Deconstructing Stereotypes : Alternative Youth Narratives about the Middle East

SOURCE:

http://www.aud.edu/news_events/en/view/687/current_upcoming/deconstructing-stereotypes-

 

The School of Arts and Sciences at AUD held workshops for students in the Cultures of the Middle East course, part of the Middle Eastern Studies Certificate, where they had to deconstruct stereotypes about the region.

The students had to contribute to the construction of alternative narratives, using diverse methods of research, media sources and creative expressions. The workshop helped the students describe the complex realities of this large region while keeping a skeptical perspective to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The course highlighted this awareness of how points of views are shaped and become critical to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of the Middle East.

“The study of the Middle East is increasing incrementally as conflicts keep the region in the headlines. However, most international media channels, the entertainment industry, and many digital/social media hubs rarely go beyond those headlines to look at the complex cultures, religions, histories, social-economic-political systems and viewpoints of the respective countries and populations under debate. Old and new stereotypes picturing the Middle East as unfriendly, dangerous, violent, bloodthirsty, backward, or exotic, mysterious, another ‘Not Like Us’, have become part of individual and collective psyches, and have allowed theories such as Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ with ethnocentrism and extreme binarism/polarization (‘us vs. them’) to flourish,” expresses Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies.

According to many students, the Middle East should not be defined as “a fertile environment for extremist movements”, with dictatorship and injustice as the two main features, but a “powerhouse” full of diverse energies, negative and positive, where people struggle and manage to survive just like others elsewhere, with common human fears and aspirations, and contribute to the evolution of humanity with their unique styles born of intricate mixtures of rich histories and paradoxes of deep-rooted traditions and continuously changing cultures.

The AUD Middle Eastern Studies Certificate is designed to give students an appreciation and understanding of the region in which they are currently studying and in which many will be pursuing professional careers. It is an opportunity for these students to enhance their knowledge of the cultural, historical, and political factors that have shaped the Middle East through time and to a large extent, explain the profile and texture of the current Middle Eastern landscape.

Students’ narratives were depicted on art boards, which can be summarized as follows: The Middle East does not have clear-cut boundaries, even if basic maps include Southwestern Asian countries and part of North Africa. People in the Middle East do not all live as nomads (in fact, very few live as nomads) and nomadism has both advantages and disadvantages, just like any postmodern lifestyle in the city. The Middle East is more than desert, camels and oil; it is quite urbanized and has some of the oldest cities in the world; it encompasses rich and diverse heritages and natural/human resources. The geography is diverse and includes everything from fertile river deltas and forests to mountain ranges and plateaus, snow in the winter and beaches in summer. Arabic is not the only language (there are at least 20 languages such as Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Berber… and dozens of dialects) and the Arab identity is part of many other Middle Eastern ethnic/national identities. Islam is the predominant religion in the Middle East but the majority of the world’s Muslims are not Middle Eastern and live outside the Middle East, and other religions are also part of Middle Eastern histories and present-day cultures. The Middle East is not just one big bomb waiting to go off - violence is not inevitable in the Middle East and spaces of peace do exist, whether based on interfaith dialogue or other forms of dialogue. People in the Middle East are not uneducated and unworldly. Women’s status is not synonymous with oppression – there are different contexts, laws, applications, situations and experiences. Conflicts are part of many Middle Eastern lives, but stability, economic/cultural growth and advancement are also found in this region.
 

  

Peace Education in Lebanon: Case Study in the University Context (MEST FORUM, American University in Dubai)

SOURCE: http://www.aud.edu/arts_and_sciences/en/NewsEvent/8624/671/ 

 

The MEST faculty is glad to announce the launching of the MEST Forum, a monthly series of intellectual/scholarly activity to be held every last Tuesday of each month during the fall and the spring semesters.

Peace Education in Lebanon: Case Study in the University Context
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies

Even if initiatives and practices of dialogue and living together have never ceased to exist in Lebanon, both physical and psychological/cultural aspects of war still prevail, fueled by a continuous struggle between hypomnesia and hypermnesia, and the inexistence of a common national war memory thus common history and identity. In this context, the new generations are inheriting the experience of war as still living memory, and are molding/converting this remembrance into some form of fixed historical and existential knowledge, allowing cycles of violence to be perpetuated. Peace Education plays an important role in breaking these cycles, by cultivating the knowledge and practices of a culture of peace.

Dr. Chrabieh's presentation will introduce the current Lebanese context in relation to war and war memory, as well as Peace Education initiatives in Lebanon and the main characteristics of a pedagogical approach shedeveloped and applied in her classrooms at St Josef University of Beirut, Notre Dame University and Holy Spirit University-USEK from 2007 till 2014.

More than Ebola or ISIS (Da3ech), the Past would become “the Lash with which Yesterday flogs Tomorrow”!

