Where universities are active agents of peace building

Now is the time for higher education in particular and education in general to contribute to the establishment and embedding of peace in Colombia, according to José Manuel Restrepo Abondano, president of Colombia’s Del Rosario University, who recently visited Bath in the United Kingdom to discuss the question of how Colombia can move from a protracted armed conflict to a sustainable solution.

The audience at the event – hosted by the International Centre for Higher Education Management at the University of Bath and the Society for Research into Higher Education – included university leaders from South Africa on the Future Leaders Initiative funded by the South African government, who spoke about how relevant the university innovations occurring in Colombia were to South Africa.

Before exploring the role of higher education in establishing and embedding lasting peace, they were taken on an explanatory journey through the darkest periods of Colombia’s recent history, in which it has experienced more than 50 years of internal armed conflict between state forces and various illegal groups, mainly guerrillas and paramilitaries. It is one of the most lethal conflicts witnessed since the Second World War.

Abondano explained that the conflict dramatically escalated over three decades, peaking in 2002 with more than 700,000 people affected and dropping to just over 100,000 in 2014. At its height, for 12 years between 1990 and 2002, it took more than 25,000 lives each year on average, dropping to a still substantial 15,000 lives a year from 2002 until 2015.

A definitive ceasefire by the main guerrilla group is in operation after the government of Juan Manuel Santos arrived at a peace agreement with the FARC-EP guerrillas – the People’s Army – in August 2016 and signed a revised version of it in November 2016. A ceasefire by the last remaining rebel group, ELN, is also in place, to be reviewed in January.

The key question for Abondano now is how universities can help identify the causes and the potential solutions to such a protracted conflict and contribute to building and sustaining peace.

Abondano explained that the conflict has over the years spawned abundant literature among scholars. Considerable attention has been given to the “structural” causes of the struggle, including poverty, lack of public services, statelessness, exclusion, marginality and lack of agrarian reform.

Increasingly, works have focused on the strategy pursued by illegal armed actors, which he termed the “greed or grievance” debate about taking power, drug-related activities and land grabbing.

‘Microfoundations’ of violence

But scant attention has been paid to the “microfoundations of violence” – including motivations, identity and enlistment of the combatants, values and norms prevailing in the armed organisations, and relationships between the warring factions and the population.

Explaining the evolution of the conflict, he said the roots could be traced back to the 1960s. In the wake of another cycle of violence in the 1940s and 1950s between Conservatives and Liberals, three main communist insurgent forces emerged during the Cold War, denouncing the legacy of the alternating conservative and liberal governments and the harsh socio-economic conditions, especially in rural areas.

Their emergence led to a crackdown by security forces and escalation of the conflict in the 1980s, against a backdrop of “democratic consolidation and economic liberalisation”, as the two strongest armed groups, FARC-EP and the ELN, sought to create a mass popular uprising and seize power.

Their funding came from drugs operations and extortion and they were able to recruit soldiers and arms on an unprecedented scale.

In response, diverse self-defence organisations and death squads, labelled paramilitaries, appeared, eventually forming a coalition, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia or AUC. Some of its units evolved in the shadow of the state and others autonomously, establishing alliances with drug traffickers, landlords and cattle ranchers.

As a result, while they were supporting the fight against the guerrillas, they were also enemies in the war on drugs, Abondano said.

As guerrilla and paramilitary factions in a growing number of municipalities turned into de facto powers, the lines between drug activities and political violence blurred.

Peace initiatives were made by numerous governments from the 1980s, but the breakthrough came last year with the agreement with FARC-EP.

This focused on a raft of issues, including access and use of land; land development programmes to improve development for all; infrastructure improvements for rural areas; development of health, education, housing and water supplies and sanitation; promotion of research and technological innovation; and the eradication of hunger, Abondano said.

It also sought to improve democratic participation by vulnerable populations who felt excluded by the traditional see-sawing of power between the Liberals and Conservatives.

Intensifying the fight against armed criminal groups, security guarantees, abandonment of weapons and justice for victims were also among the ingredients, plus active support from countries and organisations with experience in managing post-conflict situations, such as the United Nations, Cuba and Norway.

Abondano said a key plank of the agreement is the commitment to addressing the drugs trade that feeds violence. This will include eradicating production, public health programmes to tackle consumption, and strategies to tackle organised armed criminal groups involved in the drugs trade.

The challenge for universities

The current ceasefire with ELN will be reviewed on 12 January. But ceasefires alone do not resolve conflict.

The challenge for universities is how best to ensure they make a significant contribution to lasting peace. So far there is limited literature, few conceptual frameworks and strong theoretical challenges to this idea.

But Abondano noted some interesting trends in higher education – which in Colombia is comprised of a mix of public and private institutions – that offer grounds for hope.

“Far from collapsing in the midst of violence, the universities have undergone spectacular transformations, in particular since the 1990s,” he said. “The changes have been motivated by complex considerations which tend towards an inclusive development and a responsible citizenship among other aspects.

“As a consequence, significant improvements have been registered in different spheres – including access to training, pedagogical standards of teaching and learning, academic mobility, research and publications, services to community.”

What is at stake, he said, is an understanding as to how Colombian universities can contribute to a sustainable peace.

He quoted the work of Lynn Davies, emeritus professor of international education at the University of Birmingham in the UK, who argued that education has two faces: it can act as a unifying force, but it can also be a cause of conflict. It can be part of the response, but it also has the ability to fuel or exacerbate violence through unequal access or promotion of negative stereotypes.

