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 Report of a Pedagogic Act in Peace South
Asian Orientation Course on Human Rights and Peace
How we began
The South Asia forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), a regional platform
for human rights activities, after about ten years since its inception,
organized the first regional peace studies orientation course in Kathmandu
from 6 February to 21 February 2000. This was SAFHR's first such orientation
activity in peace and human rights education, probably the first also
in this region, organized as a peace studies course on South Asia, particularly
in form of a foundational course on the moral-ethical values of peace
and human rights. Thirty-three (33) participants were selected and invited
to join the course from all over the region from amongst whom twenty-nine
(29) participated. Included in this were two participants nominated by
the governments of Pakistan and Nepal. This was a result of the policy
of inviting the governments of the region also to nominate one each to
the course.
However, it is important to note why SAFHR took such a step
in pedagogic activity and how it moved in the last year towards organizing
the orientation course. This will help us to understand the plus and the
minus of the work-plan, its advantages and limitations. As a regional
human rights forum SAFHR realized in course of its work how issues of
human rights, for several reasons, were getting irretrievably linked with
issues of peace and conflict resolution for several reasons. First, human
rights abuses have become worse in situation of conflict, state repression,
and the erasure of civil society from peace process. Second, while individual
rights have been receiving, even though insufficient, recognition, group
rights such as of minorities, refugees, non-state persons, internally
displaced, indigenous people, have got almost no recognition at all from
legal authorities, and this has reinforced the contemporary situation
marked by absence of peace. Third, neither a purely human rights activism
alienated from the wider concern for peace, nor a purely peace concern
devoid of the values of human rights has been able to connect peace and
human rights, and establish the democratic linkage. Fourth, numerous civil
liberty activists and peace campaigners among the common people have been
in search of a forum that would undertake the task of establishing such
a connection in pedagogic form. And, finally, as a consequence of all
these imperatives, civil rights activism now calls for an educational
programme that amplifies the notion of the right to peace, peace as
a space to enjoy rights.
The planning
In the summer of 1999 we met in Delhi in a rigorous consultative
meeting on the two notions of peace audit and peace studies orientation
course. To this meeting were invited a group of some twenty people, specialists
and activists in educational institutions, frontline people in human rights,
media experts, and people with experience of re-conciliation, mediation,
moderation and resolution programmes. It was a tight group that focused
on methods of auditing peace agreements, retrieving histories of reconciliation,
preparing modules of peace and human rights studies, assessing the peace-building
capacities of societies, and finally ways of integrating results of public
audits of peace process(es) in the region with the plan of a peace studies
orientation course. This meeting was also regional in nature, as a result
the structure suggested in the meeting had regional inputs in terms of
course content and participation. The Delhi consultative meeting resulted
in two working groups finalizing the two plans - one for peace audit,
and the other for peace and human rights orientation course. The peace
audit exercise was held in Dhulikhel in Nepal. It concentrated on analyzing
two peace processes - in Nagaland in India and the Chittagong Hill Tracts
in Bangladesh. The auditors were from the peace constituencies of society
- women activists, religious leaders, civil liberty campaigners, pedagogues,
and peace activists. The exercise was in a comparative format, and the
findings and lessons have been published as SAFHR paper 5.
The experience of the audit helped to improve the plan for
the orientation course and led to the adoption of some more rigorous steps
to enable the course to integrate in it the moral findings of a public
audit of peace.
Structure of the orientation course
First of these steps related to finding out the ideal mix of (a)
a normative orientation, (b) a practical approach, (c) the way to establish
relation with similar programmes in South Asia so as not to repeat but
to adopt the best in them in our design, (d) desirable recruitment area,
(e) and, the most efficient and the most fruitful way of selection of
participants. The second step related to integrating the results
and methods of peace audit with a public education on peace. The third
step related to the design and syllabus of the schedule. The fourth
and the final related to preparing the course material.
