Boots on the Ground: Catholic Sisters and Peacebuilding on Five Continents

by Carol K. Coburn and Ken Parsons

Introduction

From 2015 to 2019, the global Sisters of St. Joseph created, developed and taught a curriculum on “Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management.”  The U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph received a major grant to address the growing cultural diversity and conflict present both within their global congregations as well as the congregation’s educational, healthcare, and social service ministries which include almost 60 countries on five continents.[1]  The grant was to address twenty-first-century issues of ethnic tension and local, regional, and global conflict.  For example: In some countries in Africa, St. Joseph sisters found themselves in novitiates with sisters from warring tribes.  In the Middle East, sisters’ schools had faculty, students and parents from predominately Muslim families.  In India, young St. Joseph sisters came together in large living situations, working with diverse age, religious, and ethnic populations, speaking multiple languages.  To strengthen global sisters’ networks and religious identity and to better serve constituents, the sisters’ project aimed to create and utilize a curriculum that would provide knowledge, skills, and spiritual identity and integration through the understanding and practice of cultural diversity, nonviolent communication, and conflict resolution.  As project consultants and evaluators, Professors Ken Parsons and Carol Coburn from Avila University, a Sisters of St. Joseph institution, were asked to collaborate and consult on the curriculum and evaluate its success.  Ultimately, this four-year, multilingual project documented successful outcomes and strategies used on five continents.

The historical and cultural foundations of the Sisters of St. Joseph and Catholic sisters’ global outreach, provides context on why they chose to advance their ministry in 2015, by adapting to the new realities of the twenty-first century.  For St. Joseph sisters, this adaptation to the changing times has been an ongoing theme – continuing to serve the “dear neighbor without distinction” –  first documented in their seventeenth-century founding documents and later Constitutions.  Also, the reality is that over the last half-century, the numbers of new sisters have declined in North America, Europe, and Latin America and are growing in Africa and Asia (particularly India), changing the global landscape for the religious congregation.  Additionally, the St. Joseph sisters wish to become a more integral and united global community and needed to take measures to understand cultural difference and global realities faced by their 10,000 sisters many who are ministering in extreme areas of ethnic and religious conflict on a daily basis. Finally, the historical power dynamics of North American and European influence in women’s congregations are giving way to a new reality where leadership and influence are shifting to Africa and Asia.

Women, Religion and Peacebuilding

Catholic sisters are only part of the growing numbers of women worldwide involved in peacebuilding.  Until more recent times, women have been portrayed only as victims of war and social justice inequality.  For over a decade, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), has documented the important role that women and religion play in negotiating, securing, and maintain peace in global conflicts.  The USIP researchers and website include online teaching units, micro-courses, speakers, and publications touting the importance of gender and religion as mitigating factors for success.  History has shown that civil resistance is most successful when women are engaged in the peace process.  Additionally, including women at the conference table and activism in the streets lowers a country’s propensity for conflict when paired with higher levels of gender equality.  “Research shows that when women effectively influence a peace process, it’s more likely that an agreement will be reached, implemented and sustained. . . . Inclusion is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing.” [2]

Other scholars who have researched gender and peace support the importance of a “gendered” peace initiative.  In her article, “What Sex Means for World Peace,” Valerie M. Hudson uses empirical data to demonstrate that the “best predictor of a state’s stability is how its women are treated.”  A more inclusive, equal environment for women promotes peacebuilding.[3]  Likewise, researcher Severine Austesserre documents the often ineffectiveness of only male elites or UN interveners at the peace table.  She states, “The problem is that currently we are always focusing our efforts on the top, on political leaders, on [male] elites, and we very rarely support peace at the grassroots.”  She tells the stories of the “ordinary yet extraordinary individuals and communities that have found effective ways to confront violence.”[4]

Because the Catholic sisters are religious women, many operating in their home culture and country, they have an insider’s view; and as workers in education, healthcare and social service are known and trusted by those in their communities.  This makes them important players in peacebuilding projects.

Historical Background and Context

To adequately understand this project, it is important to briefly put Catholic sisters’ work into a larger cultural and historical context.  The Sisters of St. Joseph congregation was founded around 1650 in Le Puy, France.  As an apostolic community who worked in private and public settings, they immediately began to work with the poor and sick, as well as providing education for girls.  Working with French society’s marginal populations, St. Joseph sisters provided care and succor maintaining hospitals and schools for those most in need.[5]

This pattern continued well into the mid-twentieth century but dramatically changed in the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council met in Rome and mandated changes to modernize the global Church.  In the United States, the ministries of all Catholic sisters exploded into a vast myriad of programs and services focusing on the marginalized of society.  Sisters became activists in civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war movements, sanctuary movements for Central American immigrants, among many other signature social justice issues of the twentieth century.  Sisters have been avid supporters and lobbyists for free trade, water and land management issues for the poor, ecology, micro-financing, HIV/AIDs assistance, and anti-violence campaigns to protect women and children across the globe.  Attempting to take more active responsibility for the investment practices of national and global corporations, sisters also participated in protests and asserted power as stockholders and investors in multi-national corporations involving issues such as worker’s rights, healthcare reform, environmental sustainability, and human trafficking among many other pressing issues across the globe.[6]  By the twenty-first century over 30 orders of women religious, including the Sisters of St. Joseph, had accredited NGO’s recognized by the United Nations, helping to create and work toward the U.N. Millennium Development Goals which included gender equality and women’s empowerment, education, healthcare, poverty, environmental sustainability, and global partnerships and more recently the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.  This United Nations NGO designation represents 100,000 sisters from 200 congregations in 177 countries.[7]

In her chapter on Catholic women and peacebuilding in the twenty-first century, scholar Maryann Cusimano Love describes global  “advocacy networks” where Catholic nuns are plugged-in to social networks, the Internet, and are adept at using decentralized networks and participatory leadership, to gather and communicate information.  This provides sisters an opportunity to put out a call worldwide describing and assessing the current situation on the frontlines in hot spots such as Sudan or Congo among many others.  In reality, nuns’ global access was valued long before electronic technology made the world smaller.  In the 1980s, when long-time Boston politician and then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, was asked how he identified the burning issues from around the globe, he said, “Follow the nuns and you’ll never go wrong. . . . They have people on the ground and they know what is really going on in areas of conflict.”[8]

In light of this context, this twenty-first-century project continues this legacy of global presence and service.  It is significant because it expands knowledge, skills, and spirituality already present within St. Joseph ministries and religious life. Given the history of intercultural relations, multilingualism, and activism, this project deepens and extends the sisters’ myriad of knowledge and experience regarding conflict and its resolution, further developing skills for understanding nonviolent communication, cultural diversity, and difference within the St. Joseph global community.

Project Design Overview

Over a ten-day period in October in 2015, the global St. Joseph Design Team, consisting of nine sisters (from eight countries) and two university consultants, worked to create a teaching curriculum on “Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management.”  It was a “train the trainer” program and live, simultaneous interpretation was provided in four languages: English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.  The Design Team members would create the goals, objectives, and essential elements of the program, design the curriculum, research content sources, study and debate pedagogical strategies, and ultimately two or three sisters (Design Team members) would team-teach the ten-day curriculum to approximately 125 sisters from five continents.  Two Avila University faculty would attend each session and evaluate the project’s effectiveness.  The training program would be taught five times over a two-year period between May 2016 and May 2018, ultimately bringing 122 St. Joseph sisters to Le Puy, France, for training in the curriculum. Here the sisters developed pedagogical skills necessary to return to their own countries and cultures to teach an additional 75 sisters and lay persons the concepts and strategies of this peacebuilding, educational program.  Ultimately, the program could potentially touch the lives of approximately 5000 people.

Curriculum and Methodology 

The Design Team based the curriculum and methodology of the program on three essential elements: 1) Nonviolent Communication and Conflict Resolution;  2) Critical Engagement with Difference; and 3) Role of Empathy for Understanding and Right Relations Within a Diverse Community.  Around these three themes the Design Team developed workshop content and methodologies asking a central question: “What do you want sisters-participants to leave with after their ten days in Le Puy”?   The Design Team created materials and content that provided knowledge and skills integrated with the congregation’s heritage and spirituality.  The focus of the grant was to teach 125 sisters-participants who were in early stages of religious life (postulants, novices, newly professed) and those sister-formators who mentored them.  Strategies and methods included, but were not limited to: readings, real-world case studies, experiential learning, discussions (face-to-face and online), role-playing, journaling/reflections, collaborative projects, listening circles, videos, performance activities, personal narratives, and study/thought questions.  The curricular template was not meant to be a one-size-fits-all document.  It had to be focused, yet agile, to work with diverse sisters and cultures within the St. Joseph congregation. During the ten-day training sessions in Le Puy, between May 2016 and May 2018, sisters from 27 countries participated, representing four distinct linguistic groups: Spanish, French, Portuguese and English.  Sister-teachers had to be flexible and innovative to teach curriculum in 5 separate sessions with the 25 sisters in each representing a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds.  By the seventh day of training, the participating sisters began to work individually and in small groups to begin creating their own workshops for their sisters and lay persons in their home settings.