Dr. Pamela Chrabieh (2014) – Dubai

500 students’ narratives of war and visions of peace were collected during storytelling sessions and art workshops from 2007 till 2014 in my classrooms at Holy Spirit University (USEK), St Josef University and Notre Dame University in Lebanon. This qualitative research with young people born in the 1990s, from different religious/sectarian, political  and social-economic affiliations, revealed the following: 

30% of students portrayed peace as the elimination, deportation or destruction of the ‘other’, perceived as an enemy. During one of the art workshops, a student drew a map of Lebanon in which he indicated with an arrow and a caption “Palestinians and Syrians back to their country” while other ones indicated “Israel to the sea”. According to this student, peace could not be achieved in the presence of these foreign elements, but only with their elimination or deportation. Another student argued: “Two people with their own different beliefs and perspectives concerning life, and life goals, can never unify and become one in a same country, especially if one people dominate the other by the use of force (i.e. Muslims and Christians)”.  A student drew all of the major political leaders and warlords looking down on Lebanon from the clouds with halos above their head. When asked to explain his caricature, the student said he thought Lebanon could only have peace when all of them would be dead.

25% of students think peace will be implemented when sectarianism is abolished, or even religions. A student drew a coffin in which a cross, a moon crescent and a Star of David were lying. The caption “R.I.P” was engraved on the coffin. “Rest in Peace” has a double meaning; also signifying people can also finally live in peace through the “death” of religion. Another student drew two separate identical boxes. In one of the boxes, she drew a Qur’an and a Bible. In the other box, she drew the Lebanese constitution. The student explained she thought both boxes were a gift from God, but that they needed to remain separate no matter what for peace to be achieved.

45% of students had positive attitudes toward others. Positive war memories were being shared in the classroom, especially stories of interreligious/inter-sectarian dialogue and conviviality. A Druze student recounted the story of her family who was able to pass through various checkpoints with the help of their childhood Christian friends to access a hospital during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. A student argued that peace comes with “the acceptance of the fact that I am a rock among many other rocks, here to stay, but nonetheless working in harmony with other rocks to allow the structure to stand”. One of the students drew a musical key with the caption “we are all part of the symphony!”. Another student used a famous juice ad slogan. He drew a carton can of juice, and then added all the different denominations which form Lebanon as if they were the main ingredients, with the slogan “There is a little bit of Lebanon in all fruits!”.

40% of the 500 students were not able to tell stories of the past. Many of these students’ parents were not affiliated to political parties, or they were ex-militia who never raised the war subject at home. Still, some were seeking ways to cope with the memory of past violence in order not to repeat it. According to one student: “If parents do not talk about the past, it does not mean that they did not communicate to their children a chronic fear, even if the original threat does not exist anymore. This fear leads to a culture of silence and makes people unable to handle any new conflict”. Many of these students living in a culture of silence at home were interested in digging into the past, trying to extract acknowledgement of wrongdoings and recognition of their identities. Others chose to rally with determined collective narratives – political parties’, sectarian narratives -, believing that they are the victims of ‘the other side’, that their actions are morally imperative toward the other side, that their dispositions are ‘moderate’ and they are willing to ‘sacrifice’ themselves for the sake of the nation, unlike ‘the other side’.

There were also students who preferred to follow the ‘blank page’ approach, believing the prospects of ending conflict were bleak, blaming the media, the political leaders, foreign powers and other elements for Lebanon’s misfortune and the improbability of an end to conflict. A student wrote “To be Lebanese, in my opinion, is to be in a constant state of wait. Lebanon is a project, nothing more, nothing less.” A Lebanese-born American student noted: “Do I believe my generation will be the one to finally live in peace? No, I do not. They all say the right things, advocate a homogeneous society, and speak of togetherness, but when it comes down to concrete actions, I believe most would side with their religion and-or political party in a time of conflict”. As part of an exercise where students were asked to define what it means to be Lebanese, a student wrote “To live here with my family with my minimum basic rights.” This disturbing thought reflects the student’s hopelessness through their acceptance of a life in sub-optimal conditions, as well as an inherent sense of pessimism in their ability to change Lebanon’s situation, and a lack of belief in their own agency.

Young people born years after the initial traumatizing events become part of the traumatic process. New generations inherit trauma from the previous generations. 60% of students told stories about how their parents and neighbors experienced physical war in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the students recounted a childhood memory: “My father taught me the basics of shooting guns when I was a child. He never clearly explained why he thought it was important for me to be trained, until the events of May 7, 2008 (when inter-sectarian clashes in Beirut occurred). He told me then ‘Do you see why I taught you how to fight?’”. A large part of this generation inherited the experience of violence as still living memory, molding and converting this remembrance into some form of fixed collective memory or historical knowledge.

