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The narrative presented in this book revolves around the idea that contemporary education on and/or for peace, particularly in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict, can and ought to be strengthened by incorporating a focus on historical memory. This idea has its origins not in detached academic reasoning but in my personal, long-time experience as an observer and analyst of armed conflict and university lecturer in conflict/peace studies in violence-inflected countries in the global South, especially in Colombia. Peace education conceived in these terms helps to address some of the shortcomings of what I call the conventional and critical schools in the field. Furthermore, historical memory-oriented peace education can contribute to filling voids in and enhancing the new, UN-led sustaining peace agenda, thereby supporting the achievement of the SDGs. At the same time, the narrative highlights that we cannot take anything for granted. Our present knowledge about the relationship between historical memory, peace education for sustaining peace and achieving the SDGs is still limited. There clearly is a need for more research on the complex issues that have been addressed in the pages of this book. Before outlining future areas of research on education for sustaining peace through historical memory, the main thread of the presented narrative can be summarised as follows.

Both peace and education are “essentially contested,” hard-to-nail-down concepts. Welding them together in one single term—peace education—without accounting for this basic fact, which has bedevilled research and practice in the fields of peace studies and peace education for more than half a century, raises challenging questions about what it is that is being proposed and done; and how it is done and by whom, and for what purpose. With their normative, apolitical, morally appellative and culturally universalist focus on the individual learner, conventional conceptions and practices of peace education do not easily relate to the variable, heterogeneous and context-dependent notions and realities of peace and education that can be found across the globe. They also shy away from taking account of often entrenched asymmetric and unequal power relationships between social, ethnic and other groups that typically characterise violence-inflected societies, thereby circumscribing the possibility to contribute through education to the creation of more inclusive institutional structures that enable peaceful coexistence, even reconciliation, beyond the mere absence of direct, structural and cultural forms of violence. While not wrong, evoking the importance of building “cultures of peace” falls short of addressing these tough realities.

Critical approaches to peace education, in turn, forefront the importance of empowering individuals as well as collectives to become agents of social transformation, especially at the local level. In this perspective, education for peace is understood as social action geared towards finding solutions to a broad range of direct, cultural and structural manifestations of violence, injustice and inequality. Yet, while critical peace education is more attuned to the thorny issues of power and exclusion, and pays more attention to social and horizontal inequalities and other structural drivers of violence, it is faced with the challenge of showing convincingly how the empowerment and emancipation of the marginalised and oppressed through formal and informal education for peace can lead to broader institutional transformation that respects the freedoms and rights of all members of communities ravaged by violence.

Regarding the memory of individuals and collectives of past violence, atrocious crimes and injustice, efforts to recover and preserve it are today increasingly widespread in countries wrestling with, or emerging from, violent conflict. This reflects the rise of memory studies as a distinct field of inquiry as well as the growing recognition of the importance of centrally including the voices of victims in the elaboration of narratives of past suffering and evil. However, both conceptually and in praxis historical memory work faces challenges that those who conduct it have to navigate. Among the pitfalls historical memory work faces are the tensions between history and memory giving substance to claims that forgetting should trump remembering. Furthermore, because it is anchored in the subjective domain of memory applied historical memory work risks deepening prevailing patterns of hatred, enmity and exclusion in addition to being instrumentalised and manipulated by hegemonic societal groups and interests. This notwithstanding, specific contemporary cases, such as that of Colombia, reveal that under certain conditions historical memory work can yield positive results in terms of giving voice to victims on all sides of the violent conflict spectrum, thereby honouring their entitlement to recover and preserve the memories of past suffering and helping them to address traumatic past experiences.

The sustaining peace agenda, fielded by the UN in the mid-2010s, offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways in which we approach our applied, everyday work on and for peace in the classroom and beyond. Regarding the field of peace education, there is merit in adopting the less prescriptive, value-laden and universalising and, at the same time, more indeterminate, normatively restrained and humble elements that set the discourse on sustaining peace apart from that of conventional international peacebuilding. In this respect, incorporating a focus on historical memory and employing didactic tools such as narrative, oral histories, remembering and futures visioning can enhance the strength and value of education on and for peace in a world riven with crises, disunity and violent conflict.

Rather than upholding notions of universal values, independent of local culture and historically formed power relationships, and the idea that peace can be achieved by righting the individual mind; or seeking to bring about far-reaching social transformation to alleviate the plight of the oppressed and marginalised by empowering them to resist and fight for their rights, such an approach strives to enable learners (and teachers) to work towards healing past trauma and recognising the “other” as a moral agent. Historical memory-oriented peace education thus seeks to promote reconciliation by opening up space for the surfacing and expression of emotions. More cooperative, trusting and harmonious relationships among individuals and collectives are enabled on the basis of new identities shaped by experiences of having witnessed and listened to the suffering of the “other.” Enhancing such relationships through education on and for peace could be key for strengthening the resilience of individuals and collectives vis-à-vis endogenous and exogeneous shocks associated with different forms of direct, structural and cultural violence and injustice.