Evaluation

As evaluators, we designed four assessment tools to measure program effectiveness for the St. Joseph sisters participating: Personal Background Questionnaire, Pre-Evaluation, Post-Evaluation, and Six-Month Follow-Up Questionnaire.  The Background Questionnaire provided important demographic (age, ethnicity, education, years in religious life, etc.), educational, and work/ministry data on each sister.  The Pre-Evaluation combined quantitative and qualitative questions assessing the participants understanding, attitudes, and ideas about conflict, cultural diversity, ethnic tensions, and non-violent communication strategies.  This was completed weeks to months before the course and before any reading materials were sent to the participants. The Post-Evaluation was conducted immediately on the final day of the ten-day workshop.  It included some of the same questions, quantitative and qualitative, as the Pre-Evaluation as a way to measure attitudinal and/or knowledge change (or lack thereof) after participating in the course.  It also allowed for comments on strengths, weaknesses, and attitudinal thoughts about the workshop as well as sisters’ personal reflections on the ten-day experience.  The Sixth-Month Follow-Up Questionnaire was completed six months after completing the course and attempted to gather data on who, when, and where they taught the curriculum in their own local settings.  It also included questions about their own attitudes and feelings about teaching the curriculum and how they measured their own success and well-being within their communities.

Results

The qualitative and quantitative data from this project is voluminous so we have provided an overview based on our four evaluative tools and our own direct observations and analysis to profile many of the key components of the research.[9]  The background questionnaire provided important demographic information about the sisters who attended the workshop.  Demographically, the 122 sisters provided an interesting profile.  Seventy-one percent of participants were between the ages of 18 and 49.  This emphasized the projects desire to educate young, newly professed sisters and/or those who were in charge of their formation.  Ethnically, 34% identified as Asian Indian, 17% African.  Overall half of all participants came from Asia or Africa which were the two focus areas for the grant. Both continents represented the locations of the fastest growing numbers of new sisters in each of the five sessions. Seventy percent spoke two languages or more, again most of those coming from Asia or Africa, which included tribal, regional, and national languages.  Approximately 70% of the sisters had completed some university education and 27% had some graduate education almost exclusively in healthcare, education, and social service occupations.  Approximately 72% of sisters had been in religious life between 1-24 years, many in Asia and Africa entering as adolescents.

Pre and post evaluation data were extensive and varied with questions focused on attitudes and knowledge about cultural diversity and conflict issues. The quantitative (5-point Likert Scale) and qualitative data (sisters’ comments) are both important to the process and document overall positive outcomes.   Sisters reported that they were less fearful of conflict, felt more capable to resolve conflict, and less fearful of cultural diversity within their communities.  They reported they better understood strategies for nonviolent communication and valued their knowledge about cultural diversity to better live in community and work successfully within their ministry.  Interestingly, they also reported that they better understood whether conflict arises from cultural differences or those inherent in religious life.  This was a critical component of the grant because this is an important distinction for culturally-diverse women living closely in community in sometimes highly stressful situations around the world.  Some of the sisters’ written comments also reflect the purpose and significance of the workshop for these sisters.

The sisters’ post-evaluation comments give the quantitative data “life” and in some cases reflect personal situations.  One sister wrote that she hopes to use these strategies on conflict in her own community, “[H]ad I not learned this I may have added to the conflict.”  Another wrote, “ I feel that I am leaving [the workshop] with a lot of tools [or strategies] and I intend to use them.”  One spoke of understanding that “multicultural, intercultural is a strength” not a problem.  And a sister in an African novitiate simply wrote, “I have a community of six members and five are from different countries. . . . [This training will help me] work with current sisters in conflict.”

The six-month follow-up questionnaire provided information and insights about how the Le Puy-trained sisters felt after going back to their local settings and becoming Second Generation teachers sharing the curriculum with other sisters and lay peoples.[10]   The Second Generation of sisters quickly understood that this curriculum could go far beyond training only younger or newer sisters in the community.  For example: In November 2017, three St. Joseph sisters from three different congregations in Brazil came together in Northeast Brazil in Cicero Dantas, Bahia.  They taught over 50 men, women, and youth between the ages of 18 and 80 in a three-day workshop.  A sister remarked that most participants were members of local “settlements and camps of people who daily struggle to find a place to live and work.”[11]  The participants included teachers, students, housewives, village leaders, senior advisers, and religious sisters.

Not an original focus in the grant, training and working with lay people within their local ministries was an excellent decision (made by the sisters).  Those trained in Le Puy saw the need and the importance of utilizing and demonstrating the adaptability of the curriculum by teaching  local lay people and other groups.  The data from the Second Generation programs in their home countries document the sisters’ dedication to create these workshops and their unique approach to making the curriculum their own.  The aggregate data show that participants in Second Generation workshops varied from locale to locale.  Although the curriculum is still being taught in workshops, as of November 2019, participants included sisters (59%), lay people (23%), educators (9%), and students/adolescents (10%).  The workshops were taught in over 25 countries, South America provided 33% of all workshops, Asia 31%, and Africa 17% of the total number of workshops six months after each Le Puy workshop.  Adapting to the lives of the people, Second Generation sisters taught workshops tailored for their populations who in most cases had very little “free” time.  The length of the workshops varied from 2-3 days to 9-12 days.  Sixty-one percent of the workshops were 2-3 days in length, and 25% were 4-5 days in length.  Only 11% of the workshops lasted between 6-12 days.  As of November 2019, sisters have reported 120 workshops, involving over 3200 people.  This is an underestimation because sisters have taught and are continuing to teach the curriculum so we do not have data for 2020.

Implications and Analysis

The success of the Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management workshops were demonstrated in both quantitative and qualitative assessment measures providing a road map for future research and program development, particularly for religious congregations of women operating in a global milieu.  In a world overwhelmed by conflict, locally and globally, women religious are in a unique position to reach a variety of constituencies including members of their own congregations and the lay people to whom they minister.

Although not part of the original grant, the sisters created their own diverse groups of participants including combinations of religious women and lay people in many of their Second Generation programs in their home nations and communities.  Working with the needs in their local communities, sisters adapted the curriculum for all ages, genders, religious, lay, and local NGO groups hoping to learn new strategies for nonviolent communication and conflict resolution.

The success of the project goes beyond curricular outcomes and evaluations.  Other factors are important to holistically explain the sisters’ effectiveness as teachers and peacemakers.  Their personal, educational, and religious backgrounds provided a unique workforce and presence in global peacebuilding. These include six critical factors for success, particularly significant in sisters’ interactions with people in their local ministries.

• Sisters effectively identified the needs in both design and teaching, avoiding a formula or an implication that one-size-fits-all
• Sisters adapted their curriculum to the local culture, including those participants outside of religious life who are necessary and important to the peacebuilding process
• Sisters’ networks are vast and they are trusted and respected members of the local communities – before beginning the workshops they had already established credibility with the local populations
• Sisters’ knowledge and skill sets reinforced and helped ensure success
• Sisters’ foreign language proficiency enhanced outreach to a variety of populations
• Sisters’ advanced education enhanced their ability to think critically, understand learning styles, and blend the curriculum with experiential learning opportunities and activities

Although not an explicit part of this grant program, three additional and important concepts stand out when reflecting on the successful outcomes and implications for the future; this includes the importance of sisters’ understanding the concepts of interculturalism, intersectionality, and transnational activism. The Design team and sister-instructors realized – very early on – that they were witnessing and experiencing interculturalism within the workshops in Le Puy.  Interculturalism refers to “support for cross-cultural dialogue and challenging self-segregation tendencies within cultures. Interculturalism involves moving beyond mere passive acceptance of a multicultural fact of multiple cultures effectively existing in a society and instead promotes dialogue and interaction between cultures.”[12]   With 25 sister-participants in each of the five sessions in Le Puy, interculturalism was an essential component.  Even in sisters’ four linguistic groups, intercultural interactions permeated the workshop.  For example, the French linguistic group included sisters from Haiti, France, and multiple countries in West and Central Africa as well as Madagascar.  They shared the language but also shared a need for interaction and at times blend their cultural backgrounds within identity and diversity.

Additionally, sisters also understood the importance of intersectionality.[13]  Feminist scholars stress the importance of intersectionality as an important concept when analyzing women’s lives.  Race, geography, religion, ethnicity, age, class, and other factors do not exist in isolation – they interface and overlap in the lives of all women.  Women’s lives and identities embrace a myriad of cultural, gendered, and social imperatives providing a complex matrix.  In fact, amid the Le Puy trainings, sisters themselves often discussed the nuances of their own identities: religious, gender, ethnic, racial, and class intersectionality.  The global sisters in this study, as well as the population they minister to, cross many boundaries in their intersectional tension and identities.  Because most sisters live with the population they serve, and in many cases come from the population they serve, they have a unique perspective.

