Peace Review 12:1 (2000), 131–138

Peace Education in an Era of Globalization

Birgit Brock-Utne

We shall here look at the challenges that face peace educators in this era of
globalization. To analyze what the challenges are, and how they can be met, we
Ž rst must look at the concept of “globalization” itself. What do we think of when
we use the terms “globalization” or “global village”? Do we think about the type
of market economy that seems to have conquered the world? What type of
violence does this market economy lead to? What challenges does it pose for
peace educators? Or do we look at the increased communication between people
from different cultures through travel in the air, on land, or in cyberspace? What
kind of problems and possibilities does this communication mean for a peace
educator?
Peace education as an academic Ž eld also must be examined. What is peace
education? How does it relate to human rights education? What type of violence
does the globalized market economy produce? What challenges does it pose for
peace educators?

I n many ways “globalization” has become the buzzword of the day. In their
book Global Village or Global Pillage, Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello claim
that the word “globalization” is “on the lips of politicians, professors and pundits
alike.” Corporations, markets, Ž nance, banking, transportation, communication,
and production increasingly cut across national boundaries. This globalization of
capital is being deliberately accelerated by most national governments, by
international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank, and by the global corporations themselves.
Many authors claim that the world has become “a global village.” Economies
are interconnected; computers and fax machines connect people across oceans.
Millions of people all over the world have become “netizens,” a new word coined
to denote internet inhabitants. We surf the internet and, although most of us
cannot devote the time our kids do to hanging out online, we nevertheless
communicate daily and swiftly around the globe, sending each other articles and
whole manuscripts within seconds. The netizens now number about 60 million
and are growing at a rate of 20% every year. But they are very unevenly
distributed throughout the world.
New diseases ignore national boundaries, and environmental destruction in
one part of the world profoundly affects other parts of the world. Many of the
world’s medicines come from plants in various rain forests. In their book on the
increase of global inequalities, York Bradshaw and Michael Wallace lament the
deforestation caused by escalating proŽ t seeking—a destruction that may have
eliminated cures for AIDS, cancer, and many other diseases.
Bradshaw and Wallace sum up the most striking feature of the global village
ISSN 1040-265 9 print; 1469-998 2 online/00/010131-0 8 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
132 Birgit Brock-Utne

in one word: “disparity.” The globalization of capital increases the differences

between the haves and the have-nots. The share of the poorest 20% of the
world’s people in global income was 2.3% in 1960 and it sank further to 1.4%
in 1991 and even further to 1.1% in 1997, according to the latest Human
Development Report from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
It continues to shrink. And the ratio of the income of the top 20% to that of the
poorest 20% rose from 30:1 in 1960 to 61:1 in 1991 and to 78:1 in 1994.
Children and women—especially single mothers—suffer the most when dispari-
ties grow, in both industrialized and developing countries. It intensiŽ es the
“feminization of poverty.” And, according to a study conducted by the American
peace researcher Elise Boulding, women receive more beatings in periods of high
unemployment.
In their much discussed book, Die Globalisierungsfalle: Der Angriff auf Demokratie
und Wohlstand, Hans-Peter Martin and Harold Schumann claim that we are
heading towards a 20–80 percent society—one where the great majority, the
80%, live in poverty and with hardly any decision-making power over conditions
affecting their lives, while the 20% live in abundance, are always short of time,
and make far-reaching decisions affecting everyone.
Ulf Hannertz argues against the idea of the “global village,” which to him
suggests interconnectedness, togetherness, and the homogenization of culture.
Using a transnational perspective, Hannertz argues instead for “creolization”
rather than homogenization or McDonaldization. Individuals may live with
multiple cultural and linguistic contexts without losing their identity; instead,
they develop transnational identities.
A small group of people enjoy the beneŽ ts of a shrinking world. They are the
transnationalists, the cultural commuters, “die Ortspolygame Menschen.” They
have a responsibility not only to enjoy the beneŽ ts but also to analyze its impact
on the majority of the population. They are obliged to work against a policy of
increasing disparities.
Adopting Talcott Parson’s well-elaborated theory, whereby a social system
contains four subsystems (namely the economic, political, social, and cultural),
J.N. Piertse has summarized how each academic discipline deŽ nes globalization.
In economics, globalization is equated with economic internationalization and
the spread of capitalist market relations. In international relations, the focus is on
the increasing density of interstate relations, the new role of the state, and the
development of global politics. In sociology, the concern is with the increasing
worldwide densities and the emergence of “world society.” In cultural studies, the
focus is on global communication as well as on worldwide cultural standardiza-
tion as in Cocacolanization, McDonaldization, or postcolonial culture.
Let us concentrate on the Ž rst and last of Piertse’s dimensions: the economic
and the cultural, and examine how globalization within these two subsystems
affects peace education.

