1 00:00:00,570 --> 00:00:08,670 All over the world, there is an upsurge of interest from young people in studying peace. 2 00:00:08,670 --> 00:00:13,330 This is often something that confounds or confuses administrators. 3 00:00:13,330 --> 00:00:23,190 They're often clueless. Parents are often frightened and scared that their offspring want to go into a field where there are no jobs. 4 00:00:23,190 --> 00:00:29,250 But it is young people who are firing the development of approaches all over the world that 5 00:00:29,250 --> 00:00:36,780 often have to be clever and innovative because there are no departments of peace studies. 6 00:00:36,780 --> 00:00:41,940 So that's what I'm going to be talking with you about today in Africa. 7 00:00:41,940 --> 00:00:49,830 For example, there are 800 universities and there are now 26 centres for the study of peace. 8 00:00:49,830 --> 00:00:58,950 But in many, if not most of those 800 universities, there are young people who want to study the subject in the United States. 9 00:00:58,950 --> 00:01:05,850 There are now more than 400 centres or departments for the study of peace. 10 00:01:05,850 --> 00:01:11,670 But it's happening all over the world and it's often unseen when I'm not in Oxford. 11 00:01:11,670 --> 00:01:17,970 I am involved teaching with the University for Peace, which is a United Nations affiliate. 12 00:01:17,970 --> 00:01:26,100 The main campus is based in Costa Rica. We offer 11 master's degrees at Costa Rica. 13 00:01:26,100 --> 00:01:29,790 The reason that the main campus is in Costa Rica is because the University for 14 00:01:29,790 --> 00:01:35,670 Peace was established as the result of a resolution in the General Assembly. 15 00:01:35,670 --> 00:01:42,630 And it was Costa Rica that proffered the resolution and it was thought wise to put the university there. 16 00:01:42,630 --> 00:01:51,360 Also, Costa Rica had demilitarised in the 1940s, but we also have regional programmes around the world Africa, 17 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:56,880 Central Asia, South America, South Asia, all over the world. 18 00:01:56,880 --> 00:02:00,720 We don't have students in the regional programmes. 19 00:02:00,720 --> 00:02:10,470 We work with instructors and lecturers to help them respond to the trend that I mentioned at the beginning. 20 00:02:10,470 --> 00:02:16,650 And I was part of the team that built the Africa programme in 2002 and 2003. 21 00:02:16,650 --> 00:02:22,360 We visited with 50 universities in Africa and 15 countries. 22 00:02:22,360 --> 00:02:29,640 And I want to tell you what happened that, um, Baraa, a state university for science and technology in western Uganda. 23 00:02:29,640 --> 00:02:39,240 We walked in and we sat down with the dean of development studies who almost immediately thrust paper in our hands and said, 24 00:02:39,240 --> 00:02:43,530 this is the syllabus for a course that we want to teach. 25 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:53,820 Can you tell me? Are we on the right track? And I said, well, could we not have our meeting and do this by correspondence over email afterwards? 26 00:02:53,820 --> 00:03:01,710 She said, oh, no, we have 90 students who have signed up for an introductory course on the study of peace. 27 00:03:01,710 --> 00:03:07,290 And neither I nor any member of my faculty has any training in this field whatsoever. 28 00:03:07,290 --> 00:03:16,800 Now, that's just indicative of what's happening all over the world where the students are coming and knocking on the doors of deans and saying, 29 00:03:16,800 --> 00:03:23,910 well, all of this is fine. But when do we get to learn all of these other things that are important to us? 30 00:03:23,910 --> 00:03:34,260 So let me share with you a few things that we have learnt in the process of trying to address this trend. 31 00:03:34,260 --> 00:03:43,440 We have evolved several principles. One is that the term peace has a different meaning in every local language. 32 00:03:43,440 --> 00:03:49,620 There is no universality to the term and there are often quite explicit. 33 00:03:49,620 --> 00:03:56,070 They may mean that the ancestors are sleeping well or that there is chicken in every pot, 34 00:03:56,070 --> 00:04:03,120 or that the girls are no longer forced into marriage, often very, very concrete and specific meanings. 35 00:04:03,120 --> 00:04:09,900 In some parts of the world, the word cannot be used. There's no point in talking about peace to the Palestinians, for example, 36 00:04:09,900 --> 00:04:16,950 who simply don't believe that there is such a thing or that peace making efforts are sincere. 