Finally, Donatella della Porta and Raffaele Marchetti, authors of the article, “Transnational Activism and the Global Justice Movement,” document the importance of a transnational approach to peacebuilding.   They write: “Transnational activism entails transnational actors. . . . [including those in] global civil society, international non-governmental organizations [NGOs], transnational social movement organizations [or] global justice movements . . .”[14]  In much of the world, this is the daily experience of many Catholic sisters.  Utilizing this definition, we would argue that Catholic sisters have been involved in transnational work for decades.  This approach and understanding are a necessary ingredient to reducing conflict, locally and globally, and ultimately peacebuilding.  Understanding the importance of gender and religion to global peace and justice, editors Susan Hayward and Katherine Marshall recently published, Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen, an anthology on peacebuilding by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women.  Using the resources and support of the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), these real-world, case studies came from the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Israel, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Honduras. This USIP research documents the effectiveness of working with women in global peacebuilding.  Because of their years of onsite observation and networking, the work and effectiveness of Catholic sisters were an important component of that conversation.[15]

Consequently, for these reasons this unique, four-year grant is important and why we believe the curriculum has global applications for further peacebuilding by Catholic sisters.  The grant and program are not perfect, it is not universal, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution to peacebuilding.  However, it is at the very least, a useful template for peacebuilding, particularly for congregations of women religious, who have historically adapted to the world as they find it – trying to make it better.[16]

In the next phase of this project, Avila University will house the archives and all materials from the curriculum project.  We hope to create a website and online presence providing access for other global religious congregations to utilize and adapt the template for their congregational and ministerial needs.  These needs could be identified by a variety of religious congregations’ NGOs and UN networking to support individual congregations and collaborative programs on Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management – needed throughout the world.  Additionally, Avila University and a St. Joseph sister, trained in Le Puy, developed and piloted an English online version of the curriculum.  In light of the on-going Coronavirus world pandemic, online work will become more important and necessary in the immediate future.  Not always a good or possible option for less developed countries, the online workshop appears to be very successful for those who have the internet infrastructure with opportunities to learn, discuss, and reflect on the curricular materials.  Avila University hopes to provide online resources and workshops in five languages (Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Italian) for religious congregations whose sisters have the technological infrastructure to benefit from online training in peacebuilding.  The Sr. Martha Smith Archives and Research Center at Avila University will preserve all grant materials and we hope to establish a Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management website that will serve as an internet portal where digitized grant materials can be accessed for use by other religious congregations to adapt and utilize across the globe.  With approximately 700,000 sisters living and working worldwide, that’s a lot of “boots on the ground” for peacebuilding.[17]

Notes

[1] The authors would like to thank the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for funding this four-year project and for their understanding of its importance. We would also like to thank Sister Patty Johnson CSJ for her vision, support, and encouragement along the way.

[2] Susan Hayward and Katharine Marshall eds., Women Religion and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2015).  Also, the USIP website https://www.usip.org/ provides extensive research for research, teaching, and online activism.  The quote is from Norway’s ambassador to the U.S., Kare R. Aas taken from USIP’s article “Women and Peace: A Special Role in Violent Conflict,” by Fred Strasser (March 18, 2016), 1.  See also two excellent documentaries by Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker, Women, War & Peace (PBS 2011) and Women, War & Peace II (PBS,  2019).

[3] Valerie M. Hudson, “What Sex means for World Peace,” https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/04/24/what-sex-means-for-world-peace/  (April 24, 2012).  Also see the full study in her book, Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

[4] Severine Autesserre, “On the Frontlines of Peace: An Insider’s Guide to Changing the World,” Keynote Address at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame (November 9, 2019).   In 2021, her forthcoming book with the same title will be available through Oxford University Press.

[5] For an overview of the Sisters of St. Joseph from their roots in 17^th century France until early twentieth-century America see Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

[6] For the best up-to-date information on the transnational activities of women religious see the websites of religious congregations.  Most have a “social justice” link that gives past and present networks and activities.  Also, see www.globalsisterreport.org – weekly online report of sisters’ activities from across the globe.

[7] Kelly Litt, “Catholic Sisters at the UN: Bringing the moral voice to the debate,” in Global Sisters Report www.globalsistersreport.org  June 29, 2015.

[8] Maryann Cusimano Love, “Catholic Women Building Peace: Invisibility, Ideas and Institutions Expand Participation,” in Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding, 64.  The quote from Tip O’Neill was also taken from this source from Love’s  interview with St. Joseph Sister Janet Mock, December, 2011.

[9] All quantitative and qualitative data on the sisters and the grant is being archived at the Sr. Martha Smith Archives and Research Center, Avila University, Kansas City, Missouri.

[10] “Second Generation” is the term we assigned the 122 sisters who trained in Le Puy and returned to teach in their own countries.  The “First Generation” are the nine sisters on the Design team who were the instructors for the five workshop-training sessions in Le Puy.

[11] Excerpt from “Report to Evaluators” from Sr. Griselda Morales Martinez, Project Director the “Cultural Diversity and Conflict Management” grant, November 2017.

[12] Ibanez B. Penas and Carmen Lopez Saenz, Interculturalism: Between Identity and Diversity (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006), 15.

[13] There are a variety of resources and articles that discuss this concept including, Kimberly Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43:6 (July, 1991), 1241-99 and “What Does Intersectional Feminism Actually Mean?” International Women’s Development Agency  https://iwda.org.au/ (May 11, 2018) among others.

[14] Donatella della Porta and Raffaele Marchetti, “Transnational Activism and the Global Justice Movement,” www.academia.edu, 428. Also see Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York: Cambridge Press, 2005). For more on the importance of women in the peacemaking process see the work of documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney, who produced a two-part series for PBS titled Women, War and Peace, Part I (2011) and Part II (2018) describing successful peacebuilding by women in the twenty-first century.

[15] Hayward and Marshall eds., Women, Religion and Peacebuilding.

[16] In an effort to broaden accessibility and information about the project the authors have given presentations in fall 2019 at the Peace and Justice Studies Conference at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Canada and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

[17] This 2017 data and many more statistics can be found at the online website for Center for the Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA)  http://CARA.georgetown.edu.  (Washington, D.C.)

 

Carol K. Coburn is a Professor Emerita in Religious Studies and a consultant for the Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Nonviolence at Avila University.  She is the author of two books including Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920.  She has over 30 refereed articles and 40 national/international presentations, most focused on Catholic sisters, social justice, and peacebuilding.

Ken Parsons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Avila University. He is also a consultant for the Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Nonviolence and the Director for the Center for Global Studies and Social Justice (2013-2019). He teaches and presents papers at conferences around the world on structural violence, notions of difference, and human rights

New Online History Resources: The Cold War and Post-Cold War Era

By Roger Peace

History is most useful when approached as a series of decisions rather than events.  Those choices can be analyzed in hindsight and assessed as to their wisdom or faults.  Moreover, choices made at certain times can have long-range and profound effects.

One such time was the 1945-1947 period, when the Truman administration adopted policies and attitudes that set the stage for a long Cold War.  Another was the 1989-1991 period, when the Cold War ended and the possibility of building a new world order was at hand.  In both cases, the “peace dividend” that many citizens sought – a transfer of funds from military to domestic programs such as education and health care – evaporated.  Instead of mutual aid and support, a vicarious “empire identity” was parlayed as the glue to unite Americans.

Two recent essays on the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website, “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990,” and “The post-Cold War era, 1989-2001,” delve into how and why decisions were made in Washington at the outset of these periods.  In the case of the Cold War, for example, six possibilities are laid out from which President Harry Truman could have chosen, the first three being on the peaceful side (he chose the fourth and fifth):

• A global New Deal as suggested by former Vice President Henry A. Wallace;
• Cooperative internationalism and full support for the United Nations as advocated by Eleanor Roosevelt;
• Peaceful coexistence, or détente, which emerged twenty-five years later;
• Containment or encirclement of the Soviet Union and opposition to “communist” movements around the world;
• Rollback or subversion of “communist” governments and movements; and
• Nuclear attack, the most aggressive option for which plans were drawn up but never implemented.

Having charted the decision-making process, the Cold War essay moves on to assess results.  Viewed from a peace-oriented value perspective, these results are examined not primarily in terms of military success and national prestige but in terms of ethical considerations and international norms.  Was it a war of aggression?  Did the U.S. intervention contravene international law?  Were the Geneva Conventions respecting civilians observed?

Apart from the Korean War and the Vietnam War (examined in separate essays), most U.S. interventions during the long Cold War were covert.  The international relations scholar Lindsey O’Rourke, in Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (2018), identifies 70 “regime change” interventions during the Cold War, of which 64 were conducted clandestinely through the CIA.  Of these 64, five involved assassination plots, 13 involved U.S.-backed military coups and insurrections (9 succeeded), 16 were directed at manipulating elections (12 resulted in the U.S.-backed candidate winning), and 14 instigated sabotage and destabilization operations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.   Astoundingly, according to O’Rourke, “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes.”

The contradiction between stated U.S. principles and actual policies leads us to a third component of peace history – unpackaging official rationales and ideological presumptions.  In the case of the Cold War, this requires a lengthy section on the origins of socialist and communist philosophies and movements, and the manner in which anti-communism has been used to support right-wing authoritarian governments.  During the Cold War, the U.S. supported a host of dictatorial and repressive regimes, and covertly overthrew a number of democratic ones.