P eace education, like the notion of peace itself, is a contested concept. It faces
a lot of the same analytical problems as the the concept of peace, and also
some additional ones. The whole Ž eld of peace education is extremely difŽ cult
to treat in a scholarly manner because it is open to so many different political
interpretations. For political reasons—to reach consensus on a deŽ nition of peace
 Peace Education in an Era of Globalization 133

education to be used in the international community or in ofŽ cial school

curriculum guidelines—the term “peace education” is intentionally devised to be
open to various interpretations and to accommodate various viewpoints.
The division of peace education into various subŽ elds, such as human rights
education, disarmament education, and development education, attempts to
make the unwieldly peace education Ž eld somewhat easier to handle analytically.
Roughly speaking, those who emphasize structural violence want development
education to be the area most central to peace education. Elsewhere, I have tried
to relate the concepts disarmament education, development education, and
human rights education to each other and to peace education, which I see as the
generic umbrella for all the different disciplines. Here, I also take peace
education to include development and human rights education.
Nevertheless, within peace studies, some have questioned whether peace
education is the broader category—encompassing human rights education—or
whether human rights education is broader—encompassing both peace and
development issues. Some also maintain that human rights education can be
looked at as an “approach” to be applied to the Ž eld of peace education.
Within the peace education Ž eld, human rights education is normally viewed
as a subŽ eld of peace education. Yet the Declaration adopted at the World
Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993 views human rights
education as an all-embracing concept. Article II.d of the Declaration runs as
follows:

Human Rights Education should include peace, democracy, development and social
justice, as set forth in international and regional human rights instruments in order to
achieve common understanding and awareness with a view to strengthening universal
commitment to human rights … The proclamation of a United Nations decade for
human rights education in order to promote, encourage and focus these educational
activities should be considered.

This broader way of deŽ ning human rights education causes it to overlap with
peace education, and thus makes it just as unwieldly.
Betty Reardon, a leading expert on U.S. peace education, has analyzed more
than 100 current peace curriculum guides, from kindergarten through high
school. She concludes, “There are as yet no clear and precise limits to, nor
standards for, what is to be included in peace education.” In her analysis she
identiŽ ed nine topical areas that characterize contemporary U.S. peace edu-
cation curricula: cooperation, con ict resolution, non-violence, human rights,
social justice, world resources, global environment, and multicultural under-
standing. All these areas have cognitive as well as attitudinal and behavioral
components.
Reardon further deŽ nes the purpose of peace education this way:

… to promote the development of authentic planetary consciousness that will enable us

to function as global citizens and to transform the present human condition by changing
social structures and the patterns of thought that have created it.

Elsewhere, I have deŽ ned peace education as

134 Birgit Brock-Utne

the social process through which peace, as I have deŽ ned it, is achieved. This
includes the practising of equality of rights and equal power-sharing for every
member of a given community. It further includes the learning of skills of
non-violent con ict resolution. It also includes respect for human rights.

