Migration, cultural encounters and (Peace) education

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Peace Education is a special edition focusing on three interconnected topics: migration, cultural encounters, and peace education. Even though migration has been a continuous and integrated part of human history at all times, it increases in certain periods. We are living in such a period. The causes of migration are not the topic of this special issue. The focus is on cultural encounters that follow from migration, and conflict that may emerge when migration increases rapidly, or comes in waves. However, cultural conflict often follows in the wake of attempts by states or majority nations to subdue indigenous peoples or make them disappear through a process of cultural marginalization or assimilation. This issue of the journal covers both these phenomena. The idea that education can promote cooperation and friendship across ethnic or other group boundaries, is essential in peace education, and has long roots in peace education and social psychology (Allport 1954; Aronson and Bridgeman 1979; Gaertner et al. 2000; Sherif 1988; Watson 2008; Watson and Huá 2016; Zhu, Jiang, and Watson 2011). However, some of these ideas, inter alia Aronson and Bridgeman’s ‘Jigsaw Classroom’, have been met with criticism that the ideas do not take adequately into account the context of intergroup encounters, and which contextual conditions must be met to facilitate the goals of inter-group cooperation and friendship (Bratt 2008; Salomon 2006) and details as regards teaching methods and composition of the group of learners (e.g. Nusrath et al. 2019, table/fig-4; Salomon 2004). Educational efforts to increase tolerance, cooperation and integration of people belonging to different cultural groups or communities have no success formula or guarantee of success. Cultural encounters demand work to learn to know and understand one another’s customs, norms, cultural values, ideals and taboos. Without such knowledge and attitudes, mutual tolerance and respect is difficult, if not impossible. But even though such knowledge and attitudes are internalized in most people of a society, we need to integrate groups on a practical, social level, because inter-group boundaries do not disappear just because people understand one another. The complexity and difficulty of the task may be underestimated in peace education projects. Individuals and/or groups that move across borders have been involved in a long process of socialization into one or more cultures before they moved. They have acquired an identity based on that former socialization, and the territory, community or nation they leave, are part of their identity. So in JOURNAL OF PEACE EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 20, NO. 2, 127–134 https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2023.2241722