On the most fruitful way of selection of participants, we
prepared brochure, notifications, letters and circulars, and issued them
in two (2) mass dailies (Kathmandu Post in Kathmandu and the Daily
Star in Dhaka), three (3) mass periodicals (Himal in Kathamndu,
Economic and Political Weekly in Mumbai and Mainstream in
Delhi), about sixty (60) newsletters, besides sending them to the thirty-five
(35) partners of SAFHR in the region and to several educational institutions
in countries of the region numbering around twenty (20). We notified also
on the internet. Our journal, Refugee Watch, also carried a detailed
notice. We welcomed and encouraged inquiries, a peace studies desk was
set up to handle correspondences, and we set out on a rigorous selection
procedure. In selecting the thirty participants, we reserved categories
for refugee, minority and women participants. While twenty participants
were to be selected through the public procedure, we invited participation
from partners who were required to follow the same norm of application.
The participants were to be below thirty-five (35) years in age, would
have to write a short note on why s/he would like to join the course and
how s/he would use the experiences therefrom, and the application was
to be supported by two referees. The participants were required to pay
registration fee without exception. Local participants from Kathmandu
also would have to join the residential course as a boarder in order to
participate fully in all course activities. The recruitment area was determined
as youth in age, a blend of human rights and peace activism and scholarship,
experience in women, peace and human rights activism, some amount of media
knowledge, and finally involvement in SAFHR's activities in the region.
This was a fifteen-day (15) course, neither long nor very
short with thirty (30) lecture periods, one day of field work, six interactive
sessions, two evaluative sessions of participants, two writing sessions,
and two evaluative sessions by resource persons. All resource persons
were requested to stay on for two/three days more beyond their designated
day/s of lecture/s so that they could interact with participants and help
us with their assessment. Field-work was linked to one of the major themes
of the course, and course work consisted of a review essay on any of the
papers circulated among the participants as course material and a term
paper on any of the themes in the course. Fifty-six (56) papers - twenty-eight
(28) papers in each category were submitted at the end of the course.
These were evaluated and returned to authors after discussion. Participants
were requested to submit evaluation notes also so that the design could
be improved upon in later attempts. Most complied, and these will certainly
help in making the programme more interactive.
The structure of course not only depended on the duration
of the course, and other associated factors mentioned above, but fundamentally,
on the pedagogic orientation which we wanted to lend to the course. If
peace is a normative activity, it has to be made distinct from the conflict-management
training exercises and strategic studies prevalent today. Therefore the
aim was to emphasize the ethical dimension of the syllabus. The aim was
also to impart to the participants of the course the idea that the ethical
and normative aspects are not suddenly on us. They are historically present,
conditioned by the contingencies of globalization, civil wars, intervention,
gross civil rights abuses, genocide, and the erasure of society from the
arena of peace-building. As a consequence, we wanted to reinforce the
fact commonly ignored, that without the ethical attributes peace becomes
fragile, it is reduced to just a condition marked by absence of war, a
condition empty of all positive contents of a wholesome life. In designing
the course content, we had to therefore combine, and this was the most
critical and therefore difficult part, the ethical with the experiences
of the activism for peace and human rights. This explains the juxtaposition,
not always comfortable, of normative and practical discussions, a broad
range of issues, a sort of rainbow formation ranging from issues of tolerance,
reconciliation, and complexities of self to political issues of globalization,
humanitarian crisis, other regional experiences, and the nitty-gritty
issues of human rights. Issues of environment, cooperation on scarce resources
such as water, occupied the middle ground in this range whose very sweep
was crucial to the development of a rich idea of peace and dignity. The
evaluation reports submitted by the participants did not fail to notice
this. The main evaluation report also noted this. It was intended to be
a foundational course and its relevance or otherwise depended on laying
the foundations of a critical outlook - in short, the foundations and
methods of critical peace studies programme.
Course work and field work
As mentioned earlier, the course consisted of, besides classes,
interactive sessions, course work and field work. Course work consisted
of review papers and term papers. Review essays were meant to encourage
the critical faculty of the participants. Many participants while reviewing
some of the literature made available to them in form of course material
commented on their applicability or otherwise in the South Asian scenario.
Some reviewed a genre of literature instead of a particular piece. Some
reviewed lectures. Among the themes commented upon were militarism, gender
injustice, ecology, the quality of human rights, and forced population
flow. The term papers were more reflective. Again justice was the principle
concern. There was one paper reflecting in a creative way on the ethics
and norms of peace. Some participants commented later that they had found
the requirement of course work very useful. For some activists, this was
the first occasion when they were deliberating in rigorous manner principles
and experiences that they had considered as natural and had practised
as their vocation.