In the conclusion of this essay, I offer a succinct summary of lessons that may be drawn from this study:

If there is a paramount lesson to be learned from the Cold War, it is that the United States should shed its imperial identity and become a team player on the world stage, pursuing cooperation rather than military preponderance.  Let Pax Americana follow Pax Britannica into the dustbin of history.  American citizens need to be aware of the history and effects of U.S. foreign policies, cross-examine official rationales, and strengthen mechanisms of democratic accountability, thus enabling critical assessment of current U.S. policies and actions in the world.  Ethical standards of behavior should apply to the United States no less than to other nations.

The latest essay on the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website, “Post-Cold War era, 1989-2001,” takes a similar approach in (1) highlighting the choices at hand at a crucial time (and the missed opportunities for creating a more peaceful world), (2) assessing policy results, (3) critiquing official rationales, and (4) probing lessons that might be drawn – a general peace studies approach to international relations and wars.

As with all essays on this open resource website, the post-Cold War essay is written for students and the general public, offers coherent and well-organized narratives, and is accompanied by an ample number of photos and images – 119 to be exact (and 125 in the Cold War essay).  It synthesizes and builds on the work of expert scholars, offers analysis based upon available primary sources, and provides copious endnotes for independent examination of primary documents.  The authors, Brian D’Haeseleer, Jeremy Kuzmarov, and Roger Peace, are scholars of U.S. military and foreign policy and experienced teachers.  Professors, instructors, and teachers are encouraged to assign the essay, all or in part, to their students.  All essays may be downloaded in PDF format, with or without images.

The Post-Cold War essay covers the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989, the Persian Gulf War in early 1991, “humanitarian interventions” in Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere, and the failed American crusade to remake Russia.  The story begins with a missed opportunity to build a more peaceful, just, and cooperative world order.

On December 8, 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev presented a challenge to the world community to create a new world order based on cooperation rather than domination.  “The formula for development at another’s expense is becoming outdated,” he told the United Nations General Assembly.  “It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy.”  To the surprise of many, the Soviet Union followed through and allowed the communist governments of Eastern Europe to fall as nonviolent revolutions swept through the region.

In December 1989, President George H. W. Bush met with Gorbachev on the island of Malta.  Bush seemed upbeat after the meeting, telling reporters, “The arms race, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle, all those should be things of the past.”  That was a good start for remaking the world order.  Rhetoric notwithstanding, however, the U.S. foreign policy establishment viewed Moscow’s retreat from great power domination as an opportunity to advance U.S. interests and establish the U.S. as the sole superpower in the world.  Less than three weeks after the Malta summit, U.S. forces invaded Panama in a classic “gunboat diplomacy” maneuver, denounced by the UN General Assembly as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a more cooperative and peaceful world order gradually receded from view during the post-Cold War period.  In its place, U.S. leaders advanced the idea of an American-led world order secured by U.S. military predominance.  Those who hoped for a “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War were sorely disappointed as new threats from abroad were found to replace the vanishing “communist threat.”  As for Russia, the U.S.-applied capitalist “shock therapy” produced mostly shock and little therapy as social welfare systems were eviscerated and poverty rose precipitously.  All in all, as the historian Odd Arne Westad notes, “the 1990s was a lost opportunity for international cooperation, particularly to combat disease, poverty and inequality.”

What might the world be like today if different choices had been made in the post-Cold War era?  Might the transfer of money and talent to constructive activities been realized, enabling governments to competently address environmental threats, pressing economic needs, and epidemic diseases?  Though the opportunity was missed in the 1990s, the future is still open to this healing possibility.

The U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide is an open resource, non-commercial, educational website sponsored by the Historians for Peace and Democracy and the Peace History Society.  If interested in assisting this website project (production of essays or public outreach), please contact Roger Peace, website coordinator, rcpeace3@embarqmail.com.

Bibliographic Guide to Conventional and Nuclear Armaments

by David Lincove

Readers of the Peace and Change blog who are interested in data sources of conventional and nuclear armaments will be interested in the bibliographic guide to key sources linked in this blog post.  In the guide, I link to the most extensive, systematic publications with statistical information compiled from publicly available sources.  Most are freely available on the internet.  The data sources are used to cite numerical information, often illustrated over a period of time, as evidence in research.  In addition, the sources generated studies assessing and comparing quantitative methodologies in armaments.  For example, after  UN Register of Conventional Arms became operational in 1992, researchers, such as Malcolm Chalmers, Siemon Wezeman, and Paul Holtom, studied its development and effectiveness to achieve its purpose of reducing secrecy and building confidence among nations to help maintain peace.  The internet has enhanced the public exposure of arms data, although the complications assessing and comparing the raw data from different countries limits its impact except for experts on armaments.

 

See “Key Sources of Multinational Data on Conventional and Nuclear Armaments” Reference and User Services Quarterly 58, 1(Fall 2018): 11-15 at 

 

Revisiting Peace Research in the 21st Century: Reflections on an Interdisciplinary Field with a Mission

By Harry Targ

Personal Reflections

As I grow older I ground more and more of my teaching and writing in the context of my own professional history. I studied journalism and political science in college in the late 1950s and earned a masters degree in political science in 1962. After short stints in the military and working for the social security administration, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in political science, achieved in 1967. Lacking a political vision much beyond liberalism and devoid of any practical political work, I thought being a professor would make a nice career.

The mid-1960s was a time of ferment. Brave young people, from the South and the North, launched a heroic campaign to end Jim Crow segregation in the South. From the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August, 1964 authorizing President Johnson to escalate war in Southeast Asia, to the daily bombings over Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder) in 1965 to 540,000 troops in South Vietnam by 1968, struggles over the war in Vietnam and foreign policy, in general, enveloped the society. The 60s was a time also when the last vestiges of colonialism were being dismantled. Only Portuguese Africa resisted change as did white minority regimes in the former Rhodesia and South Africa. In the Western Hemisphere, the Cuban revolution represented the hope of humankind for the construction of a better world.

It was an exciting time to be alive, to become politicized, and to initiate a teaching and research career. I was drawn to the study of international relations and United States foreign policy within political science. 

 

Social Science Paradigms: Realism, Behavioralism, and Modernization

I had studied international relations, foreign policy, and diplomatic history in college. My “radical” teachers in college were critical of the foreign policies of presidents Truman and Eisenhower. They also condemned the most simplistic versions of the Cold War explanation of world affairs, and the overly zealous branding of all critics of United States foreign policy as being “communists.”

I was influenced by my professors to see the world through the lens of “the theory of political realism.” Foundational theorists who shaped the discourse on international relations included British historian E.H. Carr (1964), theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1947), retired diplomat George Kennan (1957), and political scientist Hans Morgenthau (1960). The theory of political realism they propounded drew upon the classical writings of ancestors such as Thucydides, St. Augustine, Thomas Hobbes, Machiavelli, and James Madison (see Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, 1971). Each in their own way saw war and violence as emanating from human nature, drives for power, greed, and personal honor. In a world of each against all, military capabilities, “balances of power,” and other devices whereby the power of one could be checked by the power of another constituted the tools for muting, but never eliminating, war and violence.

The contemporary realists, for example, Kennan and Morgenthau were critics of United States foreign policy not because the U.S. was interventionist or because the American government had launched an arms race with the former Soviet Union but because these activities were defended in the name of promoting freedom and democracy rather than “national interest” and “security.” The problem with the anti-communist proclamations of the day and the promises of human liberation they articulated was that they were not achievable. There must be, the realists said, a fit between goals, rhetoric, and policy. And the number one goal that any nation must pursue is advancing national interest and security. In a world of perpetual violence, this was all that could be achieved.

While most instructors of undergraduate courses on international relations used Hans Morgenthau’s classic text, Politics Among Nations (it survived eleven editions), newer currents were emerging in the graduate study of international relations. Following the Soviet launch of Sputnik and an emerging U.S. cultural celebration of science, President Kennedy promised that an American would be on the moon by the end of the sixties. Perhaps most importantly because of the tilt in Defense Department policies and personnel from old-fashioned military wisdom to modern scientific management, the study of international relations began to shift toward the “scientific study of international relations.” Now, social science researchers needed to go beyond a description of political events and policies to explain them and predict future outcomes. The new study of international relations should embrace scientific techniques: posit hypotheses, operationalize them clearly by identifying variables that could be measured, and “test” the hypotheses by examining the data using statistical techniques. The behavioral science model became the dominant paradigm throughout the discipline of political science and significantly so in the study of international relations (Kaplan, 1966; Targ, 1983).

