Struggles for peace with justice: Building a network of grassroots educational activists for knowledge exchange and solidarity

• In Event: Community and Social (Re)Integration after Conflict and War through Education

Proposal

Background and context the study

In conflict-affected societies, historically marginalised ethnic and religious minorities and indigenous populations repeatedly encounter deep systemic injustices including unjust and exploitative systems that supress identity, discriminate and deny existence of minorities and exclude them from political and economic participation. For oppressed and marginalised communities in culturally and territorially contested spaces, peace is concerned with their political freedoms, economic redistribution, reparations, land repatriation, recognition of their interconnected and silenced histories and cultures, respect for human rights and an inclusive political environment in which they can exercise these rights and fulfil their life goals. Education in these challenging environments serves as an enabler of grassroots resistance.

This paper draws on the work of ‘Peace with Justice Network’ that brings together in dialogue marginalised communities in politically hostile environments from diverse contexts in order to contribute towards the processes that transform conflicts. The network comprises academics, human rights activists and educational practitioners from grassroots communities in Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, India, Mexico, Guatemala and Syria. Through online exchanges and symposia, it facilitates the exchange of knowledges and voices of disadvantaged and politically repressed communities about their struggles for peace and social justice, harnesses interconnected indigenous experiences; and builds solidarity across participating organisations. The aim is to understand peculiarities of the nature of relationship between struggles of the marginalised communities for peace and stability and state responses to their struggles and to produce public-facing peacebuilding outputs that are contextually relevant and draw on local experiences of peace and learning from the network.

Theoretical framework

The paper draws on theoretical works on ‘epistemic justice’ (Tuhiwahi Smith, 2021; Fricker, 2013; Santos, 2014) and ‘critical rights literacy’, drawn from broader theories of critical literacy (Freire, 1970; Beck, 2005) which seek to transform social injustices and inequalities, to recognise ethnic and indigenous movements as the sites of knowledge production and ‘laboratories of learning’ for peace and social justice (Novelli et al, 2021). First, the notion of epistemic justice is vital as it involves recognition of ideas, learning and knowledge of the peoples who struggle for peace and life with dignity. The network engages with the most innovative ideas and practices emerging from civil society and other organisations in the global South which could be learned by critical academics researching peace and social justice and share these in ways which support the struggles of marginalized communities. In this sense, the paper borrows the concept of an ‘ecology of knowledges’ from Santos (1999: 38) who points out that “alternatives of knowledge and of action must be searched for, either where they have been most obviously suppressed or have survived in marginalised/ discredited form”. Second, critical rights literacy is a form of learning which actively encourages people to critically engage with the broader social, political, historical and economic factors which enhance or more typically close down their access to and exercise of their rights. It is an important step beyond the human rights literacy perspective that rarely incorporates the voices of marginalised or disenfranchised communities and which tends to side-step issues of power and the ways in which governance systems and institutions deny people’s rights.

Findings

Drawing upon a series of dialogues at regional and global symposia with educational activists from seven different countries over two years, the study reveals that peace in most of these contexts is threatened by repressive states and armed groups that promote homogenising political visions, neoliberal capitalism and monolithic national identities at the expense of diverse and interconnected cultural subjectivities. Grassroots learning communities conceptualise peace in the form of territorial, political and cultural justice and draw on their ecology of knowledges rooted in their indigenous cultures to resist human rights violations and oppressive structures. In this process, learning and knowledge production is part of everyday survival and manifests resourceful pedagogical approaches: companimianto (Guatemala), approaching violence as a ‘disease’ to be treated by indigenous knowledge (Mexico), systematisation of the knowledge about ethnic discriminations and internal colonisation (Nepal), repossession of ethnic language and cultures via parallel education provisions (Thailand and Myanmar), experimentation of autonomous higher education to curb political repression (Rojava, Syria), Roshani movement among Hazaras (Afghanistan) and use of poetry and Adivasi voices to resist political repressions and economic exploitation (India). All these grassroots struggles demonstrate the power of protest in defending their communities from violence and violations of their human rights.

Conclusion and implications

This research shows that grassroots struggles produce the most significant knowledge about pedagogies for peace and social transformation. Research initiatives around understanding of peace and peacebuilding should focus on building international solidarity and knowledge sharing platforms across social movements at the grassroots to connect peoples’ lived experiences and their aspirations. This could provide opportunities for peoples at the margins to learn from each other about what works/ doesn’t work in terms of movements for peace and justice; promoting autonomy and local governance systems which are supportive of peace building. Research as a process of dialogue and co-learning could help recognise ecologically situated epistemologies and cognitive justice through which the knowledge generated serves communities and their struggles. This approach has significant implications for theory, policy and practice for building peace, justice and trust guided and led by the knowledge and lived experiences of indigenous marginalised communities.

Author

• Tejendra Pherali, UCL Institute of Education