The Case for Peace Studies in the Arab World

By Mohammed Dajani Daoudi

One reason that reconciliation and peace in the Middle East have remained elusive is the fact that these topics have not been addressed in primary and secondary school classes, nor taught at the university level, to become part of the social and political fabric of the Arab world. People cannot readily concretize and act upon ideas they have never been exposed to, especially when the dominant norm resonant in the region’s infospheres has consisted of multiple layers of violence and counterviolence. Thus, preparing educators and experts in this field—and augmenting the professional skills of others, as well—as an essential ingredient in, and is in some respects a precondition for, paving the way to a future of conflict resolution, moderation, reconciliation, tolerance, and peace.

My own intellectual journey personally attests to this truth. When I crossed the Allenby Bridge in 1993, I had no idea what was waiting for me at my new academic home at Al-Quds University. I had not been to Jerusalem, the city of my birth, since 1968, and during that 25-year period, I considered Israelis to be enemies and Israel as needing liberation from its own Zionist ideology. I was an unawares prisoner of one-sided narratives populated by well-practiced stereotypes.

At first, I kept my distance from Israelis, rejecting all invitations to socialize or to hear their side of the story. Then Ambassador Moshe Sasson gave me his eye-opening book Seven Years in the Land of the Egyptians, published in Arabic, to read. Little did I realize at the time that this book would start me on a journey to extensive academic cooperation with Israeli and Jewish scholars, or that it would lead me to a passion for devising peace education models.

I decided to review the Sasson book for the Egyptian journal International Politics. I was surprised by my own assessment of the book and by the subsequent, mainly positive reactions to the review.

In 2000, I co-authored with Barry Feinstein of the Hebrew University an article entitled, “Permeable Fences Make Good Neighbors: Improving A Seemingly Intractable Border Conflict Between Israelis and Palestinians,” in The American University International Law Review. Similar experience: important learning experience, and positive reactions.

Many enlightening collaborations later, I decided that it was time to hit the road. So in the summer of 2004, I took 20 Palestinian students to attend a conference on peace education held in Antalya, Turkey. Then each summer during the 2009-2012 period, I and Dr. Michael Zakim led fifteen students from Tel Aviv University and Al-Quds University to Oberlin College and Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, Robert Satloff and I co-authored an article entitled, “Why Palestinians Should Learn about the Holocaust,” that ran in the International Herald Tribune on March 30, 2011. That led me back on the road, this time with a new destination. In the spring of 2014, I organized and escorted 27 Palestinian university students to Auschwitz.

The project of which that trip was a part aimed overall to teach Israeli students about the Nakba and Palestinian students about the Holocaust. These were quintessential experiential learning opportunities for advanced students, and the results were stunning, That travel study made some useful headlines, too, but the project also cost me my posts at al-Quds University and compromised my personal security. The experience is detailed in the book, Teaching Empathy and Reconciliation in Midst of Conflict (Jerusalem: Wasatia Press, 2016).

As the book relates, my experiences made me tougher and more resolute. I have continued to speak, write, travel, and teach. Most recently, after Yossi Klein Halevi published his ambitious book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor in 2018, I responded with a letter to my Israeli neighbor that was published in the revised edition of the book. The Times of Israel then published a joint interview with Halevi and me.

The Next Step

Having worked in the field of peace education for 25 years, I have seen encouraging steps forward as well as reversals. But my heart is full of hope, and I know that it is now time to take another step forward.

The Arab world urgently needs a region-wide Graduate Program for Reconciliation and Peace. Despite the state of crisis that evolved in a violent conflict which the Middle East has been undergoing, not a single university in the Arab region offers a Ph.D. program on peace, moderation, interfaith dialogue, and reconciliation studies to promote a culture of peace, tolerance, and coexistence. Yet moderation and reconciliation in the post-conflict era are essential ingredients for positive social change and the prevention of violence and conflict recurrence.

And we must learn not only how to be effective in post-conflict phases, but also how to be effective even in the midst of conflict. This is easier than it may sound, for it is when people are hurting most that they are often most receptive to other ways of thinking and acting.

