The response of teacher education to the Syrian Conflict: teacher education from conflict to peacebuilding and positive peace culture?

Premised on Galtung’s (1969) theory of ‘positive’ peace, this thesis provides an analysis of the Syrian government’s post-war peacebuilding initiatives to promote a culture of positive peace, and what role, if any, is attributed to education and teacher education in this process. This examination is underpinned by a theoretical framework that considers forms of indirect violence, drawing on Bridge’s (1999) theory of truth, and the concepts of silence and securitisation (Waever, 1995). The thesis draws on critical theory to offer a meta-analysis in order to link constructed themes to wider societal and hegemonic issues. Data is obtained from semi-structured interviews with twelve participants consisting of senior government officials and teacher educators from a public university and the equivalent of pre-service and in-service training centres within a government held area in Syria.

The study demonstrates that the current educational response to the conflict is dominated by fragmented, individual initiatives that are not linked to wider strategies aimed at promoting a culture of ‘positive peace’. Research findings reveal that the government’s current approach to reconstruction is based on a negative concept of peace as an absence of violence (Galtung, 1969), as reflected in focusing the reconstruction of the education sector on rebuilding its physical aspects and on bringing it back to ‘normal’ as it was before the conflict. This study also reveals that the role of education and teacher education in ‘post-conflict’ peacebuilding is jeopardised by current structural efforts to impose polices of silence and securitisation that are implicated in issues of hegemonic reconstruction and future representations of the conflict. The study concludes that it would be naïve to approach the current state of relative peace achieved across major cities as an indication of the conflict moving into a ‘post’ conflict stage, as it is developing from militarised and direct forms of violence to less visible forms as demonstrated through the application of silence and securitisation.