Working toward the De‐essentialization of Identity Categories in Conflict and Postconflict Societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland

Abstract

During the past decade, we have conducted research in our own countries, all of which are considered conflict or postconflict societies: Israel, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland. We have focused on a variety of topics related to peace education, reconciliation, and coexistence. Giving special emphasis to the formation of identity in educational settings, two of us have investigated primarily in integrated schools (in Israel and Northern Ireland), while the third has conducted research in multicultural schools (in Cyprus). We believe that a comparative study of these three settings is valuable because such juxtaposition helps to conceptualize how some aspects of identity are developed in practice in the countries in question (Phillips and Schweisfurth 2006). What has attracted our attention in this body of research are the dissimilar ways in which educators and children attend to identity issues when such issues appear in interactional events. Although educators, in their rhetoric and educational practices, often seem to essentialize ethnic or religious identity and mark events as related to absolute categories, children, though knowledgeable of these categories, seem less attentive to them in their social activities and construct their social worlds with less emphasis on ethnic or religious divisions. Regardless of the differences in identity found in the educational policies of Israel (emphasis on Zionist ethos), Northern Ireland (focus on pluralism), and Cyprus (priority on Greek-centered education), we have observed that, in practice, children’s perspectives differ from those of adult educators. In this article, we examine the ways in which educators engage in educational initiatives geared toward peace, coexistence, and/or conflict resolution and consider the implications for such initiatives if children’s perspectives were taken into consideration. We first summarize the similarities and differences with respect to the sources of conflict in the three societies. Then we offer short descriptions of the educational initiatives under examination and the sociopolitical con