The fieldwork comprised visit to a site of water management,
more correctly speaking, the ruins of a water management system, and a
new management system erected on the ruins. The ruins lie near village
Gajuri, situated at about sixty kms from the city of Kathmandu. The peasants
of Gajuri depend on the waters of Galaundi, a small river, for irrigation
of about 160 hectares of land and generation of electricity. The flood
of 1993 had damaged the infrastructure and nothing has been done after
that to repair Nepal's first small hydroelectric plant. The economically
dominant community in the village comprises groups such as the Bahun,
Chhetri and the Newars. The Tamang, Chepang Damai, Kami and the Sarkis
are the less dominant groups who mostly live at a distance from the canal
passing by the village. The water conflict occurs mainly during paddy
cultivation, which requires water on a daily basis unlike maize cultivation.
Sometimes, at night people drain the water from the canal to their field
without the knowledge of others resulting in conflict. The village committee
now settles conflict such as this. Water conflict had exacerbated when
a power plant was added, the upper catchment area was without water, as
the water began to be drained downward to produce electricity. There was
politics involved in the choice of site of construction of the power plant.
Gajuri was close to the capital; it could provide publicity and political
mileage. Productive infrastructure had not been unfortunately the main
consideration. All these, the participants learnt and appreciated with
the help of two water management experts who accompanied the participants
in the trip. The discussion with the villagers was instructive, there
a close interactive session with the women of the village, and some of
the term papers authored by the participants bore the evidence of their
learning. A few chose to write directly on the field-trip, some while
writing on common management of scarce resources reflected on their experience.
Teachers and the taught
In any pedagogic exercise, howsoever we try to design it as interactive
and dialogic, the unilateral attributes of our educational approach strike
back, sometimes almost unknowingly. This was no less a challenge to those
who wanted to make peace studies an act in experiential education. The
questions we faced, wherefrom was the knowledge and skill to be imported
and how was it to be integrated? How was the course to be dialogic? How
were we to iterate the truth in dialogue drawn from the experiences in
public peace audit exercises that norms of peace and histories of peace
must dialogue with each other? How were we to integrate the notion of
dialogue in the course, in other words, how were the participants and
the resource persons to come out of the course with a transgression and
reversal of the roles of teachers and the taught - a mutuality that only
a dialogic spirit can achieve? Our results were mixed, though the evaluation
notes were appreciative of the resource persons. Let us seek out the reasons.
We started with less than the time we would have liked.
Resource persons with dialogic approaches were not available to the desirable
extent. Course material was not sufficiently integrated with the type
of participants attending. Group activity was insufficient. By the time
the participants were confident of interacting, one week of the two-week
course was over. Unequal language command was also a factor. Above all,
the syllabus, course material, interactive sessions, group activity, and
evaluative sessions were not sufficiently integrated. However, as the
participants later on admitted in their evaluation notes, as the course
progressed, the participants could appreciate the logic and order of the
programme, classes, and course material. The term papers were instructive,
for they related to a variety of topics, showed diversity of approaches,
and clearly showed how they had dialogued with the idea and design of
the programme.
The inaugural and the closing addresses helped in setting
the serious tone and the business-like mood in the programme. Professor
Rajni Kothari's inaugural address on the task of peace studies in the
age of globalization, his presence throughout the course, and Professor
Anisuzzaman's valedictory address on cultural understanding in peace activities
reinforced the underlying philosophical tone of the programme. The final
session therefore brought out questions to be considered in future efforts
in peace pedagogy. The issues posed by the participants are how to decentralize
and federalize peace education? How to integrate an ethical and normative
agenda with specific experiences? How to keep continuity? How to ensure
that the resource persons become involved in the experiences of the participants?
How to make peace education more gender sensitive? And finally, as a consequence
of all these, how can we balance the need for skill-improvement in which
the course should result with a feeling of spiritual enrichment with which
the participants can leave the course?
These issues directly and indirectly posed by the participants,
resource persons, and the well wishers of peace education, become the
concerns with which the plan for the next course can begin.
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