While several theories became fashionable in the study of international relations and comparative politics perhaps none would have a greater impact on social science and public policy than modernization theory (see Nils Gilman, 2003). Starting in the 1950s with various formulations of structural functionalism, leading social science scholars from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago developed a paradigm to explain why the “newly” independent nations of the world were experiencing birth pangs of violence and poverty, why they were not democracies, and why subversive elements, such as anti-regime guerrilla fighters, were actively trying to undermine development. The modernization theorists studied the development of Europe and North America and concluded that societies needed to develop secular middle-class societies, governed by leaders with scientific and technical training. At a certain stage, infrastructure development, middle-class formation, the professionalization of elites, and qualitative shifts from theological to scientific points of view would yield democratic political institutions. When scholars spoke about public affairs, many of them suggested that that process of modernization was what motivated an activist United States foreign policy.

Upon reflection then, the 1960s was a decade of political turmoil, on college campuses an awakening from the somnolence of the 50s, and in the larger world an escalation of the arms race, U.S. global interventionism, and the Vietnam war. Parallel to these political changes a new social science was emerging as institutions of higher education exploded in numbers, interest in social science expanded, and the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and other sources began to fund large-scale projects of relevance to international relations and development. In this context realism (although declining in popularity), behavioralism and modernization grew to dominate the study of international relations.

 

Discovering Peace Research  

 I wrote about these contradictory currents at the time (Targ, 1971, 207) suggesting that “students and young faculty have begun to re-evaluate the dominant motifs of scientific inquiry: the relationship of knowledge to U.S. foreign policy, the interaction of knowledge and social control, and the adequacy and/or inadequacy of knowledge as agenda and guide to social change.”

Energized by these impulses, as a student and young professor, my curiosity gravitated toward “peace research.” I was first attracted to two prominent journals; The Journal of Conflict Resolution, produced at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution (CRCR) at the University of Michigan, and The Journal of Peace Research, the Institute for Peace Research, Oslo, Norway.

The JCR published articles that used the newer “scientific methods,” were theory and data-driven, and implied that the dynamics of  interpersonal, national, and international conflict might be similar or “isomorphic,” so that scholars might study conflict at these different levels of analysis to discover the underlying causes of conflict and violence. JCR had a distinguished list of contributors and editors representing psychology, social psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and mathematics.

The JPR initiated publication in 1964 with Johan Galtung as editor. In its first issue, Galtung described two possible worlds; one he referred to as a condition of General and Complete War (GCW). In this world, cooperation occurred within groups, but conflict characterized between-group interactions. Individual and group (and nation) actors were motivated totally by individualistic goals; identification was with self alone. In this state of GCW there were no effective constraints on the use of force.

Another possible condition, Galtung posited, was one of General and Complete Peace (GCP). This was a condition in which human integration prevailed, the harmony of individuals, groups, and nations was a characteristic feature of human existence, and violence was minimized. In this initial issue of JPR, Galtung declared that the peace research project was to study how to move from GCW to GCP (an end to violence and integration of human society). Peace research should study violence in its interpersonal, national, and international manifestations. It should address improving the human condition. It should be interdisciplinary, normative and futuristic as well. And, of course, the peace research project should use the latest of scientific techniques to study the movement from GCW to GCP.

The growth of influence of these journals paralleled the expansion of networks of professional peace research/peace studies associations. These included the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), the Canadian Peace Research Association, the Consortium on Peace Research Education and Development (COPRED), now the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), and the Peace Science Society. Peace studies caucuses were created in professional associations including those of social psychologists, international relations scholars, and sociologists.

As I acquainted myself more with peace research I became aware of the intellectual and activist tradition from which it evolved. First, peace research evolved from a long history of peace education. Religious pacifists and peace activists long preached and taught about alternatives to violence. Peace education often developed in parallel with anti-war activism. From Congregational, Unitarian, and Quaker meetings to anti-slavery and anti-war movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, activists as different as Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Mark Twain, and Eugene V. Debs wrote and spoke about peace.

Second, peace studies of various kinds evolved out of practical diplomatic achievements such as the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 which codified elements of international law. These were followed after World War I with the first academic curricula on international law.

Third, a body of peace research scholarship was published in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s that served as the model for the peace research tradition that followed.  David Mitrany, a British scholar, wrote A Working Peace System, in 1943, which analyzed the prospects for global integration based upon cross-national economic, social, and functional ties between peoples. He provided a framework that stimulated the study of regional “integration” in Europe, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s.

Major data-based studies of war were published between 1940 and the late 1960s that dramatically advanced the idea that data on wars, their frequency, causes, and consequences could be accumulated such that various hypotheses relating these to each other could be tested. Quincy Wright, the political scientist, published a 2,000-page data-rich book on the history of war called A Study of War (1942). Lewis Richardson, a retired meteorologist, gathered data on wars from 1815 to 1945, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960). Pitirim Sorokin’s four-volume, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1957), included historical data on internal and international wars over time, relating the frequency of such wars to cultural attributes. In the 1950s and 60s Rudolph Rummel gathered an array of data, from his Dimensionality of Nations Project (1968) as did long-time political scientist/peace researcher J. David Singer who published books and articles based on The Correlates of War Project (1972).

In addition to the rich history, peace research was increasingly stimulated by the recognition of the world’s greatest arms race, the growing danger of a nuclear war that could destroy humankind, and an intense global ideological struggle defined as between “communism” and “the free world.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists portrayed a clock with the hands estimating how close the world was to midnight, the hour of nuclear apocalypse. Each crisis would lead the editors of the journal to move the hands on the clock to the top of the hour.

 

Peace Research Battles: Traditionalists vs. Radicals

Despite the growing interest in peace research, dominant paradigms in international relations, political science, and history continued to reify power as the central concept driving political analysis. This was so even among those who had gravitated to peace research.

The world was understood as one dominated by two superpowers overseeing two competing power blocs. The bipolar world was a particular variant of the state system that was created in the seventeenth century. The ultimate units of analysis were separate and distinct nation-states. Since a few were always more powerful than all others, international relations became the study of powerful states.

For the most part, traditional peace researchers concerned themselves with the conflict between powerful states, particularly because of the danger of nuclear war. For them, conflict, therefore, was symmetrical, based on subjective factors such as misperceptions, misunderstandings, and miscommunications, and involved roughly equal adversaries. (The work of Roger Fisher and Charles Osgood on negotiations and strategies for de-escalating conflicts is relevant here (2010). Because of the arms race of the post-World War II period, then, they fashioned a peace research that was committed to conflict management or resolution among the big powers. Their goal was achieving negative peace or war avoidance.

For other peace researchers, this scholarly lens on the world seemed increasingly divorced from political reality (Eide, 1972). The dreams of human liberation that came with the rapid decolonization of the African continent were being derailed as what Kwame Nkrumah called “neo-colonialism” replaced formal colonialism. Gaps between rich and poor peoples and nations began their dramatic increase. Covert operations, military coups, big power interventions in poor countries increased. Wars ensued against peoples in South and East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. And multinational corporations were spreading their operations all across the globe, initiating the first great wave of outsourcing of production and jobs. For many Americans and Asians, the most wrenching experience of all these manifestations of global disarray was the Vietnam War.

In this historical context, radical peace researchers began to argue that our understanding of these phenomena required a significant paradigm shift. If we wanted to understand the world in order to change it we needed to break out of the state-centric, great powers, conflict management conception of international relations. We needed to develop theories and prescriptions that helped us understand the world we lived in so that we could work on the reduction of the enormous gaps between human potential and human actuality; and, therefore, structural violence.

These peace researchers called structural violence the difference between how humanity could live, secure in economic and social justice, versus how most people live. They asked questions about the structures and processes that prohibited the full realization of human possibility. Peace researchers also saw an inextricable connection between direct violence, or killing, which was the more traditional subject of peace research, and structural violence, which involved the institutionalization of human misery.

Further, they hypothesized that there were connections between imperialism, the workings of capitalism, patriarchy, institutionalized racism, social and economic injustice and both direct and structural violence.

More specifically, radical peace researchers began to see that both direct and structural violence resulted from a global political/economic/ and cultural system in which Centers of Power within and between countries controlled and exploited Periphery countries and people. A system of imperialism existed whereby ruling classes in core countries collaborated with ruling classes in peripheral countries to exploit masses of people. This was a system that had its roots in the rise of capitalism out of feudalism. It was a system of imperial rule. It was a system of patriarchy. It was a system of institutionalized racism. And wars were the result of struggles for imperial control and domination. Radical peace researchers borrowed ideas from dependency theory and grafted them onto traditional theories of imperialism to offer an alternative paradigm to the state-centric, power-driven model that dominated the academy and political punditry (Galtung, 1971).

 

Subsequent Developments in Peace Research and Peace Studies

 Since the 1960s there have been paradigmatic disputes in many of the social sciences and humanities. The title of an old book by Robert Lynd, poses the question that has been raised many times: “Knowledge for What?” (1970) Debates about values used in the selection of what to research and for what purposes surfaced in radical caucuses in philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, and the modern language association. Also, debates were forthcoming in international studies about the substance of the field of study and the class/race/gender perspectives reflected in dominant paradigms.

Peace research/peace studies has grown particularly since the 1960s. Numerous journals addressing peace research have been produced. About 250 colleges and universities have undergraduate programs in peace studies. A few universities have peace studies or similarly defined graduate programs. International conferences, often organized under the aegis of IPRA, have been held all over the world and well-known peace research scholars from every continent have participated in academic conferences and published original research.

