The effects of the pandemic, natural disasters, wars, and economic distress at the turn of the second decade of the 20th century are a call to strengthen peace education around the world. In this chapter, the authors argue that intentional social practices of critical literacies offer opportunities for peacebuilding, understood as a dynamic process which includes the development of harmony in different life dimensions. After providing an overview of peace research and peace education in the Colombian context, the authors provide a conceptualization of critical literacy and its relation to peacebuilding. Finally, the chapter offers a set of practical strategies to promote peacebuilding through critical literacies based on research experiences across the Americas. The strategies include the use of children's literature to understand social reality and to develop empathy, critical literacies to develop critical intercultural awareness, and connecting with families and communities through literacy practices to make peace.
TopPeace Studies
The emergence of Peace Studies marked a conceptualization of peace as the absence of war (Wright, 1942). Later, Galtung (1964) incorporated a definition of peace and peace research from two perspectives: negative peace, which he described as the absence of violence; and positive peace, which is the integration of human society, a state closer to what he also defined as a utopian ‘general and complete peace’ (GCP). Galtung (1969) further elaborated on his bifocal perspective on peace, by including the notion of absence of direct violence in his definition of negative peace, and absence of structural violence in his positive peace definition. The latter refers to the violence that emerges from society’s structural division and problems of race, gender, religion, among other sources of discrimination and unrest.
More recently, Jiménez (2014) contributed a third perspective on peace research: neutral peace. He argues that neutrality is the foundation of every social relation, and that respect for ‘the other’ can help devalue the diverse forms of violence (direct, structural, and cultural and/or symbolic). Neutral peace seeks to neutralize violent elements and scenarios that are embedded in social patterns and relations among individuals, groups (i.e., family, school), and nature. This view of peace recognizes the potential of egalitarian dialogue and acknowledges that violence is rooted in everyday encounters; therefore, neutral peace can be strengthened in everyday relationships by fostering values such as empathy, tolerance, diversity, and solidarity.
According to Jiménez (2014), neutral peace needs to work changes from the existing scientific and cultural paradigms to neutralize univocal and pre-established methods to understand reality with the aim of creating a pacifist paradigm. He goes on to affirm that neutral peace needs to have a polyphonic character; that is, to get past the ethnocentric, hierarchical, and dominant discourse in a meritocratic western society – androcentric and white – with a proposal in which multiple voices can be expressed and heard.