Such a program, which would grant doctorates in peace, conflict resolution, and reconciliation studies, would respond to a growing demand for academic skills knowledge and professional training that address the complex issues of building a new society based on critical thinking, technology, and creative innovation. Its curriculum must include interdisciplinary studies related to peace, moderation, conflict resolution, justice, inter-religious understanding, dialogue, empathy, and tolerance.

The target group for this three-year Ph.D. program would be qualified students from different disciplines from various areas of the Arab world interested in learning how to achieve economic vitality and political moderation for their societies. They are the engines of a future in which young people will achieve a significant stage of cooperation, understanding, and open-mindedness, which would facilitate living in a healthy environment free of enmity, bigotry, racism, hatred, and violence and focused on creative individuality. The overall mission of the Program is to contribute to a climate of temperance, religious freedom, and acceptance of pluralism and diversity, and thus to facilitate a just, democratic, and inclusive society enriched by its peaceful culture.

To do this the Program must effectively reveal the dynamics of rentier-elite economic exploitation as well as political extremism, religious fanaticism, and anti-Semitism. Indeed, in times of extremism and radicalism, efforts need to be focused, unified, and redoubled to confront the rise of violence and terrorism spreading globally.

To the extent the Program is successful and builds on its own achievement to scale-up to maximum influence, the region as a whole will benefit. The network of graduates will become more than the sum of its individual parts, contributing to a better society for all. The Graduate fellows will come to constitute the core of educational reformists in the Arab countries, who will spend careers promoting reformed educational curriculum and advanced regional cultural integration. In that way, the Program will reduce ambient fear, generate social trust, reduce hate crimes, and improve inter-communal relations.

Matching Skills to Circumstances

The practical uses of the Program once brought to scale, are many. They vary according to circumstances.

For example, in Middle East war zones such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, military confrontations will eventually end, and when they do, winners and losers will have to reconcile for the wounds of strife to heal. Here, Ph.D. experts in reconciliation can help to advance positive social change, preventing a recurrence of civil violence.

Similarly, ISIS and Al-Qaeda will eventually lose on the ground, but that alone will not expunge their radical ideology and dogma. As the Americans like to say, you can’t beat something with nothing. One of the purposes of the Program is to give us something attractive and well-articulated to beat something.

In other cases, Program graduates can help circumstances move from promise to fruition. For instance, the signing of the Declaration of Principles by the PLO and Israel in September 1993 was a historical landmark in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But as a result of the tremendous challenges it confronted, the peace process failed to achieve its end goal of establishing a sustainable peace. One reason is that a peace discussed between diplomats and generals was never fully matched by preparations for a wave of peace between peoples, allowing spoilers on both sides to win the day. Had there been active cadres of educators and leaders promoting and supporting the development of a peace culture those spoilers may well have failed at their goals.

Earning an education in peace, conflict resolution, moderation, and reconciliation would provide enlightened leadership to communities in the midst of conflict and in post-conflict. This would allow the graduates to fulfill a lifelong goal by making an original contribution to their communities in promoting a culture of democracy and economic prosperity.

The Fellows will be galvanized to become useful multipliers in their communities such as practicing what they learned and influencing public opinion in favor of regional integration activities. All of the principal actors will be trained to be critical thinkers and innovative individuals who would lead the community rather than follow the crowd. In so doing, they will influence central actors — such as editors of newspapers and radio and TV programs, feature writers, bloggers — who can move public opinion towards peaceful democratic integrated coexistence in the near future.

Program Elements and Overview

A Graduate Program for Reconciliation and Peace must include the following basic elements: Teaching, Training, Research, Library, Publications and Outreach, and Continuing Education.

1. Teaching must come first, and to teach on needs to design and implement a variety of academic programs on related studies. Easy to state, but hard to do well.

2. Training programs that put knowledge to work, tailored to the priority needs of the public, must come next.

3. As in any graduate school program, at least some faculty needs as well to conduct academic, scientific research in the various areas of the program, and to support and encourage research work in this field with the aim of improving capacities skills, and knowledge.

