Julia Paulson (ed), Education, Conflict and Development, Symposium, Oxford, 2011. 240 pages, $ 48.00, paperback ISBN-978-1-873927-46-5.

As we move through the second decade since 9/11, both social media and drone attacks are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives. At the same time armed conflict continues to be a reality in a number of developing countries. In this scenario, what is the impact of conflict on education and what is the role of education in areas of conflict?

Education, Conflict and Development is a timely collection of essays that investigate, through different case studies, the changing contours of international work around the need for the delivery of education in conflict and post-conflict situations. Julia Paulson, the volume’s editor, is a doctoral researcher in Education at the University of Oxford. She is also editor of Education and Reconciliation: Exploring Conflict and Post-conflict Situations (2011). In her new volume Paulson has attracted contributions from an impressive array of authors with a background mainly in Education. Despite its broad title, the central theme of the collection is not the ‘black box’ or the ‘nuts and bolts’ at the core of the educational process, but rather the processes of delivery of education itself by international donors, agencies and organizations in areas that are (or have been) afflicted by conflict, as well as the complex challenges and politics behind such processes. Unlike most works in this area, the collection does not therefore limit itself only to ‘education within conflict’, but it also explores ‘conflict within education’.

The volume is divided into three sections. Part 1 (chapters 1 to 3) discusses general concepts of education, conflict and development from a geographical and historical perspective. In chapter 1 Colin Brock tackles the relationship between education and conflict. He argues that contention is endemic and inherent to education policy making because of the political control of education. Examples cited range from education in Amazonian Peru, postcolonial Malaysia and in the Indian state of Orissa to conflict over the control of Iran’s massive Azad Islamic University. In Chapter 2 Stephanie Bengtsson examines the concept of fragile states, a phrase that came about after the end of the Cold War to fill a conceptual gap in the aid literature. This gap relates to the perceived blurring of the two separate aid spheres of development and humanitarian assistance. The concept, Bengtsson argues, ‘opens the possibility of conceptualising mechanisms to provide aid to countries that do not seem to be in direct emergency, which would qualify them for humanitarian aid, or ready for economic growth, which would qualify them for development assistance’ (page 34).

In Chapter 3 Jeremy Rappleye explores the complex relationships between education, development and conflict in the context of Nepal, or what he terms ‘the land of three Ps’: peak (the Himalayan mountains), pot (marijuana and hashish) and poverty (attracting development missionaries). Part 2 (chapters 4 to 6) includes case studies from other countries: the conflict between Arab and African Christian groups in South Sudan, expectations and realities of education in post-conflict Sierra Leone, and an analysis of Chinese, South Korean and Japanese transnational history textbooks, which opens an alternative to national textbooks. Part 3 (chapter 7-9) deals with Northern Uganda’s practical implications of education, conflict and development. Topics in this section range from sexual violence to teachers’ perceptions and peace building.

I personally found Tomoe Ostuki’s chapter on Asian textbooks of particular interest. All over the world, textbooks and education lore tend to portray a heroic national history scenario for a country’s students. Ostuki, by contrast, examines the case of the recent textbook History [that] Opens to the Future: The Contemporary and Modern History of the Three Nations in East Asia jointly developed by Chinese, South Korean and Japanese scholars, educators and members of the civil society. This trilateral North-East Asian textbook project is meant to help build a history that transcends national boundaries and thus to help create what the author calls an ‘intergenerational responsibility’ for the past. In a way, it moves away from the dominating narrative and logics of the nation-state towards an alternative regional framework (see, for example, Chen, 2010). The project brings to my mind another ongoing textbook project related to my own region, the Middle East. A fruit of the collaboration between the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research (Germany) and the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (Israel), as with History [that] Opens to the Future, this project will result in a trilingual (Hebrew/Arabic/English) textbook on the history of Palestine/Israel (Hussain, forthcoming). Even though the case study discussed by Ostuki is geographically distant from me, I feel it can help better understand national juridical-political complexities, as well as sensitivities and perceptions of ‘otherness’ not only in North East Asia, but also here in the Middle East.

Another chapter I found inspiring and I believe will be of particular interest to the readers of Environment and Planning D is Jeremy Cunningham’s empirical study on schools and peace-building in Northern Uganda. Cunningham suggests a social learning approach that synthesizes knowledge through the lens of human rights and freedoms. Students’ acquisition of conflict-preventing behavioral-change skills, the author argues, is at the foundation of tolerance of the Other and thus crucial for peace-building. When compared with Christine Pagen’s empirical field study in southern Sudan, where landmines lurk in surrounding areas, Cunningham’s undertaking seems to be less life-threatening. On the other hand, however, Cunningham is concerned with the practical use of knowledge by students, starting from the premise that knowledge is not merely about understanding and recalling definite facts, as Pagen’s survey seems to suggest, but it is also about the ability of students to make connections and cross references.

I believe this collection makes three main significant interdisciplinary contributions that help a better understanding of relations between education processes on one hand, and of conflict and development contexts on the other. Firstly, the results of the field studies conducted on the ground in conflict territories make for an important empirical contribution. Secondly, the study of transnational history as an alternative to national histories opens up to innovative ways of imagining education beyond traditional narratives and geographical imaginations, thus offering compelling possibilities for the future. Thirdly, a learning approach that focusses on a synthesis of knowledge with attention to human rights and freedoms likewise opens up a new space for dialogue and peace-making in contemporary areas of conflict. Incidentally, the volume could have benefited from, firstly, an index at the end of the book offering more flexibility in (re)searching the contents of the book; and secondly, from a preface for readers who desire to learn something about the story behind the book.

All in all, Education, Conflict and Development is a book that deserves to be read by development geographers, political scientists, aid economists, comparative and international educators, sociologists, historians of conflicts, and others. 

References

Chen K (2010) Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hussain S The politics of education reform in the Middle East: Self and Other in textbooks and curricula. Comparative Education Review, forthcoming.