Transrational Peacebuilding Education to Reduce Epistemic Violence
Cremin, Hilary, Josefina EchavarrÍa, and Kevin Kester. 2018. Peace Review 30 (3):295-302
This academic paper begins by arguing that mainstream peace education focuses solely on the state level and is thus complicit in nation-building by perpetuating state-based values and norms.
The paper goes on to detail how educational discourse focuses on universal human rights and promotion of transitional justice mechanisms through the normalisation of Western knowledge in heterogeneous contexts. In this way, the authors highlight the need to develop decolonial educational approaches through promotion of alternative pedagogies including critical democratic pedagogy.
The paper uses the example of UN universities, detailing how these international institutes involve a lot of nationalist cultural representation, state-level conflicts, and domination of Western-centricity. The authors also criticise critical pedagogies in that they are still being founded on Western rationality. To rectify this, they advance a trans-rational approach – an understanding that includes rationality and critical discernment but also open to systemic and transpersonal approaches.
This paper challenges my ideas about the advantages of critical peace pedagogies and aims to add important facets of trans-rationality that furthers this agenda by problematising its rational basis.