Michael Ogunnusi^[1]School of Applied Social Sciences, De Monfort University. & Momodou Sallah^[2]Centre for Academic Innovation and Teaching Excellence, De Montfort University.

Abstract:

This paper examines opportunities for peace, as a dichotomy between the actual and re-imagined state of the world, using a Critical Peace Education (CPE) framework, and a Global Youth Work (GYW) pedagogic approach. Drawing from similar and shared constructs presented by CPE and GYW, such as developing local human rights and participatory citizenship, teaching consciousness-raising in and out of schools, and scrutinising how the theory and application of CPE and GYW can influence structural and cultural violence, this paper asserts the need to re-engage with the more radical roots of CPE and GYW as having potential for new stories in peace studies and education that resist the status quo using knowledge and action. The authors are keen to disrupt simplified representations of peace, and uniformity of what is meant by peace, in CPE and GYW theory and practice, and the implications this has both for the social reproduction of inequality, and for youth workers and young people. Secondly, the paper will redress how peace can be understood and acted upon as critical dialogue with young people to unpick and transform experiences for agency. This paper will contribute to a greater understanding of re-imagining peace in everyday life, and the relationship between peace and practice, as part of a decolonised post-critical approach, supported by examples for how youth workers and young people have actively worked towards opportunities for peace in the duality of praxis and consciousness in their everyday life.

Keywords: Conscientisation; Dialogue; Global Youth Work; Critical Peace Education; Global Education; African Development; Decolonisation.

Resumo:

Este artigo examina as oportunidades para a paz, como uma dicotomia entre o estado real e o estado re-imaginado do mundo, usando uma estrutura de Educação Crítica para a Paz (ECP) e uma abordagem pedagógica do Trabalho Juvenil Global (TJG). Baseando-se em constructos semelhantes e partilhados apresentados pela ECP e TJG, tais como desenvolver direitos humanos locais e cidadania participativa, ensinar conscientização dentro e fora das escolas, e examinar como a teoria e a aplicação de ECP e TJG podem influenciar a violência estrutural e cultural, este artigo afirma a necessidade de se reconetar com as raízes mais radicais da ECP e TJG como tendo potencial para novas histórias em estudos sobre a paz e em educação para a paz que resistem ao status quo, usando conhecimento e ação. Os autores estão empenhados em quebrar as representações simplificadas de paz, e a uniformidade do que se entende por paz na teoria e na prática da ECP e TJG, e as implicações que isso tem tanto para a reprodução social da desigualdade, quanto para jovens trabalhadores e outros jovens. Em segundo lugar, o artigo abordará como a paz pode ser entendida e posta em prática como um diálogo crítico com os jovens para desvendar e transformar experiências, promovendo a sua participação. Este artigo contribuirá para uma maior compreensão para re-imaginar a paz na vida quotidiana e a relação entre paz e prática, como parte de uma abordagem pós-crítica descolonizadora, apoiada em exemplos de como jovens trabalhadores e outros jovens trabalharam ativamente em busca de oportunidades para a paz na dualidade das suas praxis e maior consciência nas suas vidas quotidianas.

Palavras-chave: Conscientização; Diálogo; Trabalho Juvenil Global; Educação Crítica para a Paz; Educação Global; Desenvolvimento Africano; Descolonização.

Resumen:

