The gendered moral economies of peace: Cold War education in socialist Tanzania and its contemporary echoes

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Women, Cold War politics, and peace education: Challenging the paradigm

Proposal

During the Cold War, Tanzania emerged as a flagship of African socialism, advancing a vision of peace rooted in ujamaa (familyhood), self-reliance, and solidarity with liberation movements across the continent. Education was central to this project: policy speeches, curricula, and international cooperation agreements framed schools as sites for cultivating peaceful, productive citizens. Yet, while these discourses rejected colonial hierarchies and capitalist exploitation, they largely erased the structural and gender-based violence experienced by women and girls within the nation’s borders. These silences did not vanish with the Cold War’s end; instead, they persist in altered form in post–Cold War and contemporary global education frameworks, including those associated with Sustainable Development Goal 4.7.

This paper addresses a persistent gap in the literature: while scholarship has examined Tanzania’s socialist education policies (e.g., Nyerere, 1967; Mushi, 2009) and Cold War educational aid (e.g., Samoff, 1999), little attention has been paid to how “peace” was gendered and to the continuities and transformations in the silences surrounding everyday and systemic violence against women and girls across different geopolitical eras. Drawing on feminist international relations theory, decolonial perspectives, and feminist critical policy analysis, the study asks:

1. How was “peace” defined in Tanzanian socialist education policy and associated donor discourse during the Cold War?
2. How were women and girls positioned within these constructions of peace?
3. What forms of violence were named, and which remained unspoken?
4. How do these Cold War silences persist, transform, or re-emerge in post–Cold War and contemporary global education policy frameworks?

Methodologically, the paper employs a critical historical policy analysis of 1960s–1980s Tanzanian education policy documents, Julius Nyerere’s speeches, UNESCO and donor program reports, and Tanzanian press coverage, using discourse analysis to examine representations, omissions, and ideological framing. This is paired with a targeted review of post–Cold War and contemporary policy frameworks on peace and global citizenship education. Preliminary analysis suggests that while Tanzanian socialism challenged imperial and capitalist violence, it simultaneously upheld patriarchal moral economies that rendered gender-based violence invisible — a conceptual legacy that continues to shape today’s peace education agendas.

By tracing the historical construction and evolution of these silences, the study contributes to feminist and decolonial theories of peace education, offering critical insights for developing educational frameworks that confront both structural and gendered violence in the present.

Author

• Caroline Manion, OISE, University of Toronto