37 00:04:16,950 --> 00:04:22,260 And you find variants of that theme and other parts of the world fundamental principle 38 00:04:22,260 --> 00:04:30,000 of strengthening existing institutions rather than developing anything new. 39 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:37,080 The development of a critical mass of teachers. Neil made a very strong point about so much starting in the playground. 40 00:04:37,080 --> 00:04:45,810 If you don't have a critical mass of teachers who have been trained and prepared, who understand non-violent transformation of conflict, 41 00:04:45,810 --> 00:04:52,560 who understand how to work with young people, young people have a strong sense of what's right and wrong and what's fair and unfair. 42 00:04:52,560 --> 00:04:59,970 But they need to be guided to implement that. The teachers are, of course, educated in the universities, so. 43 00:04:59,970 --> 00:05:07,180 The universities of the world that will produce the teachers that can change what happens on the playground. 44 00:05:07,180 --> 00:05:16,720 Another principle is the gender as a crosscutting issue involved in the building of peace. 45 00:05:16,720 --> 00:05:26,500 I find in my work that the southern hemisphere, particularly in cultures where there is deep or extreme patriarchy, 46 00:05:26,500 --> 00:05:33,940 there is very sensitive awareness of the significance and importance of gender. 47 00:05:33,940 --> 00:05:37,150 It doesn't need to be explicated. 48 00:05:37,150 --> 00:05:49,180 It's understood that the socialisation of males for warrior behaviours is a profound impediment to peace in societies. 49 00:05:49,180 --> 00:05:57,430 But the absence of analytical tools is often a problem for translating that into pedagogy. 50 00:05:57,430 --> 00:06:02,980 Another principle is the importance of the NGOs and academicians to each other. 51 00:06:02,980 --> 00:06:11,680 As one academician in an African university put it to me, they the NGOs are doing what we teach, 52 00:06:11,680 --> 00:06:15,880 but the NGOs often don't know how to document their work. 53 00:06:15,880 --> 00:06:23,380 The academicians, on the other hand, often need the real life context of the work that's being done by the NGOs. 54 00:06:23,380 --> 00:06:34,810 So bringing the NGOs and civil society organisations together with the new academicians who are moving into the field can be very important. 55 00:06:34,810 --> 00:06:43,450 Another is to compensate for deficits. The universities all over the world will never be the University of Oxford. 56 00:06:43,450 --> 00:06:50,040 Nothing will ever be the University of Oxford. So other ways have to be found to compensate. 57 00:06:50,040 --> 00:06:57,780 And the use of multi-media materials and online technologies has become very important for that. 58 00:06:57,780 --> 00:07:05,230 A librarian at the University of the Western Cape told me that for three years running, she had been unable to buy a single book. 59 00:07:05,230 --> 00:07:10,300 So there's no point in thinking about getting the library up to speed with books. 60 00:07:10,300 --> 00:07:17,440 Profound need for contextualisation to the local situation. 61 00:07:17,440 --> 00:07:21,970 The strategies that have been employed in many parts of the world are very basic and simple. 62 00:07:21,970 --> 00:07:29,830 Some of them pertain to Oxford. And one is the use of multidisciplinary faculty committees that is frankly admitting that 63 00:07:29,830 --> 00:07:37,150 the study of peace cannot be approached through the portal of any single discipline. 64 00:07:37,150 --> 00:07:43,300 The study of peace requires a presence at the table of a variety of disciplines. 65 00:07:43,300 --> 00:07:54,730 Pedagogues, psychology, history, communications, anthropology, political science, sociology and so on. 66 00:07:54,730 --> 00:07:58,270 There is no possibility of approaching it through a single discipline. 67 00:07:58,270 --> 00:08:04,600 So this is actually something that can be frankly embraced and faculty committees are doing that across the world. 68 00:08:04,600 --> 00:08:11,170 They're adopting the multidisciplinary approach. It's demanded, it's called for, it's appropriate. 69 00:08:11,170 --> 00:08:19,270 And it also allows for the emergence of programmes without new budgets or with minimal budgets. 70 00:08:19,270 --> 00:08:25,540 Another is the scheduling of regular lectures in order to build a constituency. 71 00:08:25,540 --> 00:08:31,150 So by creating an annual lecture, which has a great deal of prestige and attention, 72 00:08:31,150 --> 00:08:36,310 it's possible to enlarge the number of academicians across departments who are 73 00:08:36,310 --> 00:08:43,090 concerned about the study of peace and who view this as part of their domain. 