Teaching peace in the midst of civil war: tensions between global and local discourses in Sri Lankan civics textbooks

Abstract

ABSTRACTFocusing on Sri Lanka, this article complements existing research on the adoption of global norms and discourses around peace education by illuminating the tensions between global and local demands in a multicultural society torn by conflict. In analysing a series of donor-funded official civics textbooks issued during the civil war, it identifies textbooks as sites of the conflictual ‘hybridisation’ of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm and the challenge to it posed by local interests and sensibilities. The analysis of the discourses around ‘good citizenship’ in Sri Lankan textbooks elucidates a case of the political co-optation of donor-driven agendas, traceable in the uneasy blend of a traditional and a global model of citizenship education simultaneously embracing and undermining liberal ideals of peacebuilding through emphases and silences that may risk compromising national reconciliation. The textbook discourses which enact these processes construct notions of social cohesion around civic virtues, frame rights as privileges earned through compliance and gratitude towards authoritative institutions, promote understandings of peace and conflict which highlight individual responsibility while obscuring systemic violence, and affirm social justice, democracy and human rights while evading the realisation of these ideals in practice.