Violence, Culture, and Peace: a comparative study of childhood and educational aspiration in Karachi and Boston

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Critical Pedagogies, Dialogue, and Peacebuilding

Proposal

In 2018, my doctoral fieldwork with children in Karachi, Pakistan, one of the most violent cities in the world (BBC, 2022) led to startling insights into how children understood violence and peace. To create a research space which was inclusive, I centered “the child as method” (Fanon in Burman, 2019; Corsaro, 2015; Burman, 2008; Mayall, 2000; see also Nayak 2003). This approach, centring “Southern issues” as “children’s issues” (Burman, 2008, 166) framed children as capable political actors (Corsaro, 2015; Mayall, 2000; Qvortrup, 1987) who can articulate their own present and future(s). Conducted over a period of months as an ethnographic study with children ages 11-13 and their teachers in one of Karachi’s most politically tumultuous and underdeveloped areas, Orangi-town, my findings are an illustration of children’s perceptions of the “subjective and political ossification and petrification under conditions of colonial oppression” (Ficek in Burman, 2019, 3) and their knowledge of their entrapment in both violence and poverty. Many children voiced the inaccessibility of any kind of future because of their debt to a colonial past (Arendt, 1968), citing the need for, among other things, an exclusionary identity which privileges armed forces to protect Pakistanis from hostile “Others” (Mbembe & Corcoran, 2019). As Lall and Saeed note (2019) of young people in Pakistan: “…nearly two-thirds favour an Islamic state, ‘overwhelming numbers identify themselves as Muslims rather than Pakistanis” (Lall and Saeed, 2019, 49), and many both revere the Army as a “meritocracy” and express doubt in state institutions (Lall and Saeed, 49). This is despite repeated and clear evidence of the Pakistani’s military’s complicitness in “disappearing” dissidents (Amnesty, 2024), economic exploitation (see Akhar, 2022), and involvement in ethnic agitations and hierarchies. Male children frequently drew their future selves holding guns as part of the armed forces, ready to die as a martyr on the border, while many of the female children drew themselves as a mother and a housewife, citing their role as “mothers of the nation” as the only space for possibility. How can children dream, I asked consistently throughout this work, if their dreams are cut short by contextual violence, a bureaucratized state (Arendt, 1968), and the ongoing cultural reinforcement of violence as the only way forward? In other words, how can children dream when their dreams are of death?

I centred my conclusions around the Urdu word majboori, or forceful action/inaction or constraint, and engaged with Arendt’s (1970) definition of violence: “Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it” (79). It is this “violence of constraint,” a concept that I elaborate on in my conclusions, that forced children, their parents, and their communities to “forfeit [their] capacity for responsible political commitment” and engage in praxis and “liberation …from the determinations shaped by their past” (Ricoeur in Kearney, 2004, 78; Fanon in Burman, 2019, 29). As Bhambra phrases it, “The issues of colonialism…go beyond the hierarchies of identity and representation, however important these hierarchies may be, to entail social structures which are not simply historical but continue into the present and underlie identities” (2021, 75). If a national history and culture is steeped in violence from inception (Ricoeur, 2004), and if cultural and national narratives reinforce and mythologize this same violence, how do we move towards peace and find “horizons of possibility” (in Kearney, 2004, 78)? Children, as Qvortrup (1987) theorized, as they become potential political citizens both understood and could alternate an alternate “way of worlding” (Escobar in Santon and Meneses, 2019) including “good citizens” who cleaned garbage from the street, helped the elderly and the young, and planted greenery to bring joy to the mohallah/neighborhood. They could not, however, access this utopia because of their cultural, political, and economic position; as one elder in the community told me, “This place never leaves us. Even if we dream of something else, the sand here stays in our shoes” (2018).

While this study was limited to the time and scope of my doctoral work, my theoretical model urged further exploration and use centering the question of what happens when violence becomes a cultural vernacular, or a by-product of unfettered modernity (see Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012). In the United States, as in Pakistan, political violence has become an everyday part of life (Conroy, 2025). If we begin to deconstruct the binary between “North/South,” colonial/decolonial, “developed” and “developing,” perhaps we can also begin to understand that, perhaps, “the West recognizes that it is playing catch up with the temporality of others” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012, 123). How would this allow us to better understand solutions to promote peace in both culture and education? What might we learn from the members of society who have to live in the world we are careening towards?

To this end, I conducted a small-scale 2025 study of children in urban Boston, using the same questions and methods, to begin to understand whether the violence and entrapment that seem inherent in the logics of the modern and the necropolitical (see Mbembe & Corcoran, 2019) have suffused into global cultural norms and educational institutions. What might this tell us, I ask throughout this work, about what is possible both in the periphery and in the imperial center? I end this presentation with a reflection on policy: How might we take the illustrations and thoughts of children in Boston and in Karachi and consider how they might inform our decisions and policies in education as we attempt to critically reflect on the moment we are in temporally and long for peace?

Author

• Maria Khwaja, Salem State University