74 00:08:43,090 --> 00:08:55,330 Another effort is by building on what already exists, that is taking whatever is happening and incorporating into it new syllabi, 75 00:08:55,330 --> 00:09:07,210 sometimes taking a degree programme and adding and the study of peace and beginning to enlarge what is offered to students in that way. 76 00:09:07,210 --> 00:09:17,830 Faculty workshops where faculty could be frank with each other on the problems that they're having in dealing with the pedagogies of teaching peace. 77 00:09:17,830 --> 00:09:26,500 The joint supervision of theses might be something that would be germane for Oxford in so many instances. 78 00:09:26,500 --> 00:09:33,700 It may require an anthropologist and a development economist or an historian 79 00:09:33,700 --> 00:09:40,120 and a specialist in linguistics for a thesis depending upon what the topic is. 80 00:09:40,120 --> 00:09:48,910 So by frankly embracing the need for an interdisciplinary approach and having joint supervision of theses, 81 00:09:48,910 --> 00:09:57,340 it's possible to work with students and better prepare them to become practitioners in a field that's inherently interdisciplinary. 82 00:09:57,340 --> 00:10:01,180 The development of collaborative research facilities is. Similar. 83 00:10:01,180 --> 00:10:11,260 That is, rather than trying to start up more centres of this or that, it may be wise instead to work together and collaborate. 84 00:10:11,260 --> 00:10:17,440 And finally, the digital sharing of bibliographic resources and video materials. 85 00:10:17,440 --> 00:10:29,110 So as far as the relevance of all of this to Oxford, I would say that there there are perhaps five points that I'd like to make. 86 00:10:29,110 --> 00:10:34,540 One is the fact that there's profound under documentation of breakthroughs. 87 00:10:34,540 --> 00:10:48,460 There are many, many, many instances of real accomplishment throughout the world in peace building and peacemaking that have not been documented. 88 00:10:48,460 --> 00:10:58,960 Historical analysis is lacking. There are many societies in which non-violent struggles have had critical successes. 89 00:10:58,960 --> 00:11:06,430 And it's gone unrecorded. So the job of documentation in historiography is very important for this field. 90 00:11:06,430 --> 00:11:15,850 This is something in which Oxford can lead. Secondly, there are many questions that are under theorised. 91 00:11:15,850 --> 00:11:28,960 The urgency of addressing global violence has out, sped or out distanced the development of grounded theory. 92 00:11:28,960 --> 00:11:39,330 Again, this is an area where Oxford can lead. There are issues that demand illumination from different disciplines. 93 00:11:39,330 --> 00:11:52,350 As I've mentioned, again, Oxford can lead and there is finally the question of how to speak to the realists who may prefer not to talk of peace. 94 00:11:52,350 --> 00:12:00,960 Viewing it as something that's oppositional or idealistic or not the real world. 95 00:12:00,960 --> 00:12:10,110 And again, Oxford can lead in developing the methods for talking and engaging the realists. 96 00:12:10,110 --> 00:12:17,310 I'm going to close Dhaif, but not until I mentioned one example of something that the University for Peace is trying, 97 00:12:17,310 --> 00:12:21,690 which may be of interest to some people in this room. 98 00:12:21,690 --> 00:12:32,370 It's a programme that brings young instructors from universities in South Asia for a master's degree. 99 00:12:32,370 --> 00:12:42,210 Once they're working on the master's degree, their thesis is the design and construction of a curriculum for a programme that they 100 00:12:42,210 --> 00:12:48,380 will lead and courses they will teach when they return to their own universities. 101 00:12:48,380 --> 00:12:54,380 They return home and three times during the following year. 102 00:12:54,380 --> 00:13:03,890 A professor from the University for Peace visits them and Porscha at the Islamic Women's College or an Banaras Hindu university or wherever, 103 00:13:03,890 --> 00:13:11,210 and code teaches with them so that they have reinforcement and refreshment and 104 00:13:11,210 --> 00:13:17,360 supervision and someone with whom they can probe the problems that they're having. 105 00:13:17,360 --> 00:13:23,630 In one year, we were able to develop this programme at 17 universities and we are severely underfunded. 106 00:13:23,630 --> 00:13:35,090 I think this is a model that may have some applicability. The idea of working with people who are already teaching and then the development of new 107 00:13:35,090 --> 00:13:43,510 curricula under close supervision and then code teaching opportunities once they return home.