It is in this crucial interval that the cycles of revenge can be perpetuated or interrupted. The moment of transmission is important to dwell on, because it is a moment of genuine hope and possibility, but also, a moment of real danger, with the past posing a threat to present and future stability.

More than Ebola or ISIS (Da3ech), the past would become “the lash with which yesterday flogs tomorrow”!

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This short article presents a summary of the results of this qualitative research. Other details were displayed in Oxford (2010) and in Balamand (2014). For more information, contact Dr. Pamela Chrabieh.

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ALSO PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.redlipshighheels.com/more-than-ebola-or-isis-da3ech-the-past-would-become-the-lash-with-which-yesterday-flogs-tomorrow/ 

Peace Education

The following article was published by the American University in Dubai (Faculty of Arts and Sciences):

Peace Education

Dr. Pamela Chrabieh

In An Agenda for Peace (1992), the former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali introduces to the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding as “an action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict”.[1] In other words: 1) Sources of violence are diverse – political, ideological, economic, social, ecological, historical and psychological. 2) War is not reduced to combats, alliances and treaties. 3) The absence of military battles does not in itself ensure local, regional and international peace, nor simple peacekeeping initiatives.

In Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War (2011), Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war, such as nationalism, hatred, religious extremism and the search of existential meaning[2]. In Le Virus de la violence (The Virus of Violence, 1998), the late Lebanese psychiatrist Adnan Houballah identifies two interrelated aspects of war: physical (perpetrated by groups of active fighters and armies) and psychological (war-related traumas and their outcomes within civilian populations, including post-traumatic stress disorders – behavioral and affective -, different mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia, latent tensions and inability to relate to others)[3]. In that perspective, peace cannot be achieved unless these sources are dealt with, and both aspects of war are handled. To that end, the fulfillment of a peacebuilding process is required,   including better political governance and economic systems, human rights, social justice and responsibility, intercultural and interfaith dialogues, ecological awareness, and peace education.

Peace education encompasses a diversity of pedagogical approaches within formal curricula in schools and universities and non-formal popular education projects implemented by local, regional and international organizations[4]. It aims to cultivate the knowledge and practices of a culture of peace. In the classroom, teachers can do little to reduce the economic and political causes of wars, but they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by engaging students in a journey of understanding the forces that manipulate them; by introducing them to relevant psychological and pedagogical principles such as the contact experience, conciliation through personal story telling, reckoning with traumatic memories, body-word[5]; by understanding the socio-emotional aspects of reconciliation and discovering alternatives to violence; by fostering mutual respect and building bridges across differences.

Wars start in the human mind and peace education plays an important role in individual and collective mindset changes, from classrooms to communities, from grassroots peace activists, peace-movement organizations and international non-governmental organizations engaged in peace education to societies and local governments[6]. It contributes to the deconstruction of the so-called invincible aura surrounding wars, and to its transformation into a dim light bulb.

A cursory look at contemporary South Western Asian (i.e. Middle Eastern) history might seem to indicate, at first, that war is part of Middle Eastern genetic codes and cultures, and that peace cannot be. However, claiming that Middle Easterners are died-in-the-wool warriors with violence running in their veins is simply and sadly an awful stereotype created by anthropological legends, geopolitical gurus/experts and media propaganda. Peace is a past and present reality/experience/praxis in the region. It is part of the local DNA. It is, as described in many of the spiritual traditions[7], including the monotheistic religions that emerged from the South Western Asian mindset, the realization of humanity’s nature and an ordinary possibility.

However, for this possibility to become the general rule, the norm, there is an urgent need for actively and continuously implementing effective policies of peace education at all levels, geared towards promoting social cohesion beyond mere coexistence, as well as reconciliation and wisdom cultivation. Peace education is being applied in the region but it needs to expand. There are many conditions to pursue this expansion, such as support from private institutions and public authorities, sustained interaction between students and their teachers, and certainly, common initiatives between the different social entities: families, neighborhoods, religious and cultural communities, political parties and the media.

 

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[1] An Agenda for Peace. Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping. Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992.

[2] Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

[3] Le Virus de la violence. Paris, Albin Michel, 1998.

[4] Candice C. Carter. Conflict Resolution and Peace Education: Transformations across Disciplines. Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

[5] Gavriel Salomon, Baruch Nevo (Eds.). Peace Education: The Concept, Principles, and Practices Around the World. Psychology Press, 2012.

[6] Ian Harris. Peace Education from the Grassroots. Information Age Publishing, 2013.

[7] Edward J. Brantmeier, Jing Lin, John P. Miller (Eds.). Spirituality, Religion, and Peace Education. Information Age Publishing, 2010.

 

 

ARTICLE SOURCE: http://www.aud.edu/arts_and_sciences/en/page/3610/peace-education-dr.-pamela-chrabieh