As selections for this collection were being made in the winter of 2014, the issue of disarmament was reintroduced into the peace discourse by some who did not fear breaking the taboo of speaking the unspeakable, of actually speaking truth to power in the conference rooms of the United Nations. When the International Peace Bureau and some other NGO’s called for the essential necessity of reducing military expenditures to the achievement of the “Sustainability Goals” being proposed to carry forward the unfinished agenda of the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), they unsettled the “gentlemen’s agreement” of the member states to sideline the issue as most continued to increase military expenditures and build greater arsenals. So I find the re-reading of this article to be timely and sad. The sadness comes from the foiled hopes that the late 70s the early 80s exhibited for disarmament, reflected in the UN Special Sessions on the issue, held in 1978 and 1982, the latter being the occasion of the most massive peace demonstration in the history of New York, demanding an end to the nuclear arms race, as the Second Special Session on Disarmament was about to convene. The event was a high point in the anti-nuclear movement that had some effect on education, but even the many educators who through the early 80s advocated teaching about the dangers of nuclear weapons did not address the possibilities for peace integral to general and complete disarmament (the demilitarization of the international system) envisioned by many in the years immediately following World War II as a means “to bring an end to war.”

Between those two sessions with the encouragement and assistance of an international network of peace educators, UNESCO had convened at its Paris headquarters, “The World Congress on Disarmament Education” as called for in the Final Document of the 1978 Special Session. The 1980 UNESCO Congress produced a document (http://​www.​un.​org/​disarmament/​education/​docs/​uneco.​pdf), which like the issues raised in this article, still has relevance to peace education, yet like most aspects of disarmament remains outside the major themes addressed by the field. While there was, especially in the United States, a reluctance to address any truly political aspects of peace, the structural aspects of system change and critical study of sovereignty were ‘alien’ to the thinking of the majority of secondary school peace educators. Granted, the field was still viewed with suspicion by much of the public as well as governing authorities, and there was evidence that the topic was a red flag to the member states. (Note that in this piece published by an arm of the inter-state system of which it was so critical that ‘State’ is capitalized, as is the custom with the name of the deity.) In the wake of the Congress and its final document (which in fact raised little of challenge to the system) some member states withdrew from the organization, most notably and most damaging, the United States and the United Kingdom. UNESCO itself retreated from pursuit of this area of peace education, so only a few voices continued to try to bring it into the peace knowledge discourse. Since mine has been one of them, I can but view the attempts to gain serious considerations of arguments such as those put forward in this selection as professional failures. Were it not for the fact that a few NGOs continued to put forward proposals and offer strong support for weakly pursued state efforts at “arms control,” I might have lost hope that others would succeed. Developments, such as the Secretary General’s report on Non Proliferation Education in which there is fleeting but definite recognition of the long-range goal of general and complete disarmament, also served to “keep hope alive.” As do the efforts of civil society and the non-nuclear nations to strive toward nuclear abolition. This piece is included here, as it is one of my essays on the topic that illustrate the significance of the concepts of disarmament and alternative security systems to all the phases of my work.

I see here, as well, elements of the arguments about control put forth in “The Knowledge Industry” that also influenced the evolution of thinking about patriarchy that gained some attention with the publication of “Sexism and the War System.”

Betty A. Reardon

February 21, 2014

Among the crucial controversies of peace education, generally acknowledged but seldom discussed, are the issues of whether its methods should be primarily cognitive or affective and whether its purposes should be intellectual or political.¹ To my mind there is no question about how these issues should be resolved. The methods should be both cognitive and affective and the purposes both intellectual and political. Given these premises peace-education programs and curricula should include the most central substantive concerns of peace, disarmament as an alternative to the arms race and the present State system which breed war and violence. However, issues regarding the nation-State system and the techniques it uses to maintain the ultimate power position in the world political system have little or no place in current peace education as it is practiced in schools and universities. Until these issues become universal components of the content of peace education, the field cannot be true to its’ own purposes.

The purpose of peace education is to provide learning which can be applied to the problem of reforming and/or restructuring present human society so as to make it more just and less violent. The subjects which should constitute the bases of such learning are those manifestations of violence and injustice which dehumanize and threaten the very survival of contemporary world society. Clearly the most significant among these manifestations are the war system and the global economic structures which divide most of the human species into categories of poverty or affluence. When the two are carefully examined, it becomes apparent that an insidious, symbiotic relation-ship exists between them; that they are indeed one system maintained by armed force or the threat thereof, that force residing primarily in the hands of the most powerful nation-States.

The neo-colonial world economy, a system in which the industrial nations provide a high standard of living for most but not all of their populations as a consequence of having virtually free access to the resources and the raw materials of the so-called developing nations, is buttressed by military superiority in the form of highly sophisticated weapons systems and large-scale industries for the production of both nuclear and ‘conventional’ weapons. The technological ‘progress’ which has brought the developed countries to post-industrial affluence has also provided these nations with weapons technology which make the destruction of human society not only possible but, according to some, highly probable (cf. the 1976 report by the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research).² Although most peace research acknowledges these relationships, they are not yet studied in peace education.³ The reasons hark back to the ambiguity about the methods and content of peace education and raise the questions: Why should peace education place equal emphasis on cognitive and affective modes of learning, and how can disarmament be a significant vehicle for such learnings?