Teaching Cultural Memory in South Sudan: Education’s Role in Creating Negative and Positive Peace
Start Date
12-1-2012 10:30 AM
End Date
12-1-2012 12:00 PM
Description
Post-conflict education has the potential to foster reconciliation and contribute both to negative and to positive peace. Whereas negative peace-building establishes the absence of violence, a positive peace requires that parties resolve the underlying issues that fuelled the conflict in the first place. At the same time, because education is always culturally embedded and politically delivered, it can also serve as a destabilizing force when sensitive issues and the memory of a shared violent past are inadequately addressed. As South Sudan heads towards independence on 9 July 2011, concerns about the soon-to-be new country’s ill-prepared social and economic post-war environment are many, and include its limited capacity to satisfy the educational needs of its population. The long-term outcomes of the reconstruction process, and the very viability of South Sudan as an independent nation, will be influenced by the success of national educational programming in developing the capacity of the population. At the same time, given the ethnic-based character of the conflict, the new curriculum policy must also contribute to the formation and transmission of collective identity, social cohesion, and a sense of shared citizenship. Drawing on research among South Sudanese communities in South Sudan and in the diaspora, this paper explores the role of education in general, and the pedagogy of teaching cultural memory in particular, in their capacity to promote – or to erode – reconciliation, peace and nation-building in the world’s newest nation.
Teaching Cultural Memory in South Sudan: Education’s Role in Creating Negative and Positive Peace
Post-conflict education has the potential to foster reconciliation and contribute both to negative and to positive peace. Whereas negative peace-building establishes the absence of violence, a positive peace requires that parties resolve the underlying issues that fuelled the conflict in the first place. At the same time, because education is always culturally embedded and politically delivered, it can also serve as a destabilizing force when sensitive issues and the memory of a shared violent past are inadequately addressed. As South Sudan heads towards independence on 9 July 2011, concerns about the soon-to-be new country’s ill-prepared social and economic post-war environment are many, and include its limited capacity to satisfy the educational needs of its population. The long-term outcomes of the reconstruction process, and the very viability of South Sudan as an independent nation, will be influenced by the success of national educational programming in developing the capacity of the population. At the same time, given the ethnic-based character of the conflict, the new curriculum policy must also contribute to the formation and transmission of collective identity, social cohesion, and a sense of shared citizenship. Drawing on research among South Sudanese communities in South Sudan and in the diaspora, this paper explores the role of education in general, and the pedagogy of teaching cultural memory in particular, in their capacity to promote – or to erode – reconciliation, peace and nation-building in the world’s newest nation.