Mario Novelli

Education, conflict and social (in)justice: insights from Colombia

This paper explores the dynamics of repression and resistance within the Colombian education system through exploring human rights violations against educators. Drawing on the findings of several fieldwork visits carried out since 2005 across Colombia, the paper focuses on the darker side of the education/conflict relationship, demonstrating through a series of cases the complex way education systems and education actors get caught up in the Colombian civil war and the national and transnational catalysts for the human rights violations that occur. In doing so, the paper also argues for a more interdisciplinary and critical approach to education and conflict that recognises the transnational drivers of conflicts in education and beyond.

Education and Countering Violent Extremism: Western Logics from South to North?.

Abstract This paper explores the way education and conflict have become entangled during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ response to ‘radical Islam’ at home and abroad. The paper charts the complex ways that education has been deployed to serve Western military and security objectives in multiple locations in the global south and how these strategies have now returned to the ‘ West’ in the form of ‘countering violent extremism’ interventions. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the ‘boomerang effect’ I will explore whether and how education techniques and strategies deployed abroad in pursuit of imperial interests return to the West and are deployed to monitor, control and suppress marginalised communities in a form of ‘internal colonialism’. Finally, the paper brings the two sections together in the Findings to explore commonalities and divergences.

Learning to win: Exploring knowledge and strategy development in anti-privatisation struggles in Colombia

On Christmas Day 2001, several hundred workers began an occupation of the headquarters of EMCALI, the public service provider of water, electricity, and telecommunications in Cali, Colombia’s second largest city. The occupation was a response to a government announcement to privatize the company. Thirty-six days later, the workers emerged victorious after signing an agreement to keep EMCALI public. During the occupation, marches, strikes, protests, and blockades were carried out in Cali by EMCALI workers affiliated with the trade union SINTRAEMCALI, with support from local trade unionists from the region and supporters from the local communities. In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, toward the end of the dispute, a second one-day occupation took over the headquarters of the government ministry responsible for implementing the privatization process. The second occupation was defended by local trade unionists from the region who surrounded the building. Meanwhile, in London, regular protests were held outside the Colombian embassy, and several live video link-ups took place between leaders of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and workers inside the Cali occupation, alongside a range of other transnational solidarity activities, with letters of support and solidarity arriving from all around the world.

Capital, inequality and education in conflict-affected contexts

Abstract Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century has brought the issue of inequality to the centre of political debate. This article explores contemporary research on the relationship between education and inequality in conflict-affected contexts with a view to seeing how Piketty’s work speaks to these issues as a field of research and practice. The article provides a critique of Piketty’s approach, arguing for a broader, interdisciplinary and holistic approach to exploring and addressing inequality in education in conflict-affected contexts in their multiple economic, cultural and political dimensions. In doing so the article also lays out an analytical framework inspired by cultural political economy for researching education systems in conflict contexts which seeks to go beyond narrow human capital framings of education and address the multiple potential of education to promote sustainable peace and development in and through education.

A fusão entre segurança e desenvolvimento no setor da educação: discursos e efeitos

The article explores the merging of security and development policies by western development agencies operating in conflict affected states, and its broad effects on the education sector. The article explores the way education has become increasingly intertwined with post 9/11 security discourses and traces the history, rationales and outcomes of this shift. The article also explores the multiple and competing discourses of a range of actors engaging with education in conflict affected states, demonstrating the way a ‘common sense’ discourse linking development to security masks deep divisions amongst key actors. This is then followed by a reflection on the contradictory nature of development assistance and presents some examples of the way aid to education was used during the Cold War for military rather than development purposes. Finally the article ends with a call for more research and critique on this important issue.

The violence of peace and the role of education: insights from Sierra Leone

Abstract Research on peacebuilding has mushroomed over the last decade and there is a growing interest in the role of education in supporting peacebuilding processes. This paper engages with these debates, UN peacebuilding activities and the location of education initiatives therein, through a case study of Sierra Leone. In the first part, we explore the complex and multi-dimensional nature of violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone. In the second, we critically address the role of education in the conflict and post-conflict period, highlighting education’s centrality as a catalyst to conflict, and then reflect on the failure of the post-conflict reconstruction process to adequately transform the education system into one that could support a process of sustainable peacebuilding. Finally, we conclude by exploring the ways that greater investment and focus, both financial and human, in the education sector might, in the long term, better contribute to a sustainable and socially just peace.

Teachers as agents of sustainable peace, social cohesion and development: theory, practice & evidence

This paper presents a ‘peace with social justice’ framework for analysing the role of teachers as agents of sustainable peace, social cohesion and development and applies this to research evidence from Pakistan, Uganda, Myanmar and South Africa. The paper draws on evidence from a recently completed UNICEF and ESRC funded project on education and peacebuilding, and specifically from data gathered around the role of teachers. Drawing on rich fieldwork data collected between 2014–2016 in each of the four countries, the paper will evidence the complex and contradictory role that teachers play in sustainable peace and development and its implications for teacher governance, teacher policy and teacher practice. The paper challenges the overly human capital driven logics of much teacher policy reform agendas and highlights the need and importance for a more holistic approach to teacher governance and management that recognises teachers’ multiple potential to contribute to both societal peace and development.

Understanding the Outcomes of Advocacy Coalitions in Education

In this chapter, we use comparative analysis lenses to better understand the nature of civil society coalitions and their impact in the educational field. The arguments provide a synthesis of core issues that have emerged from the case studies presented in earlier chapters. In particular, this chapter looks at different aspects of education advocacy coalitions (EACs or coalitions): the coalition’s profile; the agenda of the coalitions; their strategies and actions; the impact dimensions of advocacy, the levels of internal cohesion of EACs; and the opportunity structures that are conducive to impact. Finally, we conclude with some core reflections on the outcomes of the research and some key suggestions for coalition building.

The New Geopolitics of Educational Aid

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s development aid to education in low-income countries was often provided on condition that recipient governments implemented a string of neo-liberal education reforms linked to structural adjustment policies and fiscal austerity.

Introduction to Civil Society Coalitions and Educational Advocacy

In the book Poverty and Famines, Amartya Sen presents the main findings of the outstanding research he did on the causes and effects of world famines. One of the starting points of his research was observing that similar types of food crisis (in similar climate conditions, with similar bad crops) that happened in India and China in the fifties had very different consequences in the two countries: Three million people starved to death in China, while many less died in India. So, the driving question of Sen’s research was why did such big variations in the management of food crises in apparently two similar situations happen? (Sen 1983).