Teaching Peace, Embodying Peace

Long before I became a minister, I became a teacher. My teaching career unofficially began in Guatemala where I worked as a volunteer during their civil war in 1992. I wasn’t there as a teacher, I was there to volunteer having given up my spot in the Peace Corps in (what was then) Zaire a year prior. But I consider my time in Guatemala as the start of my career in education because it was during that time when I realized just how unjust the world is and I felt called to change things. I had more than an inkling about this, of course, thanks to friends in high school, courses in college, and the campus activism I was involved in in the 80s. But being in Guatemala, and experiencing—on my first day—a procession of protesting indigenous women carrying signs asking “Where are our husbands? Where are our fathers?” my eyes were thrust open. I learned right then about the Desaparecidos and my education continued whenever I was checked boarding or debarking buses by teenagers with machine guns, or when I’d see gunfire in the hills at night, or when I’d see missionaries working to ‘save souls’ but not improve living conditions. 

During my time there, I had many conversations that opened my mind—and my heart—and when I returned home I did a deep dive into Guatemalan history to understand the roots of their situation. Many years later, I learned that uncovering Root Causes is central to the practice of peace education and the act of peacebuilding. As many of you may already know, I discovered that United States policies and practices in Guatemala and throughout Latin America were directly responsible for the devastation that Guatemala (and other nations) experienced. Neo-imperialism, greed, and violence led to destruction, death, and long-term destabilization. And of course, this was a pattern. The United States government was quite good at wreaking havoc in other places and then abdicating any responsibility to help in the aftermath. But here’s the funny thing I uncovered: so much of US (and other imperialist-mindset nations) ‘intervention’ in the world is done in the name of  “creating PEACE” and all these years later—with a Ph.D. in Peace Education—I have to wonder how the heck are they defining peace?

Peace is one of the words that trips people up. It's often viewed as too lofty or fluffy or utopian and impossible or it becomes a “relative concept” that falls into the unclear trap of “whose peace?” Conflict, violence, and justice are also terms that folks struggle with. Many of us have diverging definitions of these Big Ideas—peace and conflict and violence—which leads to confusion, more conflict, and often, great acts of violence. World history is riddled with wars and oppressive systems and structures meant to—in the eye of the power holder—create peace and stability. But probably more accurately, enforces silence and submission. But that is not true peace.

In peace education, we provide and model a method of critically and systemically looking at issues to unpack assumptions, identify root causes, and then creatively enter into dialogue toward transformation and repair. And to do this, we have to start with some real definitions.

As I’ve written before, while it’s not a cheery thought, Peace Educators like myself tend to start everything we do with an assumption of violence in some form. Conflict and harm are always present. But, how we look at conflict, oppression, and harm makes it possible for us to not just create an illusion of peace—or a temporary band-aid mollifying version of peace—but rather true peace.

But what is this true peace? Peace research uses the terms, Negative Peace and Positive Peace. Negative Peace is the taking away of the “directly bad” violence thus the removal of direct or personal violence. So yeah, ending wars and interpersonal violence is a good thing, but that’s only the start. To create Positive Peace we need to remove all the things that insult or harm one’s dignity, thus we need to remove the structural violence - the oppression, the poverty, the alienation, the injustice. I actually prefer to think of it this way: Negative Peace is the emptying out of direct harm and violence, and Positive Peace is Refilling the Cup with true peace - justice, human rights, environmental responsibility, etc. More on that here.

This is no small task, right? We need tools. That’s where Peace Education can help! 

Today, we are overwhelmed with examples of both direct and structural violence but not everyone sees them as such. Have you tried having a conversation about racism and the historical roots of the United States with anyone lately? Folks are just unable to see the forest for the trees! The same is true with violence against women, crushing debt, rampant poverty, and climate change! So many folks can’t see issues as Systemic and Interconnected. And they certainly, then, have trouble seeing Root Causes. And that’s where we begin in peace education. Take for example local violence - direct violence in struggling communities. Outsiders like to lay the blame on some inherent flaws of the people and their place in the world. But with a peace education lens, we can see that the Root Cause of this Direct Violence is poverty and instability which are manifestations of Structural Violence. People act out violently—even against their neighbors—if and when they have limited opportunity, and limited resources, and are actively subjugated by society because of their skin color or country of origin. It’s not hard to see the connection once you look.

So, in peace education when we want to understand a conflict or issue, we start with assumptions. What do we think we know? What do we see on the surface? What is the media telling us? What is being left out? How are our feelings involved in the issue? By naming and unpacking assumptions, we can see our blind spots and we can also see “what’s in the room”. We see that everyone's perceptions come from a variety of perspectives. By airing and seeing these perspectives we can actually hear one another and begin to see the complexity of an issue.

Then, we begin to dig to get to the roots of the issue. As I just mentioned, the Root Cause of urban violence is not “people are amoral and don’t care about their neighbors”. That’s just someone’s perspective looking in from the outside. But Root Causes go deeper. Those Root Causes are poverty, underfunded schools based on racist redlining policies, and historical and systemic racism, to name just a few. By using a systems lens coupled with critical and historical analysis, it is easy to see that conflicts and problems usually run a lot deeper than they seem. 

So, simply, peace education is this practice. It’s not just saying “Let’s be kind and get along!” No, it is looking at things deeply, and critically, and connecting the dots. We can use this for something as big as questioning why our government seems to do nothing to address climate change or something smaller, like a conflict in the community. By looking for Root Causes, your whole perspective on how things work or don’t work will shift. And then it gets better! When we begin to see problems through this interconnected lens, we have so much more to work with when it comes to generating ideas to transform or change things.