Other experts have highlighted the contribution it can make to forming identity, developing political autonomy, critical thinking, maintaining links between opposing groups, contributing to peace-building and supporting reconstruction via training for state building and society capacity building.

Professor Alan Smith, UNESCO Chair at Ulster University in the UK, has pointed to education’s value in counteracting inequality and the need for education to be sensitive to diverse groups in a conflict-affected country.

This last point hints at the approach of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire that education must be a collaborative process of reciprocal relationships between the educator and the educated. “Those relationships are regarded as the foundation of participatory, emancipatory and transformative education,” Freire said.

Shaping behaviour

Abondano stressed that universities emerge as “peace-building actors” in post-conflict situations by “shaping the behaviour of different agents” – such as governments, entrepreneurs, students, people and public opinion – through rules, norms, values and intellectual frameworks.

He advanced an analytical framework that acknowledges that sustainable peace-building depends on “education contributions to societal transformations, embedded in complex local, national and global political economies that both shape and are shaped by this relationship”.

Key to this approach was respecting diversity, ensuring equity, transforming access and addressing injustice, including the “understanding of past and contemporary historical and cultural injustices that underpin conflict”.

He said the oldest and most important universities in Colombia are becoming key players in building, keeping and strengthening peace at national and local levels, through teaching, research, assessment, service and public engagement. This included not just the provision of education and development of peace education, but also the promotion of a culture of peace and participation in the national peace-building process.

Promoting a culture of peace in a transitional context involves promoting a culture of social interaction based on principles of freedom, justice and democracy, diversity, empathy, tolerance and solidarity. It must be a culture that rejects violence and works to solve problems through dialogue and it must guarantee everyone the full exercise of all rights and means to participate in the development of society.

The first point can involve teamworking, volunteering programmes, community-based field work. Examples of peaceful problem-solving include the installation of a university ombudsman, the development of model UN societies and debating teams. Guaranteeing rights and participation involves institutional inclusion strategies and the role of legal clinics, he said.

Strategies with most impact

Abondano said there are some interesting lessons to be learned from Colombian universities. Those that had the most impact on sustainable peace-building had programmes and strategies that were “project oriented, territorially rooted, interdisciplinary, gender-focused and community-led”.

He said in Colombia higher education has helped to mitigate the psychosocial impact of conflict by creating “stability, structure and confidence” through universities as “social laboratories” that provide teaching, research and service that contribute to peace-building.

In concrete terms higher education had raised access from 37.1% to 51.5% of the university age population between 2010 and 2016, and 60% of new students entering higher education now came from families whose incomes did not exceed two monthly minimum wages.

The latter was achieved through scholarships based on academic performance and socio-economic variables, such as whether students came from a conflict affected area, ethnic minorities or had disabilities; and also from universities actively closing access and opportunity gaps, which are a huge driver of conflict, and promoting the values of non-discrimination.

“Through specific trainings, universities are strengthening collective memory, resilience and diversity and identities,” Abondano said.

There is also a strong emphasis on gender equity, protection against gender violence and the training of not just indigenous teachers, but the empowering of indigenous women, he added.

National and international research and services consortia have been established to set the agenda of the education system around education for peace issues. This includes creating textbooks to teach about internal conflict to new generations, monitoring the progress of the peace agreement, sharing curricula in peace and conflict studies, and debating education for peace with local and national education authorities.

At the same time universities have become active actors in reconciling, dealing with the legacies of the conflict and helping communities to move on.

According to Abondano, they are “directly involved” in mediation and peaceful resolution of conflicts, historical social memory, restorative justice, reintegration into civilian life, training of peace managers, reconciliation and forgiveness, peace brigades involving staff and students, health care in conflict areas and helping to enhance profitable projects and productive partnerships.

Summing up, Abondano said universities are responding to 50 years of learning and resilience in the face of challenges.

“We are crossing the night to a new morning of this country. Our past was written by bullets, but with dialogue, with greatness, unity, solidarity and education we will rewrite our future and for that universities will be needed.”

Lessons for other countries

Responding to Abondano’s presentation, Professor Rajani Naidoo, director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management at the University of Bath, who organised the seminar, noted that Colombian universities have found ways to reach out to young people in guerrilla organisations and to reintegrate them into civilian society.

“There are important lessons here for universities in other countries where there are growing numbers of young people who are marginalised and angry and turning to violence,” Naidoo said.

Some of the university leaders in the audience from South Africa felt that in their country, there was insufficient focus on apology and forgiveness for the past and the need for negotiation in the present. South African universities should respond to this in their curriculum and research, they said.

Nirvana Rajkumar, quality promotion officer at Durban University of Technology in South Africa, said the presentation was “thought provoking and very much indicative of the critical importance of negotiations for peace leading to development and economic growth”.

Professor Bernie Morley, deputy vice-chancellor and provost of the University of Bath, said the evidence of the good that universities can contribute to society is “apposite in a time when the UK government is asking for evidence of what universities contribute at home and abroad”.

Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, vice-president and dean, University of Bath, said every citizen in their heart of hearts seeks a peaceful transformation of society towards a future that ensures an inclusive approach to economic and social development.

“As Nelson Mandela argued, education lies at the heart of that transformation. Colombian universities highlight for us all the vital role that higher education can play in ensuring a way of peace rather than strife.”