All over the world, there is an upsurge of interest from young people in studying peace.
This is often something that confounds or confuses administrators.
They're often clueless. Parents are often frightened and scared that their offspring want to go into a field where there are no jobs.
But it is young people who are firing the development of approaches all over the world that
often have to be clever and innovative because there are no departments of peace studies.
So that's what I'm going to be talking with you about today in Africa.
For example, there are 800 universities and there are now 26 centres for the study of peace.
But in many, if not most of those 800 universities, there are young people who want to study the subject in the United States.
There are now more than 400 centres or departments for the study of peace.
But it's happening all over the world and it's often unseen when I'm not in Oxford.
I am involved teaching with the University for Peace, which is a United Nations affiliate.
The main campus is based in Costa Rica. We offer 11 master's degrees at Costa Rica.
The reason that the main campus is in Costa Rica is because the University for
Peace was established as the result of a resolution in the General Assembly.
And it was Costa Rica that proffered the resolution and it was thought wise to put the university there.
Also, Costa Rica had demilitarised in the 1940s, but we also have regional programmes around the world Africa,
Central Asia, South America, South Asia, all over the world.
We don't have students in the regional programmes.
We work with instructors and lecturers to help them respond to the trend that I mentioned at the beginning.
And I was part of the team that built the Africa programme in 2002 and 2003.
We visited with 50 universities in Africa and 15 countries.
And I want to tell you what happened that, um, Baraa, a state university for science and technology in western Uganda.
We walked in and we sat down with the dean of development studies who almost immediately thrust paper in our hands and said,
this is the syllabus for a course that we want to teach.
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?
She said, oh, no, we have 90 students who have signed up for an introductory course on the study of peace.
And neither I nor any member of my faculty has any training in this field whatsoever.
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,
well, all of this is fine. But when do we get to learn all of these other things that are important to us?
So let me share with you a few things that we have learnt in the process of trying to address this trend.
We have evolved several principles. One is that the term peace has a different meaning in every local language.
There is no universality to the term and there are often quite explicit.
They may mean that the ancestors are sleeping well or that there is chicken in every pot,
or that the girls are no longer forced into marriage, often very, very concrete and specific meanings.
In some parts of the world, the word cannot be used. There's no point in talking about peace to the Palestinians, for example,
who simply don't believe that there is such a thing or that peace making efforts are sincere.
And you find variants of that theme and other parts of the world fundamental principle
of strengthening existing institutions rather than developing anything new.
The development of a critical mass of teachers. Neil made a very strong point about so much starting in the playground.
If you don't have a critical mass of teachers who have been trained and prepared, who understand non-violent transformation of conflict,
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.
But they need to be guided to implement that. The teachers are, of course, educated in the universities, so.
The universities of the world that will produce the teachers that can change what happens on the playground.
Another principle is the gender as a crosscutting issue involved in the building of peace.
I find in my work that the southern hemisphere, particularly in cultures where there is deep or extreme patriarchy,
there is very sensitive awareness of the significance and importance of gender.
It doesn't need to be explicated.
It's understood that the socialisation of males for warrior behaviours is a profound impediment to peace in societies.
But the absence of analytical tools is often a problem for translating that into pedagogy.
Another principle is the importance of the NGOs and academicians to each other.
As one academician in an African university put it to me, they the NGOs are doing what we teach,
but the NGOs often don't know how to document their work.
The academicians, on the other hand, often need the real life context of the work that's being done by the NGOs.
So bringing the NGOs and civil society organisations together with the new academicians who are moving into the field can be very important.
Another is to compensate for deficits. The universities all over the world will never be the University of Oxford.
Nothing will ever be the University of Oxford. So other ways have to be found to compensate.
And the use of multi-media materials and online technologies has become very important for that.
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.
So there's no point in thinking about getting the library up to speed with books.
Profound need for contextualisation to the local situation.
The strategies that have been employed in many parts of the world are very basic and simple.
Some of them pertain to Oxford. And one is the use of multidisciplinary faculty committees that is frankly admitting that
the study of peace cannot be approached through the portal of any single discipline.
The study of peace requires a presence at the table of a variety of disciplines.
Pedagogues, psychology, history, communications, anthropology, political science, sociology and so on.
There is no possibility of approaching it through a single discipline.
So this is actually something that can be frankly embraced and faculty committees are doing that across the world.
They're adopting the multidisciplinary approach. It's demanded, it's called for, it's appropriate.
And it also allows for the emergence of programmes without new budgets or with minimal budgets.
Another is the scheduling of regular lectures in order to build a constituency.
So by creating an annual lecture, which has a great deal of prestige and attention,
it's possible to enlarge the number of academicians across departments who are
concerned about the study of peace and who view this as part of their domain.
Another effort is by building on what already exists, that is taking whatever is happening and incorporating into it new syllabi,
sometimes taking a degree programme and adding and the study of peace and beginning to enlarge what is offered to students in that way.
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.
The joint supervision of theses might be something that would be germane for Oxford in so many instances.
It may require an anthropologist and a development economist or an historian
and a specialist in linguistics for a thesis depending upon what the topic is.
So by frankly embracing the need for an interdisciplinary approach and having joint supervision of theses,
it's possible to work with students and better prepare them to become practitioners in a field that's inherently interdisciplinary.
The development of collaborative research facilities is. Similar.
That is, rather than trying to start up more centres of this or that, it may be wise instead to work together and collaborate.
And finally, the digital sharing of bibliographic resources and video materials.
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.
One is the fact that there's profound under documentation of breakthroughs.
There are many, many, many instances of real accomplishment throughout the world in peace building and peacemaking that have not been documented.
Historical analysis is lacking. There are many societies in which non-violent struggles have had critical successes.
And it's gone unrecorded. So the job of documentation in historiography is very important for this field.
This is something in which Oxford can lead. Secondly, there are many questions that are under theorised.
The urgency of addressing global violence has out, sped or out distanced the development of grounded theory.
Again, this is an area where Oxford can lead. There are issues that demand illumination from different disciplines.
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.
Viewing it as something that's oppositional or idealistic or not the real world.
And again, Oxford can lead in developing the methods for talking and engaging the realists.
I'm going to close Dhaif, but not until I mentioned one example of something that the University for Peace is trying,
which may be of interest to some people in this room.
It's a programme that brings young instructors from universities in South Asia for a master's degree.
Once they're working on the master's degree, their thesis is the design and construction of a curriculum for a programme that they
will lead and courses they will teach when they return to their own universities.
They return home and three times during the following year.
A professor from the University for Peace visits them and Porscha at the Islamic Women's College or an Banaras Hindu university or wherever,
and code teaches with them so that they have reinforcement and refreshment and
supervision and someone with whom they can probe the problems that they're having.
In one year, we were able to develop this programme at 17 universities and we are severely underfunded.
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
curricula under close supervision and then code teaching opportunities once they return home.