4. The Program must establish a specialized multimedia resources library to support the academic programs and research projects undertaken by fellows and faculty, and the library must be capable of outreach publishing programs to other educational programs, the media, and the general public. As part of outreach efforts, Fellows must participate in lecture series, symposia, and conferences, in order to galvanize grassroots interest in the issues of concern.

5. The Program must develop capabilities to refresh and retrain mid-career cadres as necessary. Learning never ends, and graduates will need to keep abreast of new knowledge techniques, and opportunities to refine their skills during their entire careers.

In addition, the Program will need both a prestigious international advisory board and a robust travel infrastructure. It needs the latter because, while the challenges of the Middle East have their own special character, the historical experiences of other parts of the world are deeply relevant to dealing with them. So in addition to formal learning, field trips to sites such as Nazi death concentration camps and post-conflict areas such as Ireland, South Africa, Rwanda, Kosovo, and other areas where conflict and reconciliation have taken place are necessary to study first hand about the sufferings and hardships of people during conflict and genocides and how to deal with it afterward.

The PhD program will include six components:

The first will be online preliminary courses to provide all participants with a shared basis of knowledge. These courses will, in turn, consist of several units: Major Approaches and Theories in Reconciliation, Conflict Management and Resolution, and Peace Building; Building Community Interventions; Skills in Technological Management and Resolution; Dialoguing from Conflict to Reconciliation; and Peacebuilding from Theory to Practice.

The second will be a course in which fellows will learn theoretical approaches and acquire skills for leadership, conflict resolution, and management while also practicing the planning and development of interventions.

The third will be guided observations and on-site visits of post-conflict areas and joint projects and organizations working in the domains of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, community development, and disadvantaged populations in local communities – through a wide range of innovative approaches.

The fourth will be consolidation sessions of lessons learned in the field.

The fifth will be meetings with leading professionals and decision-makers in processes of conflict management and resolution, including those processes related to post-international conflicts.

The sixth will be guided field research that will help fellows build and plan interventions based on needs assessments and application of theory and conceptualizations they have learned and discussed in the Program.

After course work is completed, all students will engage in field projects aligned with their interests and skills. Note that not all graduates will become full-time conflict resolution specialists. In many cases the program will endow experienced professionals from other fields will additional qualifications for peace work, merging their professional expertise with skills in peacemaking and conflict resolution. These will include, for example:

Medicine in the Service of Peace: Cross-border complex clinical consultations, surgeries, and treatment as well as developing clinical infrastructure and doctors’ residences and fellowships.

Bridges for Peace: An educational program offering multi-ethnic opportunities to meet and create social initiatives through the use of innovative platforms.

Sports, Arts, and Music as Bridges for Peace: Boys and girls from conflict areas taking part in unique, in-depth peace education through sports, arts, and music programs.

Empowering Economies for Peace: Promoting cross-border business partnerships.

An academic adviser and mentor will monitor the progress of each fellow and provide one-on-one guidance in the different phases of the Program. A dedicated virtual platform that will enable continued engagement as well as online discussion groups availing fellows the presentation of questions and sharing their experience and knowledge throughout and after the completion of the Ph.D. program.

The Arabesque Peace

Peace is too important to be left to generals, diplomats, and politicians. People who suffer from conflict must be part of the solution to it if that solution is to be just and enduring.

As is well known, a characteristic artistic motif in the Arab world involves something, appropriately enough, called an arabesque. An arabesque is just an interesting non-iconographic shape that, by itself, is not much use to anyone. But if a skilled artisan puts enough of these individual small shapes together, there is no limit to how beautiful and serviceable the result can be.

That, let me suggest, is the metaphor to keep in mind for a Graduate Program for Reconciliation and Peace. Each graduate will be one piece, one part, of a growing structure of beauty and strength that will bend the hearts of all who experience it toward the light, and toward what is right. So let us get busy building that structure. We have a lot of work to do Let us start today.