Dismantling Myths and Teaching Controversial Issues in Conflict-Affected Societies: Insights From Cyprus

Abstract

In this short piece we argue that although theoretically in times of war and protracted conflict, it is particularly crucial for teachers to engage with controversial issues, doing so in praxis is fraught with ethical, practical, political, contextual and emotional dilemmas and challenges. Informed by our research on and teaching of the Cyprus conflict (and the associated peacebuilding process) as a controversial issue itself, we posit that merely replacing ‘war education’ with ‘peace education’ can fail at best and be counterproductive or solidify essentialist positions at worst. Instead of focusing primarily on replacing one form of knowledge with another and on developing fixed skillsets as part of peace education manuals, we argue that meaningful engagement with difficult conversations requires new modes of being that can only materialise through long-term processes of self-reflection, affective engagement and enactment of critical pedagogies: here, we focus on three such pedagogies, namely, ‘pedagogies of discomfort’; ‘pedagogies of desecuritisation’ and ‘pedagogies of empathy’.