Mindfulness and Peace Education in Conflicts

The Role of Mindfulness in Peace Education in the Context of Conflict

• Explores the necessity of mindfulness within peace education, questioning its role in automatically promoting positive attitudes toward adversaries
• A participant in an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue workshop expressed increased understanding of the conflict after thoughtfully considering it
• Peace education occurs not only in designed programs but also unintentionally in workplaces with joint interethnic or interreligious activities

Intractable Conflicts

• Ethno-political conflicts are based on political and psychological factors
• Political factors: Objective conflicts of interest over resources, dominance, and governance
• Psychological factors: Subjective experiences of fear, mistrust, hatred, and frustration

The Psychological Aspect of Peace Education

• Intractable ethno-political conflicts exhibit psychological attributes
• Protracted nature
• Perception as zero-sum games
• Frequent violence and totality affecting daily life
• Centrally affecting society, influencing everything from education to political discourse
• Delegitimization and dehumanization of the adversary: Adversaries lose their history, are distrusted, blamed, and devalued
• In Rwanda, objective disputes evolved into psychological factors like anger and hatred, prolonging the conflict
• Nations have a need for enemies, serving to mobilize support and rally the population

Mindlessness in Conflict

• Catches slogans without considering the implications
• Accepting a holistic, stereotypic view of the adversary without questioning prejudices, needing little mental effort
• Thinking becomes dualistic, dividing groups into "us" versus "them"
• Dualistic thinking creates a "group think" that validates itself

Dynamic Process of Conflict

• Consists of negative attitudes affect stereotypic perceptions
• Described as "Cause One Thing Leads to Another" (COTLETA)
• Reinforces a coherent and systemic view of the conflict and the adversary
• COTLETA leads to an growing accumulation of beliefs, prejudices and feelings, developing mindlessly

Peace Education Variants

• Functions based on the socio-political context, from tranquil settings like Sweden to violent contexts like Rwanda
• Peace education includes classroom teaching of democracy, human rights, and conflict resolution
• Encounter dialogues and joint activities such as soccer clubs or orchestras

Goals of Peace Education

• Cultivate greater legitimization
• Accept own roles in the conflict by change perceived identity
• Feel empathy toward the other side by humanizing it
• Change attitudes, and reduce stereotypes and prejudices

Effectiveness and Challenges

• Durability of positive effects
• Desired effects are often short-lived due to sociopolitical forces and media influence
• Different groups approach and react to programs differently
• Minorities seek a voice; majorities seek moral justification

The Role of Mindfulness in Peace Education

• Basic instincts must have mindful conscious, and metacognitive control
• Urges restraint from acting on immediate impulses driven by rage
• Social forces either value conflict and competition, or prefer harmony and cooperation
• Ethno-political conflicts favour valuing conflict and competition
• Mindfulness is needed to overcome the brain's functions, specifically in situations wmore mindlessness is easily activated
• Peace education cultivates:
• Ability of other side of the conflict
• Ability to entertain the opposing point of view
• Capacity to empathize and recognize humanity, which is not natural in situations of fear
• Reduce/overcome feelings toward the adversary to serve the ends of peace education

Characteristics and Application

• Mindfulness has three characteristics:
  • Continuous creation of new categories
  • Openness to new data
  • Awareness of perspectives
• Need to decategorize the adversary as a member of the same group
• You should know the other sides view of the conflict
• Need to be aware of alternatives to seeking peace
• Conscious and metacognitive control is needed
• Mindfulness requires motivation of acting, and negates automatic action

Practical Applications

• Requires contradiction, paradoxes and conflicts within a program
• Initiate dialogues between adversaries
• Deliberate mindfulness may cultivated be applying its underlying mechanisms

Linking Research and Mindfulness

• Information seeking and generate and detail relates to mindfullness
• Uncertainty and seeking
• Higher uncertainty means seeking
• Tend to pay more attention to details
• Creates alternative solutions
• The corelates (response uncertainity/mindufuness) relate to being the determinants
• Training
• Attend to film detail training
• Hypothesis geneation on said shoft film
• Details and new detail generation will help greater response
• Training works and it creates more uncertainity and more mindful approches
• Peace education targets to be more mindful when dealing with conflict by applying distinctions, becoming more able to see the others vies and create alternatives

Key Challenges

• Bridging the gap between mindful disposition and strong motivations
• Maintaining desired changes due to counter forces

Disposition and application of being mindful

• Social psychology does not accept implicit assumptions
• While principles may exist, and can be noble, sometimes motivations still compete with applications
  • (EG sanctity of human life vs killing someone for science)
• Then needs the disposition to be mindful in the face of anger? Everyone knows how dangerous, vitious, and uinjust the adversary could be?
• It becomes a strongly held concept with respect to the concept.

Strengthening Mindfulness

• Mindfulness can become a central disposition much like attitudes
• Dispositions can be powerless when applications aren't appropriate
• Being too imperfect vs overlooking
• Its key and will lead to a gap discussion
• Its a individual matter that require others help
  • When it comes to conflict etc, need support from everyone

Sustained Effect

• PE provides a sense of reduction when it comes stereotypes and prejudices
• The target it to cultivate mindfulness as a training tool
• Must use good ambiguity and alternatives which could help guide those in education programs
• The discovery of finding a point of view will make them less likley to go back with finding those solutions which is very hard

Summary

• No evident to having peace and playing a significant education rule
• With regards to handling the advesrary needs a need to be motivate and mindful

Mindfulness in Peace Education

• Deliberately handling all situations should improve
• Approach should improve to match what peace education is cultivating
• Questions need to be addressed and what is cultivated