Some peace researchers have combined their interest in peace studies with parallel and equally interdisciplinary pursuits. Berenice Carroll, for example, has been a leading feminist scholar and while participating in the Committee on Peace Studies at Purdue University also served as the Chairperson of a graduate and undergraduate program in Women’s Studies.

Growth and development of peace studies from both research and educational standpoints has raised stark conceptual debates. Rank-ordering of tasks and other outstanding issues of dispute remain.

First, there has always been a tension between those who view the study of peace in higher education as primarily a scholarly task and those who see the research agenda for peace as ancillary to activism. In addition, different emphases have emerged between those who support research versus those who highlight teaching (including peace pedagogies from K through 12).

Second, there is a tension between those who see their work as principally empirical and others who argue for the centrality of normativity: basically debating whether research and teaching should address what is or what ought to be.

Third, the debate continues on foundational concepts: violence and peace. Particularly, peace researchers and activists split on whether priorities should be placed on issues of direct violence or structural violence. In addition, questions exist about whether the war problem can be resolved before we solve the social injustice problem.

Fourth, issues have been raised about the possible intersections that can be created between the peace research organizing concepts, violence and peace, and organizing concepts in Marxist, Feminist, and Critical Race theoretical literatures.

Fifth, sectors of the peace research community argue for a field of study that is framed by principles of non-violence. Analyses of what is, what should be, and how to get there, for these scholars and activists is derived from reflections on the literature of non-violence. Others emphasize the electoral arena and a few still draw upon the literature of revolution. In any case, many argue, peace researchers need to gather data and analyze social movements.

Sixth, the issues of dispute described above between “traditional” and “radical” research have not disappeared. Central to these is the place of conflict resolution and mediation as tools of peacebuilding.

Finally, peace studies programs, as with many interdisciplinary and non-traditional programs, are and will be under careful scrutiny because of the economic crisis in higher education. As major universities are required to shrink their budgets many have called for eliminating “frills” in the curriculum. “Frills”, it is understood, refer to liberal arts courses and particularly non-traditional and interdisciplinary programs. In addition, there have been rightwing attacks on all interdisciplinary programs by flamboyant opportunists such as David Horowitz. Three Indiana professors were named to Horowitz’s august list of the 101 most dangerous professors (2006). All three were affiliated with Peace Studies programs.

 

Where do we go from here?

For a young academic who was slowly drawn into the maelstrom of anti-war activities in the 1960s and as a young academic who desired to link his teaching and research to the activism of that point in time, peace research provided an intellectual anchor, a model for integrating theory and practice, and an academic community that could stimulate intellectual development. That tradition and the debates raised within it, such as what we mean by violence and peace, are as relevant today as in the past. We must organize to defend the viability of disciplines such as Peace Research as they are subject to various political attacks. In addition;

First, peace research must continue to be a model for engaged scholarship. It should draw upon issues of the reduction of violence, improving the human condition, and recognizing the potential strengths of the disempowered and should be guided by Berenice Carroll’s deconstruction of the “cult of power” and its replacement with a concept of empowerment (1972).

Second, we need in our scholarship to emphasize the centrality of workers, women, people of color, and all so-called marginalized people as shapers of history, or at least to recognize their role in creating history.

Third, we need to engage in research projects that might help individuals, groups, and classes gain self-confidence and strength in their social projects.

Four, we need to extend our scholarship to the study and celebration of those who have chosen the path to empowerment and the evaluation of their relative successes and failures. This would not be an exercise in romanticism but rather an exercise in developing a more sophisticated understanding of history and change.

Five, we need to build our theories and our research skills through active engagement in the process of social change. Theoretical validation comes from engagement, not withdrawal.

Six, we need to relate models of empowerment to all sectors of society. We cannot embrace the issue of competence, strength, and self-actualization for one constituency and use traditional models of domination to try to understand other parallel constituencies. Here is where understanding the connections between class, race, and gender play a particularly important role.

Finally, peace research and activism should broaden its lens on the world to explore and assess movements for radical change everywhere, including the broad array of movements arising in the Global South. Also, we need to reflect on the global significance of non-national indigenous movements, cross-national forms of worker and women’s organizations, and the exciting array of new campaigns around land and factory occupations. Perhaps most of all we need to assess the theory and practice of what is called 21st-century socialism.

 

References

Carr, E.H. The Twenty Years’ Crisis: 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, Harper and Row, 1964.

Carroll, Berenice, “Peace Research: The Cult of Power,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, No. 4, December, 1972, 585-617.

Deutsch, Karl. W, the analysis of International Relations, Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Dougherty, James and Robert  Pfaltzgraff, Contending Theories of International Relations, Lippincott, 1971.

Eide, Asbjorn, “Dialogue and Confrontation in Europe,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, No. 4, December, 1972, 511-523.

Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, “Getting to Yes,” in  David Barash ed. Approaches to Peace, oxford Press, 2010, 71-78.

Galtung, Johan, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research, No. 2, 1971, 81-119.

Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Johns Hopkins, 2003.

Kaplan, Morton, “The New Great Debate: Traditionalism vs. Science in International Relations,”  World Politics, October, 1966.

Kennan, George, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, Mentor, 1957.

Lynd, Robert, Knowledge for What?  Princeton University Press, 1970.

Mitrany, David, A Working Peace System, Quadrangle, 1966.

Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations, Knopf, 1960.

Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics, Scribners, 1947.

Osgood, Charles, “Disarmament Demands GRIT,” in David Barash ed. Approaches to Peace, Oxford, 2010, 78-83.

Richardson, Lewis, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Quadrangle, 1960.

Rummel Rudolph, “The Relationship Between  National Attributes and Foreign Conflict Behavior,” in J.David Singer ed., Quantitative International Politics: Insights and Evidence, Free Press, 1968.

Singer, J.David and Melvin Small, The Wages of War 1816-1965, A Statistical Handbook, John Wiley, 1972.

 Sorokin, Pitirim, Social and Cultural Dynamics, Porter Sargent, 1957.

Targ, Harry R., International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle, Schenkman, 1983.

Targ, Harry R., “Social Science and a New Social Order,” Journal of Peace Research, No. 3, 1971.

Wright, Quincy, A Study of War, University of Chicago, 1942.

 

Harry Targ is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Committee on Peace Studies at Purdue University. 

Politics of Peace and Gender + Digital Humanities

By Shelley Rose

For a couple years now, department colleagues have encouraged me to find a space where my research in protest movements and gender intersected with my interests in digital humanities and pedagogy. The product of those conversations is a course I offered in Fall 2017, “The Politics of Peace and Gender.” Excited by the possibility of sharing my passion for these fields with my students, I had three main goals:

1. Focus the course on the interdisciplinary work of geographers, political scientists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and activists;
2. Emphasize the transferable skills our department and the AHA argue are an essential part of history education;
3. Pilot this course as a methods course for a future certificate or minor program in digital humanities at CSU.

Here is the description from the syllabus:

This course investigates perceptions of peace and gender in politics, drawing on insights from international relations and human rights history to study gendered conceptualizations of peace as “feminine” and assumptions that militarism and war are historically “masculine.” The chronology of the course begins with Bertha von Suttner’s pacifist novel Lay Down your Arms! (1889) and ends in the present day. Through primary and secondary research, students will evaluate the importance of gender analysis in the study of war and its opponents. In particular, this course emphasizes the various roles of men and women participating in protest events and the spaces they choose occupy. The course fosters a transnational perspective, highlighting different historical and geographical contexts such as 19^th– century nationalism in Europe, the experience and aftermath of World War I, international debates around disarmament including nuclear disarmament, gendered violence during the dirty wars in Latin America, and more recent mass transnational protest events such as the Women’s March on Washington and the Occupy Movement.

“Politics of Peace and Gender” enrolled 13 undergraduates, 2 graduate students, and 3 “Project 60” students. This was one of the most academically diverse groups of students I have ever taught in an upper-level history course. Not only did students range in technical ability, they came to the course from various majors and programs including Asian Studies, Black Studies, Education, English, Gender and Women’s Studies, History, Political Science, Psychology, and Social Studies. Early in the semester, I adopted the strategy of pulling key terms from our daily readings and posting them on the course chat (in this case we used university-supported Microsoft Teams). I also wrote the term list on the whiteboard in the classroom before each discussion. While I took attendance, students could walk to the board and put a checkmark next to the term(s) they wanted to be sure we reviewed during our session. This turned out to be a valuable exercise due to the interdisciplinary nature of both the materials and students. For instance, a term like “thick description” is familiar to history and anthropology students, but often unfamiliar to psychologists and others in the room.

In order to emphasize transferable skills, I approached this course as a digital methods course where students created an Omeka exhibit on a protest event of their choice as a final project. I drew heavily on my experience with project-based learning (PBL) and used the student-created exhibits from the Colored Conventions Project as a model to design a series of weekly skill-based labs that provided a foundation for the final project. I thought carefully about the branding for this course, and ultimately decided to use the word “lab” for work sessions. While the idea of a laboratory is borrowed from STEM fields, I use it to emphasize that these sessions are a time to experiment with digital methods. I made a conscious effort to convey to my students that it was ok to stumble, or even fail, when creating digital content – just like many scientists.