T he essential contribution human rights can make to peace education,

according to Reardon, is to provide a prescriptive, holistic, yet particular-
ized approach that “would make peace education not only more comprehensive
but also far more comprehensible.” The conceptual core of peace education,
Reardon argues, is violence, its control, reduction, and elimination. The concep-
tual core of human rights education is, as she sees it, human dignity, its
recognition, fulŽ llment, and universalization. Reardon sees the general purpose
of peace education as the development of authentic planetary consciousness that
will enable us to function as global citizens and to transform the present human
condition by changing social structures.
The globalized market economy is changing social structures but in the
opposite direction from that sought by peace educators and researchers. As
deŽ ned by peace researchers, peace is the absence of both structural or indirect
and direct violence. Structural violence is built into society, producing a process
whereby some people get poorer as a result of others getting richer. A society
with growing disparities is becoming a more structurally violent and less peaceful
society. This seems to be the effect of the globalized market economy.
Peace educators must make their students aware of the impact of market
economic policies. In a globalized world, peace education must include the study
of the growth of inequities between countries, between some of the so-called
developing countries, between these countries and the industrialized countries,
and also within countries. Students should be taught how to gather statistics from
international sources on conditions such as the distribution of food, calorie
intake, and child mortality. They should also study their own societies, and the
disparities in the different parts of the cities or countries they live in. How has
the growth in disparities emerged? What rules and regulations produce it? Which
groups have become poorer and are especially likely to be unemployed and to
have a hard time Ž nding a place to live and enough food for an adequate diet?
These kinds of studies, especially if they include the students’ near surround-
ings, will do much to inform them about the consequences of the changes the
globalized economy entails.

T he task of the educator would be much easier if a clear correlation existed

between the knowledge one confronts and the attitudes that develop. Such
correlation is hard to Ž nd. But a certain level of knowledge is often a prerequisite
for changing attitudes. Some years ago, the UNESCO Institute of Education in
Hamburg studied the relationship, among elementary and secondary school
students in several UNESCO member states, between their attitudes towards
certain social questions and their knowledge about those questions. The study
found no relationship. To raise the level of knowledge without making other
changes in the classroom situation had no signiŽ cant effect on the children’s
social attitudes and values.
In addition, a Norwegian study has shown that the more positive views about
ethnic and other minorities held by highly educated, as compared to poorly
 Peace Education in an Era of Globalization 135

educated, people cannot be attributed to the content of education itself. Instead,

the following explanations have been offered to explain the less racist attitudes
of highly educated people. First, tolerance and a concept of rights are among the
norms educators try to impart. The longer the education, the greater the chance
that students will internalize these norms. Second, education confers knowledge,
and thus breaks down stereotypic beliefs about immigrants. Third, long-term
education will increase cognitive competence, make people more resistant to
hostile propaganda about immigrants, and make them better able to understand
con ict situations. Fourth, higher education will lead to jobs with higher social
status, protected from direct competition with immigrants on the job and
housing markets. Fifth, higher education will strengthen one’s ability to master
situations, thus reducing occasions that create con ict and aggression. Sixth,
higher education creates both the motivation and capacity to act opportunisti-
cally in con ict-laden situations. Highly educated people know they are expected
to demonstrate tolerance, and their knowledge and verbal aptitude will make it
easier to disguise hostility.
Among these explanations, Anders Todal Jenssen and Heidi Engesbak found,
in their study of Norwegians between the ages of 16 and 74, support for the latter
three, ambiguity on the Ž rst, and no support for the second and third theories.
These results suggest that education in itself does not seem to break down
sterotypic beliefs about immigrants or make youngsters less racist.
In his research on the effectiveness of contemporary issues curricula (including
global education and peace education—which he equates with nuclear war
education), James Leming has compared achieved outcomes to desired outcomes
for knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. For knowledge goals, the outcomes were
achieved in two-thirds of the cases (and in as many as 90% of the cases if global
education is removed from the data). But in only about one-third of the cases
were desired attitudinal outcomes achieved, and in still fewer (about 28%) were
desired behavioral outcomes achieved. When cooperative learning strategies are
removed from the data, however, behavioral outcomes are achieved in only 10%
of the cases. Leming concludes,

The changing of student attitudes and behaviour associated with the goals of contempor-
ary issues curricula appears to be a much more formidable task for school curricula than
the teaching of knowledge regarding those same issues. Given that no clear relationship
between increased knowledge and changes in attitudes and behaviour was detected, the
overall educational and social signiŽ cance of the knowledge gains achieved must be
questioned.

