Peace Literacy, Peace Politics and Scotland’s Future
Professor Alice König, University of St Andrews
This blog discusses the world-building nature of conflict storytelling. At present, war stories vastly outnumber peace stories in the media we consume. This has consequences for our ‘peace literacy’, which in turn impacts our ability to build and maintain peace. The blog argues that greater investment in peace education is essential for Scotland’s future; and it urges politicians to foreground peace more regularly in their political discourse and policy-making. We cannot build a world we have not visualised. The more peace stories we tell, the better equipped we will all be to work towards more peaceful futures.
Keywords: peace, peace-making, peace-storytelling, peace education, peace politics
How old do you think you were when you first heard a war story? When did you last read or watch a peace story?
Our lives are saturated in war stories. Whether we are directly impacted by armed conflict or not, our experience of it is coloured from a very young age by family anecdotes, news reports, social media, participation in commemoration activities, books, films, museum spaces and online games. Between them, they socialise us into thinking about war in particular ways: as tragic but exciting; as something to mourn and yet admire; as a horror to avoid (‘never again’) but as somehow inevitably recurring, again and again.
As peace scholar John Gittings observed, if you walk into the average high street bookshop you will probably find a ‘military history’ section, but no equivalent shelf space devoted to peace. While many bookshops stock both fact and fiction titles that reflect on different aspects of peace and peace-making – from inner peace to international politics – they are usually dispersed across different sections and much less visible, accessible or promoted than books on war.
A quick browse for films online will turn up hundreds under the popular category ‘war film’. By contrast, films that narrate post-conflict recovery, reconciliation processes, community peacekeeping, friendship across divides, and other such aspects of finding or making peace, do not have a recognisable classification that unites or amplifies them. Scattered across comedy, period drama, action adventure, fantasy, science fiction and romance, they get us thinking about all sorts of phenomena; but they are rarely produced or marketed in ways that bring peace itself into focus.
Why does this matter? One objection to creating ‘peace films’ as a distinctive category is that the range of works that we might classify under that label is too nebulous or too difficult to determine. Arguably, one reason for this is that we do not have strong traditions of peace storytelling, which would help us recognise ‘peace’ when we see it and make us more ‘peace literate’. The more we discuss and explore a concept, the more opportunities we have to understand it; but the reverse is also true. The media that shape us individually and collectively rarely get us wrestling with peace as a concept; as a result, we can struggle to visualise or grasp it; and that has consequences for how we build and protect it.
The Visualising Peace project at the University of St Andrews has been trying to change that. Our students have created a virtual Museum of Peace to help make peace and peace-making more tangible for us all. Our aim is not to promote one particular vision of peace but to spark more conversation about what peace looks like to each of us, where it can be found, how it can be fostered, and what peace-making and peace-keeping involve in the day-to-day. We think that talking about different manifestations of peace is an important step in empowering everyone to play a part in fostering it, no matter who they are or where they come from.
In developing this museum, our students have been struck by two significant trends which we think Scotland’s politicians should urgently address. The first is the value – and scarcity – of meaningful peace education. Despite commitments in Scotland’s education policy to deepening young people’s political literacy and enhancing community resilience, few resources are dedicated to peace education of any sort. Limited discussion of historical truces, international peace processes and UN peacekeeping occurs sporadically across the curriculum; but it is usually overshadowed by the much greater attention given to warfighting, and it tends to focus on top-down and belligerent peacebuilding by powerful organisations, overlooking the vital importance of grassroots, local and everyday work, and the crucial role played by women.
Increasing attention is paid in schools to mental wellbeing, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and interpersonal conflict resolution; all of which are important facets of peace education. However, these elements of the curriculum are generally perceived as ‘extra’, not core’, and are often delivered in limited blocks (sometimes by outside organisations) rather than embedded systematically or connected to more political aspects of peace education or sustainability learning.
Given how crucial peace literacy is in improving our individual and collective ability to build peace sustainably for the future, it is essential to invest resources in a more systematic and embedded approach to peace education that connects the personal to the political, at local and global levels. Our research suggests that the best outcomes occur when young people are involved in co-designing peace education with curriculum specialists (‘youth-led peace education’).
Progressive change to education policy needs to be accompanied by a broader political ‘turn’. Our findings show that discussion of peace in Scottish and UK politics is both infrequent and limited. As with ‘peace films’, we can find scattered attention paid to related phenomena: e.g. social justice, community cohesion, interstate relations, and environmental protection. However, contemporary political discourse rarely foregrounds peace itself as a goal at the local or national level, reserving the language of peace for contexts of international conflict resolution – or what peace scholar Johan Galtung defined as ‘negative peace’ (i.e. the absence of violence). Additionally, although politicians and policymakers regularly call for global peace, they usually project it as a nebulous future aspiration, without doing the detailed ‘backcasting’ required to map out feasible pathways from the present. By contrast, strategic planning for future conflict scenarios tends to be done in depth, leading to resource allocation and technological investments that far outstrip anything in peacebuilding.
We would like to see this change. As the Costs of War Project underlines, the US and other countries spend trillions on warfighting; and the impacts on human life far exceed any monetary costs. The UK currently contributes to the UN’s (shrinking) annual peacekeeping budget; but this is dwarfed by global ‘defence’ spending. In the future we envision, Scotland could lead the way in establishing its own annual peace budget, in appointing a Minister for Peace, and establishing a Department for Peacebuilding, to foster more concerted peace work across local, national and international contexts.
This need not be an idealistic dream. Envisioning is one of several tools for futures thinking which harness the power of imagination and storytelling to drive real-world change. It can come in the form of speculative or useful fiction, which enables readers to explore possible, plausible and preventable futures; or in interactive experiences such as peace-gaming, which immerse participants in future scenarios. Above all, envisioning relies on the fact that stories are world-building. We are storying new futures into being all the time, through our political discourse, news reporting, social media content and public debate. The key question is: can we pivot from stories that normalise conflict towards stories that bring about peace? If Scotland’s politicians and policy-makers spend more time talking explicitly about peace, they will play a valuable role not only in developing our collective peace literacy but also in narrating us towards more informed, committed and sustainable peace-making.
The author declares no relevant financial or organisational interests.
Professor Alice König
Alice König is Professor of Classics at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on conflict storytelling and war/peace education; and she directs the Visualising Peace Project and the Ancient Peace Studies Network.