Este documento examina las oportunidades para la paz, como una dicotomía entre el estado real y el reimaginado del mundo, utilizando un marco de Educación Crítica para la Paz (CPE) y un enfoque pedagógico de Trabajo Juvenil Global (TJG). A partir de constructos similares y compartidos presentados por CPE y TJG, como el desarrollo de los derechos humanos locales y la ciudadanía participativa, la enseñanza de la concienciación dentro y fuera de las escuelas, y el examen de cómo la teoría y la aplicación de CPE y TJG pueden influir en la violencia estructural y cultural, este artículo afirma la necesidad de volver a comprometerse con las raíces más radicales de CPE y TJG, ya que tienen potencial para nuevas historias en los estudios sobre la paz y la educación para la paz que resisten al statu quo, utilizando el conocimiento y la acción. Los autores están dispuestos a cuestionar las representaciones simplificadas de la paz y la uniformidad de lo que se entiende por paz en la teoría y la práctica de CPE y TJG, y las implicaciones que esto tiene tanto para la reproducción social de la desigualdad como para los trabajadores juveniles y los jóvenes. En segundo lugar, el artículo abordará cómo se puede entender y actuar sobre la paz como un diálogo crítico con los jóvenes para descifrar y transformar experiencias para promover la participación. Este artículo contribuirá a una mayor comprensión de la reimaginación de la paz en la vida cotidiana, y la relación entre la paz y la práctica, como parte de un enfoque poscrítico descolonizado, respaldado por ejemplos de cómo los trabajadores juveniles y los jóvenes han trabajado activamente para lograr oportunidades por la paz, en la dualidad de la praxis y la conciencia en sus vidas cotidianas.

Palabras clave: Concientización; Diálogo; Trabajo Juvenil Global; Educación Crítica para la Paz; Educación Global; Desarrollo Africano; Descolonización.

Introduction

Critical Peace Education (CPE) frameworks and Global Youth Work (GYW) are overtly political and moral pedagogic approaches that strive towards ‘global models of resisting domination in unique and democratic educational spaces’ (Bajaj, 2015, p.164); not only resisting, but also actively redressing. This paper re-examines opportunities for peace as a dichotomy between the actual and re-imagined state of the world, concerned with how young people, as active global citizens, engage with, and take action about, issues that affect them.

The reimagination of peace is premised and predicated on the presence of violence and oppressions in varied reincarnations and manifestations. To therefore build alternatives to the status quo, there is an urgent need to clearly identify structural and systemic violence that paint our terrain, in our work, both in the North and the South. Colonial legacies mean this issue of naming the problem of the many shades and variations of violence is not as clear cut, due to the dusty and transient boundaries and nature of colonialism and its “hangovers”. Many forms of CPE and GYW draw from the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, proposing a transformative approach to education for social change focused on the shared constructs of problem-posing dialogue, and conscientização or critical consciousness (CC). The starting point then remains the question, beyond awareness raising, of how to provoke consciousness, and not just consciousness, but CC.

The 2022 European Declaration on Global Education to 2050 highlights the essence of this educational approach as one ‘that enables people to reflect critically on the world and their place in it, to open their eyes, hearts and minds to the reality of the world at local and global level. It empowers people to understand, imagine, hope and act…’. (Dublin Declaration, 2022, p.2). This duality of Global Education and GYW, and those who follow a post critical approach to CPE, anchored in both provoking CC and supporting young people to take action, embodies the fulcrum of this paper.

Prioritising the need for deeper self‐knowledge and democratic social change, the authors will also share their experiences of some of the circumstances in which consciousness formation occurs. In making these arguments, the authors draw from their reflection and practice to focus on how the duality of praxis and consciousness formation can be understood and acted upon to unpick and transform experiences for agency; and furthermore, what CC means for new decolonised stories using knowledge and action that challenges prevailing ways of thinking to resist the status quo.

Critical Consciousness

The concept of CC is used in many forms of CPE and GYW to describe how young people critically engage with, and take action about, issues that affect them. Some of our earlier work (Sallah, 2008, 2014) advanced the five faces (economic, political, environmental, cultural and technological), and the personal, local, national, and global links (PLiNGs) theoretical framework, which argued that the duality of Global Youth Work is to provoke consciousness and take action. Both the consciousness and action should be located and visited on the PLiNGs as the situation and symbiosis of both a newfound consciousness and action. This notion also speaks to postulations of decentering and recentering which seeks to dislodge constructed realities in cross cultural encounters. If we see the world in a given way based on our experiences, how do we then conceive of the world in another light once we encounter this newfound consciousness?

