful countries (ranked 160 out of 163) while Belarus is ranked 116. For positive peace (e.g., attitudes, institutions, structures to sustain peaceful societies), Belarus is ranked 68 and Russia - 71 (Institute for Economics & Peace, 2022). Moreover, both countries have found it severely challenging to transition to democracy and their populations face “insecurities regarding the condition of democratic systems, distrust of major societal institutions and rising populism” (Bui-Wrzosińska, 2019, p. 3). In 2020, Russia was ranked 144 and Belarus – 155 (out of 176 countries) as regards the quality of democracy (Democracy Matrix, 2020). These statistics paint a bleak picture, although it is worth noting that opinion polls and empirical studies in Eastern Europe and Russia show that the general public does embrace key ideas and ideals of democracy (Sianko et al., 2022).

What we know in Russia is that informal and formal education has been promoting justification of the totalitarian Soviet regime and its atrocities against its own people and abroad (Khapaeva, 2016; Nelson, 2019) and extreme patriotism and hyper nationalism (Tsyrlina-Spady & Lovorn, 2015). Education has also contributed to the development of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality (Håvard & Enstad, 2020; Rapoport, 2009) to justify hatred and intolerance against anyone who is perceived as the ‘Other’. The ‘Other’ in this context includes Russia’s own ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities, immigrants from post-Soviet space, and people at home and abroad who believe in liberal and progressive values. We also know that minority/Indigenous groups, which number over 190 peoples in Russia, have been denied their identities, knowledges, values, and cultures, through education that seeks to assimilate and Russify them (Khanolainen et al., 2022). At the same time, violence, such as psychological and physical bullying, persists in Russian schools and Russia is among the top countries for bullying prevalence (Inchley et al., 2020) and teachers rationalise peer aggression and blame victims of bullying (Khanolainen et al., 2021).

In Belarus, there is even less research. What we know is that on the one hand, the powerful authorities have created the system of “ideological education” that prioritises loyalty towards the state and unconditional support of its policy and, on the other, the civil society that have created an informal system for democratic education but which is now viewed as a threat to the state (Zhurakovski, 2006-2007). Research also shows that younger people embrace democratic values (Sianko, 2019) but there is moderate support for diversity, inclusion, and equality and low to moderate engagement in civic and political life among adolescents (Sianko et al., 2022).

In this paper, we thus analyse how peace education is conceptualised in and incorporated into the curricula in the two countries and whether these conceptualisations align with critical peace education and peacebuilding values, attitudes, and behaviours or clashes with them.

In particular, we are asking the following three questions:

1). How is peace education represented and conceptualised in Belarus and Russia’s curricula?
2). What kind of ‘citizen’ do Belarus and Russia’s education systems seek to develop, as conceptualised in the two countries’ curricula?
3). How do the conceptions of citizens in Belarus and Russia align (or clash) with the values, competencies, skills, and behaviours that peace education seeks to promote?

To answer these questions, we use thematic analysis of
(1) education curricula and education policies for formal education in the two countries;
(2) youth-related policies by ministries of education and culture; and
(3) teacher education policies.

For the analysis, we rely on the framework developed by the Peace Education Curriculum Analysis (PECA) team (Standish & Joyce, 2016). The framework has three dimensions that analyse how a curriculum incorporates (1) non-violent conflict transformation; (2) recognition of structural, direct, and cultural violence, and (3) positive peace. Positive peace is further divided into nine categories: peace zone (safe, non-violent spaces), peace bond (positive relationships), social justice, eco mind, link mind/interconnection, gender mind, resilience, wellbeing, and prevention. While we draw on this framework, keeping in mind that the analysis is conducted in authoritarian states, we pay attention to any other aspects of incorporation of peace education in the documents.

Authors

• Yulia Nesterova, University of Glasgow

• Daria Khanolainen, University of Jyväskylä