Seeking Peace in an Undeclared War: De-Normalizing Violence through Nonformal Education in Honduras

• In Event: Tricky Pathways: The Intricacies of Education’s Relationships to Conflict, Violence, and Peace

Proposal

Given the widespread hopes pinned on education for promoting peace (Burde & King 2023), scholarly and practical interest in peace education has grown in recent decades (Hantzopolous & Bajaj, 2021). Despite a number of examples of peace education’s promise for influencing attitudes and even behaviors, however, there is little rigorous evidence of its long-term effects (Burde, et al., 2015), and explicit efforts for education to contribute to peace can be inadequate or problematic (Novelli & Sayed, 2016). One reason why peace education often falters is that programs’ content and assumptions may be externally imposed and decontextualized (Higgins & Novelli, 2020), and much peace education research focuses on the Global North (Bickmore, 2017). Moreover, scholarship on peacebuilding generally prioritizes contexts affected by large-scale armed conflict (Bright & Gledhill, 2018), even though most violent deaths in our contemporary world occur in societies not actively involved in war (Hideg & Alvazzi del Frate, 2021). In other words, both practice and scholarship privilege the views of certain actors and contexts and, in so doing, miss opportunities to gain deeper, more varied insights into how education might contribute to peace.

My study offers one glimpse into the subtleties of education’s relationship to peacebuilding in a context that is typically overlooked in studies of peace education. Honduras is a fragile, non-war setting with high levels of interpersonal violence, hired killings, and organized crime (Landa-Blanco, et al., 2020) — resulting in what some of my interlocutors describe as an “undeclared war.” Although conventional frameworks used to study such violence label it as criminal and place the onus on the individual or specific groups, my participants demonstrate that violence affects the entire society and is sharply political. Drawing on insights from interviews and focus group discussions with more than 80 Honduran participants, as well as sustained observations of the work of five local organizations, I ask what elements of education matter in promoting peace in this environment. My findings show that misconceptions about the severity of Honduras’ crisis permit the formal education system to avoid confronting its role in feeding violence, and nonformal educational spaces are where Hondurans more commonly engage with themes related to violence and peace in meaningful ways.

In particular, I highlight two examples of grassroots initiatives that counteract violence through a combination of nonformal education and community action. I argue that it is local leaders’ deep wisdom about the complexities of violence in their context that guides them in reaching their goals, which they do by de-normalizing violence and supporting young people in creating safer communities. I find that, although participants carry the fear and despair that are widespread in Honduras, the creativity, relationship-building, and agency that these programs provide help them to find forms of peace amidst violence. As such, my study documents local insights into effective peace education in a context of complex violence and illuminates forms of local-level peacebuilding that could be instructive in other communities of Honduras and beyond.

Author

• Amanda Renee Blewitt, New York University