People who have experienced personal starvation and other suffering, and who
know what it means to be deprived, will Ž ght against oppression and for
liberation with their whole soul, and far more emotionally than children who live
in an af uent society and just read about the growing inequities.
One Swedish text provides a good example of a teaching method that helped
students become more emotionally engaged in the issue of the world’s unjust
distribution of resources. The book tells a story of secondary students in a
Finnish school who came, one day, to the cafeteria for their lunch and were met
by the smell of wonderful hamburgers. They lined up as usual to get the delicious
136 Birgit Brock-Utne

food. The Ž rst ones served got plenty of hamburgers, french fries, and salad,
even more than they could eat. The next ones got only french fries, no
hamburgers. Some few students got only some soup. Most students, when they
reached the counter, however, were told there was no more food, not even soup.
Those students got angry and terribly annoyed. They felt this was terribly unjust.
Why had so much been given to the Ž rst ones in line so that nothing was left
for those who came a little later?
Their anger led, however, to a constructive dialogue with the ones who served
the food. They had, of course, been briefed about the experiment and asked the
students, “Do you know how resources are distributed in our world today? Only
two out of ten people may eat as much as they want. Many of these people eat
more than is good for them. Most people in the world get less to eat than they
need, many are starving to death. Since you have become so angry today when
you didn’t get hamburgers, why don’t you protest this situation as it affects the
world more broadly?” After this experience the students studied structural
violence and the other problems of developing countries with much greater
emotional commitment.
Peace education attempts to develop critical and analytical minds. It also
promotes cooperative ways of working together. To solve life-threatening and
global problems we must learn to cooperate better. But how does normal formal
schooling help develop this ability? People cooperate better and solve problems
more constructively if they have conŽ dence in themselves and a feeling of
self-security and self-worth. Again: what are the chances that children will
emerge from their schooling experience with a more secure self-concept? How
can the school help children learn to cooperate and to gain self-conŽ dence?
It is not easy to work for these goals in the normal competitive school system.
Even though these goals are frequently proclaimed by formal schooling, the
structures of grading and individual achievement and competition do not
promote cooperation and self-worth in practice.
In a setting where children are taught to compete against each other, it is
difŽ cult to teach peace. It is difŽ cult to teach about equality between states large
and small when there is so little equality between teachers and pupils, and hard
to teach about the equality of the sexes when the boys in the class are allowed
to dominate the girls. Is it at all possible to teach democracy in an authoritarian
school or university?
The Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung has long believed that the
answer is no. Discussing the dilemma of educating for peace in a competitive
school setting, he asks, “Will it not merely sound hypocritical?—or, even worse,
remain empty words that are nulliŽ ed through the much stronger message of
verticality and dominance being normal and acceptable, conveyed through the
structure itself?”
The Swedish peace educator AÊ ke Bjerstedt discusses this dilemma in his book
Learning for the Future. He Ž nds that the self-concept, the personal sense of security,
and the ability of an individual to cooperate adequately are essential ingredients
in peace education and in the development of what he calls the “ego-futurem”
(our conceptions about our ability to function in the future). He cites successful
and creative men who feel that their own school days were destructive and
counterproductive. He acknowledges that teachers are not magicians and that
 Peace Education in an Era of Globalization 137

the unpeaceful structures in schools are difŽ cult for teachers to change. Yet he
argues that teachers must nevertheless always pose the following questions:

Do I as a teacher do whatever I can to help my pupils gain a feeling of self-security and

self-esteem? Do I do whatever I can in order for my pupils to wish to go on studying and
learning? Do I do whatever I can so that they shall feel capable of handling problems
and challenges in the future?

