Educations In Ethnic Violence

In Educations in Ethnic Violence, Matthew Lange explores the effects education has on ethnic violence. Lange contradicts the widely held belief that education promotes peace and tolerance. Rather, Lange finds that education commonly contributes to aggression, especially in environments with ethnic divisions, limited resources and ineffective political institutions. He describes four ways in which organized learning spurs ethnic conflicts. Socialization in school shapes students' identities and the norms governing intercommunal relations. Education can also increase students' frustration and aggression when their expectations are not met. Sometimes, the competitive atmosphere gives students an incentive to participate in violence. Finally, education provides students with superior abilities to mobilize violent ethnic movements. Lange employs a cross-national statistical analysis with case studies of Sri Lanka, Cyprus, the Palestinian territories, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Canada and Germany.

In Educations in Ethnic Violence, Matthew Lange explores the effects education has on ethnic violence. Lange contradicts the widely held belief that education promotes peace and tolerance. Rather, Lange finds that education commonly contributes to aggression, especially in environments with ethnic divisions, limited resources and ineffective political institutions. He describes four ways in which organized learning spurs ethnic conflicts. Socialization in school shapes students' identities and the norms governing intercommunal relations. Education can also increase students' frustration and aggression when their expectations are not met. Sometimes, the competitive atmosphere gives students an incentive to participate in violence. Finally, education provides students with superior abilities to mobilize violent ethnic movements. Lange employs a cross-national statistical analysis with case studies of Sri Lanka, Cyprus, the Palestinian territories, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Canada and Germany.

This collection on peace education includes contributions from an international group of scholars representing a wide variety of geographical conflict areas and exemplifying the multiple venues of peace educational labour. A strong emphasis is given to integrative and sustained long-term peace education efforts.

In identity-based conflicts, what a person learns can become whom a person learns to hate. This book explores the unique position occupied by educators during protracted ethnic conflict. As transmitters of social authority, educators occupy a position in society capable of supporting repressive constructs or challenging social inequalities. Educators who are seen to legitimize the social order may be seen as symbolic markers of the dominant group, while educators who challenge the social order can be perceived as upstarts or threats that seek to subvert social authority. By surveying the perceptions, perspectives, experiences and opinions of Israeli tertiary teachers, this book explores the positionality of educators as agents who wield “both an instrument for oppression and a tool for liberation” (Alzaroo and Hunt 2003, 165). Peace education is a platform to achieve a global culture of peace by recognizing and delegitimizing violence. Using future visioning, this book considers that a primary obstruction to achieving peace is the ability to conceive of peace and asks three questions: do university educators challenge conflict narratives in the classroom? What obstacles exist to prevent educating for peace in Israel? How do educators imagine the future?

In Killing Others, Matthew Lange explores why humans ruthlessly attack and kill people from other ethnic communities. Drawing on an array of cases from around the world and insight from a variety of disciplines, Lange provides a simple yet powerful explanation that pinpoints the influential role of modernity in the growing global prevalence of ethnic violence over the past two hundred years. He offers evidence that a modern ethnic mind-set is the ultimate and most influential cause of ethnic violence.Throughout most of human history, people perceived and valued small sets of known acquaintances and did not identify with ethnicities. Through education, state policy, and other means, modernity ultimately created broad ethnic consciousnesses that led to emotional prejudice, whereby people focus negative emotions on entire ethnic categories, and ethnic obligation, which pushes people to attack Others for the sake of their ethnicity. Modern social transformations also provided a variety of organizational resources that put these motives into action, thereby allowing ethnic violence to emerge as a modern menace. Yet modernity takes many forms and is not constant, and past trends in ethnic violence are presently transforming. Over the past seventy years, the earliest modernizers have transformed from champions of ethnic violence into leaders of intercommunal peace, and Killing Others offers evidence that the emergence of robust rights-based democracy—in combination with effective states and economic development—weakened the motives and resources that commonly promote ethnic violence.

Based on fieldwork and comparative historical analysis of Rwanda, this book questions the conventional wisdom that education builds peace.

How are the processes of increasing ethnic and racial diversity reflected in European schools? How do children and educators experience and perceive interethnic relations in schools? This book examines the issues of interethnic coexistence, the management of ethnic diversity, xenophobic and racial attitudes and, in particular, the under-researched topic of interethnic violence among children in the school environment. Drawing together qualitative and quantitative data across five European countries it offers an insight into the views, personal experiences and responses of children from different ethnic backgrounds to interethnic violence in European schools. International contributors from England, Slovenia, Cyprus, Italy and Austria come together to provide a comparative study of experiences of interethnic conflict and violence in primary and secondary school classrooms. Each chapter focuses on positive measures that can combat discrimination, providing examples of good practice as well as considering the position of the school in promoting citizenship in an increasingly global world. By examining the experiences and perspectives of children, educators and experts, the book provides up-to-date research findings in the field and suggests key mechanisms for addressing interethnic violence in schools. With support, schools can play a key role in alleviating interethnic tensions and combatting ethnocentrism through the implementation of strong policies, acting as ‘protected spaces’. Children’s Voices: Studies of interethnic conflict and violence in European schools is of international relevance both within Europe, and beyond, and will appeal to researchers, teachers and policy makers concerned with race equality in the classroom.

This publication challenges a widely-held assumption - that education is inevitably a force for good. While stressing the many stabilizing aspects of good quality education, the book shows how education can be manipulated to drive a wedge between people, rather than drawing them closer together. After analyzing the increasing importance of ethnicity in contemporary conflicts, this Innocenti Insight outlines the negative and positive faces of education in situations of tension or violence, including the denial of education as a weapon of war (negative) and the cultivation of inclusive citizenship (positive). It emphasizes the need for peacebuilding education that goes further than the 'add good education and stir' approach, aiming to transform the very foundation of intolerance.