Voices of Canadian and Mexican youth surrounded by violence: Learning experiences for peace-building citizenship

Abstract

How do young people living in high-violence contexts express a sense of democratic agency and hope, and/or frustration and hopelessness, for handling various kinds of social and political conflict problems? The management of conflict is a core challenge and purpose of democracy, severely impeded by the isolation and distrust caused by violence. Publicly-funded schools can be (but often are not) part of the solution to such challenges (Bickmore, 2014; Davies, 2011). This paper is drawn from a larger ongoing project probing the (mis)fit between young people's lived citizenship and conflict experiences, and their school-based opportunities to develop democratic peace building capacities, in non-affluent local contexts surrounded by violence, in international comparative perspective. We report on focus group conversations with several small groups of students, ages 10-15, in 2 Canadian and 4 Mexican schools in marginalized urban areas. Diverse participating young people tended to have a stronger sense of agency and hope in relation to some kinds of conflicts (such as environmental pollution) compared to others (such as unemployment and insecure work or drug-gang violence). In general, they did not feel that their lived citizenship knowledge was much valued or built upon in school. Citizenship, peacebuilding, and the role of formal education in contributing to each are contested, malleable ideas shaped by cultural, political, economic and social factors. Formal education is a project of nationstates, thus citizenship and peace-related education in publicly-funded schools often emphasizes nationalist loyalty and compliance to dominant norms, perhaps especially in countries affected by armed conflict (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Quaynor, 2012). Paradoxically, education is also associated with the development of democratic agency. Democratic processes are conflict management processes-deliberative dialogue and collective decisionmaking in the face of difference, disagreement and ideological struggle. To flourish, democracy requires an adequate level of social peace, just as building and sustaining just peace requires democracy. Democratic processes and roles (including legislative, judicial and communitarian-dialogic) are designed to prevent or redress violence by equitably handling social-political conflicts. Although they are inextricably connected, conflict analysis distinguishes violence (harmful actions and effects) from the conflicts that underlie them (the disagreements, competing needs, and factors provoking or encouraging those actions), in order to focus on solvable problems more than symptoms. Beyond the presence or absence of direct violence, social conflicts have two crucial dimensions: social-structural concerns revolving around tangible interests (competing desires and needs, such as access to natural resources or economic opportunities), and psycho-cultural concerns embedded in beliefs, narratives, and interpretive elements of relationships such as (dis)trust or bias (Ross, 1993, 2010). Another dimension sha...

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