I love that digital humanities methods and projects challenge the assumption among academics and students that all assignments must represent a “finished” product. I stress to my students that it is fine to have work in progress. After all, academics present their own work at conferences before polishing ideas into an article or book. This is the reason why I grade labs separately from the final project (which deviates slightly from the traditional PBL model). My goal is to provide students with space to grow and, I hope, to be more courageous in their final project. Students were able to use network diagrams, maps, and other elements from their labs, but they were not required to use all of them in order to preserve the element of choice that is considered key to PBL.

Project-based learning calls for a public product for the final projects. The “Politics of Peace and Gender,” student exhibits are posted on a public Omeka site. All students were required to present their exhibit at the DigitalCSU working group research showcase in our library at the end of the semester. At the time, I hosted the site as a subdomain on my own website. I am now in the process of working with the CSU library to archive this site on their servers to ensure sustainability and to link it more clearly to the university’s Bepress site, EngagedScholarship @ CSU. Students were evaluated according to this rubric.

As a special topics course “Politics of Peace and Gender” was cross-listed for both undergraduate and M.A. students. Each M.A. student completed the Omeka exhibit and also wrote an academic blog post. You can read Katherine Behnke’s post on Bernadette Devlin here on the Peace & Change blog. It’s a great example of how her research for the digital exhibit revealed a significant gap in the historiography of a well-known protest event.

Student exhibits covered topics from The 1919 May 4th Incident in China to Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. You can view them all on http://csuhisppg.shelleyrose.org/.

Shelley E. Rose is Associate Professor of History and Director of Social Studies at Cleveland State University. Follow her on Twitter @shelleyerose

New Essays on the “Peace History” Website

By Roger Peace

What would history look like if the disciplines of diplomatic, military, and peace history were merged?

This could well describe the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website – alias “peace history.”  Launched in January 2016, the website examines the major wars and foreign policies of the United States from a peace-oriented, humanitarian perspective and includes substantial coverage of peace movements.  Seven of sixteen planned sections have been completed, most recently, “Yankee imperialism,’ 1901-1934,” and “Central America wars, 1980s.” Each entry contains about 80 pages of text, is divided into numerous subsections for easy assimilation, and includes dozens of photographs and images (103 in the Central America essay).

In “’Yankee imperialism,’ 1901-1934,” authored by myself with assistance from Ann Jefferson (Univ. of Tennessee) and Marc Becker (Truman State Univ.), U.S. motives and rationales for interventionism are critically examined, the policies of succeeding U.S. administrations are reviewed, and six case studies of U.S. interventions are presented:  Cuba, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.   The eclectic anti-interventionist movement gathered steam after World War I and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against U.S. military occupations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua as well as to avoid war with Mexico in the mid-1920s.

In “Central America wars, 1980s,” authored by Ginger Williams (Winthrop Univ.), Jeremy Kuzmarov (Univ. of Tulsa), and myself, with assistance from Richard Grossman (Northeastern Illinois Univ.), Brian D’Haeseleer (Lyon Univ.), and Michael Schmidli (Bucknell Univ.), the Reagan administration’s rhetoric and policies toward Central America are placed in historical perspective and critically examined.  Historical background is also provided on El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua before proceeding to the 1980s.  The Central America movement that rallied in opposition to U.S. interventionism was remarkably creative in fostering transnational activities and cultivating understanding and empathy across national borders.

Peace History Society members and friends – instructors and students – can avail themselves of these essays, as the website is an open public resource.  Check out the website and use it!  Assign sections to students. Send feedback through the website contact system.

The next essay will focus on World War I, the subject of the excellent PHS conference in Kansas last fall.  Chuck Howlett, the unofficial dean of peace movement history, and Jeremy Kuzmarov, co-author of The Russians Are Coming Again (Monthly Review Press, May 2018), are part of the writing team.  For those who have expertise in an area not yet covered (see website home page) and would like to help with the planning, writing, or reviewing of future essays, please send me a note.  –  Roger Peace (rcpeace3@embarqmail.com)

Teaching and Living Totalitarianism in a World Heritage Site

by Ayanna Yonemura

On Saturday, July 8, the United Nations’ cultural agency, UNESCO, added Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to its list of World Heritage sites. Despite the wars that have plagued Eritrea’s short history, Asmara’s modernist and art deco architecture remain amazingly well-preserved. For six months in 2002, from the moment I woke up, during my walks through town to teach at the University of Asmara and while I ran errands on its main avenue, Asmara’s architecture dazzled me. However much I admire it though, this extraordinary aesthetic beauty doesn’t prevent me from thinking of my Fulbright months in Eritrea as my time of teaching and living totalitarianism.

Living in the Italian totalitarian era-constructed environment added a bizarre twist to my surreal and disturbing experience of Eritrea’s totalitarian political environment. Teaching about Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin’s regimes as part of a modern world history course was part of my unplanned participant observation of living under a totalitarian regime; as was lodging for four months in a government-owned hotel, the Emba Soira. Experts describe much of Asmara’s notable architecture with words like “futurist” and “bold” and, while the hotel hasn’t garnered the same amount of attention, they would be similarly impressed with the Emba Soira’s interior.

The hotel interior’s main feature is streamlined, light, wood furniture coordinated in every room throughout the hotel from the restaurant, lobby and bar on the main floor to the two stories of guest rooms. Pastel-trimmed Italian linens and modern light fixtures gently accent the furniture. Visually, it was like living in a dream. While the phones were tapped, at least the hotel staff let me know if I had gotten phone messages—a courtesy I did not enjoy when I rented an apartment and shared a phone line with my landlady.

Located on the Horn of Africa and with a lengthy Red Sea coastline, Eritrea is the world’s third youngest country after East Timor and South Sudan, and government officials have spent many years of the nation’s short history lobbying UNESCO for Asmara’s World Heritage site status. Italian architects and Eritrean laborers built most of Asmara’s remarkable architecture in the 1930s during Italy’s totalitarian years under Mussolini (1922-1943) and while Eritrea was an Italian colony, 1889-1941. Italy lost Eritrea in WWII.

After Ethiopia annexed Eritrea in 1962, Eritrean guerrilla fighters waged a thirty years war for independence that ended in 1991 when they defeated Ethiopian forces. In 1998, Eritrea fought a border war against Ethiopia. I set off for the Fulbright on New Year’s Eve of 2001, a year after this latest war’s ceasefire, having postponed my original departure date after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001.

I had postponed my trip, because while most of the world focused on New York in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Eritrea’s President Afewerki seized the opportunity to crackdown internally. Students of the University of Asmara, his nation’s only university, were among the groups whom he targeted. The university students spent several months under armed guard in an Eritrean desert, literally one of the hottest places on earth, doing forced labor. Teaching at the university was a condition of receiving a Fulbright in Eritrea, and I had looked forward to it. I delayed my departure until the President released the students.

Once I reported at the University of Asmara, I was given the assignment of teaching modern world history to former guerrilla fighters who were, then, government employees at the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs. I knew that my students could quickly report every word I said during lectures to the authorities. Following my predecessor’s syllabus as the department chair had instructed, we spent weeks on the German and Italian totalitarian governments of the 1930s. As I lectured about these historical European regimes, I could not help but think of that I was living in a very similar moment. While I described the characteristics of totalitarianism, the parallel examples of Eritrea immediately came to mind. Each time I mentioned “totalitarianism,” I preceded it with “German” “Italian” or “European” making an effort to implicitly but, consistently, stress that I wasn’t talking about Eritrea. I’m sure that at least some my students made the connection but, of course, we never discussed it or anything that was happening in Eritrea.

 

The author (center) with Dr. Gordon Sato (right), the founder of a non-profit dedicated to aiding Eritreans, and one of Sato’s staff members (left) along the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea.

 

Having been a German Studies major as an undergraduate, East Germany was my only reference point for navigating Eritrea. I had learned about its secret police and its state-controlled economy and propaganda through East German literature and some day trips into East Germany, but my studies were limited. As an American who had grown up in West Germany and California, my understanding of anything like a police state was superficial. Still, that limited knowledge gave me some context, some framework, for understanding when the Eritrean government banned Ethiopian music, listened to my phone calls, and I strongly suspect, sent a spy to chat with me at a cafe. Even in friends’ homes and cars, we whispered any unflattering comments we were brave enough to make about the president. I even averted my eyes the time I had to walk right by him to get to the restroom at a restaurant.

My research agenda suffered. The paranoia of librarians kept me out of the main archive for most of my stay and, trained to take copious ethnographic notes, I wrote down almost nothing, aware that government agents had showed up at the home of a previous foreign researcher and confiscated her notes. My notes, in the wrong hands, could lead to the imprisonment or death of Eritrean friends or colleagues. A U.S. security officer had warned me, “Perception is reality.”