Owing to the dialectic nature of peace within and among societies and states, violence and injustice in our world are highly unlikely to ever being overcome in their entirety. Just like the conventional and critical schools, historical memory-oriented peace education cannot change this. But it can provide additional, more effective support to strengthening and sustaining peaceable relationships that are central in the global quest for achieving the SDGs. In this effort, employing in the classroom didactical tools like narrative, oral history and remembering and futures visioning, which are amenable to supporting historical memory-oriented education on and for peace, does not mean that conventional and critical approaches to the field ought to be jettisoned altogether. Rather, while incorporating a focus on historical memory is relevant in its own right, it also serves as a backdrop to the enhancement and critical interrogation of the more established modes of peace education. In this regard, it must not be forgotten that historical memory work itself is grappling with challenges and tensions that should be addressed in the classroom in open and critical dialogue with both conventional and critical perspectives. It is also the case that there are significant differences regarding the depth and richness of historical memory work across violence-inflected societies. Some, such as Colombia, are stronger positioned in this regard than others, such as El Salvador or Guatemala. All of these factors ought to be considered when designing and implementing learning strategies on and for peace in the classroom.

To illustrate these concluding observations and elaborate briefly on an outlook for research and practice in the field of education for sustaining peace through historical memory, let me return again to Colombia—the one case to which I have made ample reference throughout this book. If education, and I am particularly thinking of tertiary education here, is to play a role in sustaining a state in which Colombians of all walks of life can coexist peacefully, find paths towards reconciliation and are enabled to address and transform a multiplicity of conflicts in non-violent ways in an “environment in which human potential can flourish” (Institute for Economics & Peace 2019: 67), it is fundamental to acknowledge in the first place that the country is still nowhere near this desirable condition. Despite the 2016 peace agreement and several years of efforts to implement the accord’s key provisions, Colombia remains torn between “legitimacy and violence.” Social leaders and representatives of the armed conflict’s survivors are among those groups that today are key targets of a plethora of remaining armed groups, including neo-paramilitaries and FARC dissidents, all of which entertain links to drug trafficking milieus and other criminal organisations and/or crimilegal activities. Put differently, peace education in a Colombia of “no war, no peace” is under the obligation to account for the fact that even a negative state of peace remains a far-off aspiration, not a close-by reality.

This type of violence-inflected context, which is reflective of the deep cleavages and inequalities (social, horizontal, territorial, and so on) that figure in the discussed critical approaches, conditions peace education. Promoting such education in Colombia therefore cannot be framed in any straightforward manner on the basis of the old debate about whether to assign priority to the form and pedagogy of peace education, on the one hand, or its contents on the other. Rather, the challenge is to establish how these two realms, which should not be seen as separate but as influencing one another, can be integrated into one coherent single framework. In this future endeavour, it would be of only limited help to draw selectively on the conventional and critical schools. The former, with its individualistic and morally appellative and/or culturally oriented focus, runs the risk of adding to the existing burden of, and frustration with, value-oriented ethics and democratic citizenship education. The latter, with its emphasis on critical reflection and transformative emancipation and empowerment, may contribute to deepening animosities and antagonisms among learners, and between them and their social environments, unwittingly unsettling students without providing the skills to cope with the cognitive, emotional and other challenges they are wrestling with on a daily basis.

A more propitious way of framing peace education therefore would be putting students’ (and teachers’) experiences with, and memories of, different manifestations of direct, structural and cultural violence and injustice at the centre of learning activities in and outside of the classroom. This reflexive praxis, which can help address the mentioned challenges posed by “reality’s normative power,” ought to include attention to the ways in which students and their families and communities have learned to cope with, or become more resilient vis-à-vis, the stresses and traumas associated with past and present violence and injustice. In other words, historical memory-oriented peace education would not only look at the painful past but also towards a—hopefully—more bearable, harmonious and peaceful future, one in which non-violent and constructive relationships between individuals and among groups can be sustained. This approach, which echoes Galtung’s focus on clearing the past and working towards closure without forfeiting the equally important tasks of equity-, conciliation- and harmony-enhancing conflict resolution (Galtung 2017), can be nourished by recourse to the country’s considerable experience with historical memory work. Local approaches to peace education, grounded in a deep understanding of the context (social, political, institutional, economic, and so on) of diverse types of violence and peacelessness, can be further developed in dialogue with international perspectives, both conventional and critical.

Several broad areas of future research and practical engagement stand out. They include determining in what ways ethics and democratic citizenship education can become more sensitive towards issues of peace, violence and historical memory; how historical memory-oriented peace education can help overcome the challenge of linking the micro-level of individual attitudes, beliefs, behaviour and values with the macro-level of institutional and social structures; why and through what mechanisms enhancing non-violent and constructive social relationships through historical memory-oriented education on and for peace strengthens the resilience of individuals and collectives vis-à-vis endogenous and exogeneous shocks associated with different forms of direct, structural and cultural violence and injustice; and, finally, how the impact of peace education on individuals and societies, and its contribution to sustaining peace and advancing towards the achievement of the SDGs can be comprehensively evaluated and measured.