A Gender Perspective on Peace Education and the Work for Peace
Brock-Utne, B. 2008.
This article offers a gender perspective on peace education, investigating how socializing young boys and girls is often different when teaching them concepts of care, empathy, and violence. By addressing themes of gender roles, socialization, discourses of war, and education, this article makes a compelling argument for how teaching peace still dominates through a masculine narrative and largely undermines the work of women. The education of peace is critical to children’s development and can have a dominant effect on the latter part of their lives. Thus, Brock-Utne argues for the inclusion of women’s work within peace education to encourage a more gender-inclusive society that prioritizes peace rather than war. By drawing on multiple studies (some of her own) on men’s enrollment of war, masculinity in sports, and the teaching of structural violence in Finland schools, she argues through a feminist lens the re-masculization of society is evident in matters of teaching, internalizing, and examining security and war.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-008-9122-z.