Rethinking Peace Education in a Time of Endless Wars

Oct 25, 2021 | London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security
Online
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This event is part of the Gender, Peace, Education and International Law Symposium held under the ERC project ‘A Gendered International Law of Peace’.

What does ‘peace’ mean to us, and to our students, in today’s world of endless wars? How can we explain why the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently dreamed of by the ‘peoples’ of the United Nations in 1945, has failed so profoundly? As a teacher of public international law, I am guilty of following the now long tradition of teaching about peace tangentially, through topics such as the rules regulating ‘the use of armed force’ and ‘the peaceful settlement of international disputes'. This approach does little to unsettle the UN Charter’s dominant negative understanding of peace as the absence of armed conflict. In this presentation, I rethink my own teaching practise and suggest ways I could have taught these subjects more critically. I also propose some strategies for fostering alternative, more hopeful imaginaries of peace in the classroom, even within the discipline of international law. By drawing on feminist, queer, indigenous and postcolonial dreamings of peace, and discussing some contemporary examples of the efforts of grass roots communities to live in peace, I conclude that rethinking peace in education, law and beyond is not only possible, but imperative. 

Who: London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security

Where: Online

When: 25 October 2021