For years, fear for friends and colleagues prevented me for publishing anything about Eritrea. Now, it seems that almost every Eritrean I know has escaped. My graduate school buddies successfully sought political asylum long ago and recently, while living in Kenya, I met young Eritreans whose affluent parents had bought their escape and bribed their way into Kenya. Still, during their flights, they were beaten up. In Kenya, they ran businesses but had no legal rights to own a business as they didn’t have legal papers to live or work there.

Since its people voted for Independence in a 1993 referendum, Eritrea has been a one party state and has had the same president, President Afwerki. In 2015, the UN accused the Eritrean government of pushing its people to migrate in order to flee human rights abuses yet also punishing those who try to leave the country without government permission. Then as now, Eritrea is high among the countries of origin for people applying for political asylum in Europe, in the US and, even more so, in East African nations like Ethiopia. Eritreans also make up a disproportionate amount of the African refugees crossing the Mediterranean and in many European camps.

“Cynical political travesty” is how the Eritrea government characterized the 2015 UN report. In 2016, the UN released another report on Eritrean human rights violations to which a New York Time’s opinion piece responded with, “. . .things aren’t as bad as the report claims.” In June 2017, Newsweek published an article on Eritrea called “Africa’s North Korea” citing the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index.

The UNESCO decision to place Asmara on the World Heritage list is rare positive publicity for the Eritrean government, which responded with a celebratory press release. I doubt if anyone who has been to Asmara would argue about its incredible beauty. Recalling it, I feel in awe of how architecture and design can lift the human spirit, but my strongest memories are of living and teaching totalitarianism.

Ayanna Yonemura holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning, a M.A. in African Studies and a B.A. in German Studies from the University of California. She has been honored with two Fulbright Fellowships and a Civil Liberties Public Education Fund National Fellowship. Currently, she teaches Ethnic Studies at California State University Sacramento.

Welcoming Martha and the Slave Catchers — Harriet Hyman Alonso’s Books

My new book, Martha and the Slave Catchers will be published on November 7, 2017, by Seven Stories Press. It is available for pre-ordering at several on-line stores. I know that it has been quite a while since I’ve written anything for this blog, but I’ve been hard at work preparing my first children’s novel […]

via Welcoming Martha and the Slave Catchers — Harriet Hyman Alonso’s Books

Teaching Peace and Ethical Memory with Voices of Vietnam

By Patrick Chura, University of Akron

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a black granite wall listing the names of all 58,286 American war dead, is 150 yards long; if a similar monument were built with the same density of names listing the three million Vietnamese who died in the same war, that wall would be four and a half miles long. The beautifully designed Veterans Memorial in Washington—a place of reflection and reckoning about a national atrocity—speaks profoundly to Americans, insisting that the United States search its conscience and confront the truth about itself. The fact that it does not acknowledge the Vietnamese is not surprising, but it reminds us that remembering only “one’s own” as narrowly defined by national borders leaves room for more cosmopolitan forms of memory.

During a five-week Fulbright lecturing grant at Ho Chi Minh City Open University in May-June 2016, I taught a course on American Literature of the Vietnam War for 22 Vietnamese undergraduates. In the first stage of our work, we read and discussed American literature and music. (The students loved Pete Seeger, by the way.) The second stage of the course shifted the focus, requiring the students to conduct oral history interviews with parents, grandparents or other Vietnamese who remembered the war, and to translate those interviews into English. These interviews were used immediately in the final stage of the class: the creation and performance of an oral history “memory play” about the conflict referred to in Vietnamese history books as The American War.

Realizing that this plan asked a lot of the students, I devised a short rationale to provide clarity and motivation (for them and for me), as we began. After holding up a copy of Viet Than Nguyen’s recent study, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of the War and explaining that Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American whose novel The Sympathizer had just won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I recited a statement I had silently rehearsed a few days earlier on the flight from Hong Kong to Saigon: “Nguyen says that Ethical Memory of war remembers one’s own, but does not fail to remember others as well,” I said. “This course asks you to remember others—Americans. It also asks you to remember your own—Vietnamese—in order to help Americans remember others.”

The play we made together, Voices of Vietnam, in War and Peace, is the product of their interviews and translations, and my editing and scripting. The play promotes Ethical Memory by speaking the truths of the Vietnamese people while evoking the humanity, and inhumanity, of soldiers and civilians on all sides of the conflict. It was performed in June 2016 in an on-campus auditorium at Ho Chi Minh City Open University, using a minimal set and simple staging, by student-actors who had been rehearsing for only a few days.

At the opening of the play, each student carried a single white flower onstage and placed it in a vase that remained in view throughout the performance. The six scenes that followed offered perspectives perhaps unfamiliar to Americans, describing viewpoints that have not been acknowledged by the English-speaking “memory industry” epitomized in American war films. Voices heard include those of a Vietnamese draft resister, a female doctor who worked for the Viet Cong, and a grandmother who kept books for the American military at the Saigon airport from 1956 until 1973. Voices of Vietnam explores striking cultural differences but also confirms that the prevailing American view of the war—a political and moral failure that left a young generation scarred and stripped of illusions—is largely shared by the Vietnamese.

At the end of the play, the students retrieved their flowers, presented them to an invited guest and led that guest forward. I gave this explanation of the play’s Epilogue: “You have been listening to the students speak your voices, the voices of Vietnamese who remember the war. Now you will speak the students’ voices. Please don’t be shy about coming up on stage.” As their own words became our text, I could see pride on the students’ faces. When they said, “This is my voice,” there was strong emotion, made stronger by the fact that speaking out is still closely monitored in Vietnam. Also lending power were the words themselves, the student-written “appeals to ethical memory.” Here is a sample of those appeals; words about war from Vietnamese 20-year-olds:

Thảo Quy: I did not comprehend the war until I talked to my parents about it. Its brutality is beyond imagination. There are still misunderstandings and untold stories. War has no heroes and no right side. War is wrong. War does not bring peace. The young must understand so as not to repeat. Silence explains nothing.

Le Thanh Tan: The husbands, wives, fathers, sons and daughters who lie beneath us can’t rise again to tell untold stories. But we can find them again in your voices, your stories. Some now want to go to war again; both the young and the old can be childish and naïve. So open your hearts and tell us your stories.

Hồng Loan: War is loss—friends, family, dream, and hopes. We are still affected after 41 years. Agent Orange victims suffer and leftover bombs have killed thousands. Teach the young the value of human life. Whether you are soldiers or farmers, from North or South, Vietnamese or American, we need to hear your voices, for a better future.

Gia Hân: Why did the U.S. fight here? They killed many, including my grandfather, and the consequences of dioxin remain. My father’s house was burned 3 times by bombs. My grandparents had nowhere to turn, they were poor and hungry. History books are not enough. Talk to your elders. Sympathize with them. Problems aren’t solved by fighting but by talking.

Watching the students perform and seeing the audience captivated by how openly they were speaking remains my favorite Vietnam memory. I was grateful to the students for stepping out of their comfort zone to do something in an academic setting that went beyond what they thought was possible. I had told the Vietnamese students that their play would “help Americans remember others,” which meant that U.S. students would perform it also. When some of my Akron undergraduates came down with acute cases of stage fright, I used the bravery of the Vietnamese students as motivation.

We performed the play in Akron on November 9. In a discussion with the audience afterward, someone asked the cast how it felt to speak the voices of Vietnam. Several students said that the experience was “eye-opening.” One remarked thoughtfully, “When you have to present someone else’s story, someone else’s feeling, there is a seriousness to it.” Another said, “This — performing this play — has been a way for us to go back and trace a dark part in our nation’s history and also grow more empathy.” I shared these responses by email with a Vietnamese colleague I’d met during my stay in Ho Chi Minh City. He wrote back, “I’m very moved to learn that the U.S students found performing Voices of Vietnam ‘eye-opening’ and that is has developed a mutual understanding between seemingly old enemies.”

A key defining trait of oral history is how effectively it countermands state-sponsored narratives that glorify war. At our June 2 performance in Vietnam, an audience member stopped me during intermission. “Do you know what you’re doing is strictly forbidden in this country?” he asked. Then he said that the play wasn’t “true.” I said something like, “It’s the truth of the people affected by the war. All we’re claiming to do is to express what people said, so it’s automatically the truth. We’re speaking the words of people interviewed and the play is about what they said.” That automatic truth, I think, is what Viet Thanh Nguyen has in mind when he writes, “telling family war stories . . . is an important way to treat the disorder of our military-industrial complex.”

Image courtesy of Patrick Chura

Perhaps projects of this type can help students see history from another angle and teach peace for the future. Fundamentally about words, oral history plays embrace simple staging and are adaptable to groups of almost any size and composition. Young people may speak the voices of the elderly, males may speak female voices and vice versa. In our production, a Vietnamese grandmother was played successfully by a young man of 19. By allowing students to imaginatively inhabit the Other—especially those of differing ethnicities, nationalities, gender identities and age groups—oral history readings foster social awareness and cultural sensitivity.

Educators who are interested in using Voices of Vietnam in the classroom may write me for a copy at jpc@uakron.edu.