Bjerstedt Ž nds that most schools, with their constant comparison of achieve-
ments, competitions and, ranking easily make many students lose all self-
conŽ dence and feeling of self-worth. They make youngsters in their most
formative years feel like failures and good for nothing.
Teachers must strive to counteract the hidden messages of schooling, messages
devaluing students and giving them little hope for the future, creating a low
ego-futurem. This can be done in three ways. First, teachers can teach students
about the competitive structures, such as the relative ranking scales that develop
from grading exams. Second, teachers can give students an opportunity to
develop their own interests and to have them acknowledged in school. Teachers
who teach for peace must Ž nd traits in their students to praise and encourage in
order to build their self-conŽ dence. Third, teachers can train students to imagine
a transformed society, to describe to themselves and others what a better, more
humane global order might be like. Betty Reardon has put it this way:

Thinking about how the world might be and envisioning a society characterized by
justice are the essence of conceptualizing the conditions that comprise positive peace. If
we are to educate for peace, both teachers and students need to have some notion of the
transformed world we are educating for.

Reardon believes we must keep the development of this capacity paramount

among our learning objectives.

O ften teachers claim that if all they do is just praise students, have them do
things they like and are good at, and train them in cooperation and
sharing, then the students will fail their exams. Somehow teachers working
within the normal school system, but wanting to promote peace education, have
to double-qualify their students, both in the ability to cope with the normal
curriculum—at least enough to get through the exams—and also in peace
education—by giving them this other more valuable, but often contrasting
instruction. The normal school system functions as a case study of structural
violence—violence built into structures in compulsory schooling. It is a violence
that peace education must overcome.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Was ist Globalisierung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Bjerstedt, AÊ ke. 1986. Lära för framtid (Learning for the Future). Stockholm: Liber Utbildningsför-
laget.
Bradshaw, York & Michael Wallace. 1996. Global Inequalities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press.
Brecher, Jeremy & Tim Costello. 1994. Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the
Bottom Up. Boston: South End Press.
138 Birgit Brock-Utne

Brock-Utne , Birgit. l985. Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective. New Yorkt: Pergamon Press.
Brock-Utne , Birgit. l988. “Disarmament Education: The European Evolution.” in Douglas Ray
(ed). Peace Education: Canadian and International Perspectives. London, Canada: Third Eye.
Brock-Utne , Birgit. l989. Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education. NewYork: Pergamon Press.
Brock-Utne , Birgit. 1997. “Linking the Micro and Macro in Peace and Development Studies.” in
Jennifer Turpin & Lester R. Kurtz (eds.), The Web of Violence. Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press.
Brock-Utne , Birgit. 1999. “Multicultural Education and Development Education. The Challenges
to Peace Education.” in James Calleja & Angela Perucca (eds.), Peace Education: Contexts and
Values. Leece: Pensa MultiMedia.
Galtung, Johan. l975. “Peace Education: Problems and Con icts.” in Magnus Haavelsrud (ed.),
Education for Peace, Reection and Action. Guilford: IPC Science & Technology Press.
Hannertz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge
Jenssen, Anders Todal & Heidi Engesbak. 1994. “The Many Faces of Education.” Scandinavian
Journal of Educational Research 38(1): 33–50.
Leming, James. 1992. “The In uence of Contemporary Issues Curricula on School-Aged Youth.”
Review of Research in Education 18: 111–161.
Martin, Hans-Peter & Harold Schumann. 1996. Die Globalisierungsfalle: Der Angriff auf Demokratie und
Wohlstand. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Piertse, J.N. 1995. “Globalization as Hybridization.” in M. Featherstone et al. (eds.), Global
Modernities. London: Sage Publications.
Reardon, Betty. 1988. Educating for Global Responsibility. New York: Teachers College Press.
Reardon, Betty. 1997. “Human Rights as Education for Peace.” in George Andreopoulos &
Richard Pierre Claude (eds.), Human Rights Education for the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Birgit Brock-Utne is Professor of International Education at the University of Oslo. Correspondence:

Institute for Educational Research, P.B.1092 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: birgit.brock-
[email protected]