Describing a conscious approach to social change, Freire (1974) theorised and applied (in Brazil, and other countries in the Global South), a particular concept of CC to suggest that:

1. Our humanity and social existence are dynamic and open-ended; fundamentally rooted in the praxis of how we understand ourselves and our reality, and how we reflect on, and act in, our everyday world;
2. Dialogic pedagogies can encourage our natural ability to question and transform the social aspects of agency and structure in everyday life, and;
3. Our social reality is conflicted by oppression, which occurs with and without our knowledge or agreement and has effects that we might not be aware of, so creating limits to praxis by distorting how we see ourselves and our ability to transform reality.

Crucially, CC aims to scrutinise and transform dominant power structures, including our own position and cultural affinity within them, to actively dismantle the violence in/of oppression; whether this is direct, structural, or cultural. The positionality and situatedness of both the teacher and student are key in shaping the dialogic encounter and must therefore be cardinal to the process of centring and decentring. Oppression is used here to represent any situation that limits our ability to reflect and act; whereby, the ‘ordinary person is crushed, diminished, and converted into a spectator, maneuvered by myths which powerful social forces have created’ (Freire, 1974, p.5). CC is concerned with those assisting and suffering from oppression as both are dehumanized. The dominators do not regard themselves as violent, and the dominated find it harder to see the socially reproductive nature and extent of the violence that legitimises their oppression. Such ideas are very relevant to the impetus of this paper. By positioning praxis as the historical truth of oppression alongside ontological unfinishedness, a dialectic approach is needed to provide a full account of the tension that exists between the world and our conscious existence. Freire’s work expresses a unique pedagogy aimed at disrupting oppression based on dialogical problem-posing and conscientising.

Problem-posing dialogue is developed, in contrast to formal education, from the power of day-to-day decision-making and contains a deliberate challenge to the dehumanising effects of oppression, to both reduce and transform structural violence. Dialogue, aimed at exposing the hidden potentials of other realities, in which the oppressed and those who oppress us are transformed and liberated from oppression, aims to help us to deconstruct internalised cultures of helplessness, hopelessness, inertia, and inaction that undermine the praxis at the core of our humanity (Shudak and Avoseh, 2015). Dialogic approaches and pedagogic encounters must be contextualised in a wider sense to incorporate other forms of youth and community work, and informal and experiential approaches to teaching and learning. Consequently, dialogic encounters are generated in a range of spaces contexts, and forms, and we emphasise the ones where there is an active attempt to equalise the power imbalance between the participants. Freire (1974) suggests a deepening of democracy can be built from horizontalised relationships to foster learning through dialogue, described as ‘a meeting place’ (p.133) for knowledge and critical consciousness. Both teachers and students are subjects in this process to uncover reality and create knowledge of the world to:

Develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality, in process, in transformation (Freire, 1970, p.71).

By recognising that the world is not a fixed, or closed system, CPE and GYW advocate for pedagogies that seek to co-produce opportunities for individual and collective action in response to the problems we are confronted with; identified as ways of thinking, knowing, and abilities to act and challenge oppression. Yet, CC is not necessarily made plain or evidenced in approaches to CPE and GYW, or even typified as being distinct from the analytical techniques associated with critical thinking.

When positioned against other metacognitive typologies, CC, or critical transitivity, exemplifies our ability to interpret problems, analyse reality, and move through paradigmatic shifts, associated by Freire with self-determined intervention in our own lives, and the ability to recognise and challenge internalised and external oppression collectively using dialogue. Freire’s work outlines different types of consciousness that will be briefly explained. Intransitivity/magical consciousness is used to describe a non-critical acceptance of oppression as passivity and inertia; whereby, social change is caused by powers and/or things unexplained, often deemed as being more substantive than human agency. Due to a lack of problem-posing, the second typology, semi-transitivity, offers a reductive knowledge of oppression compartmentalised and removed from broader structural issues as being singular, unfair and corrupt. Consequently, agency is primarily reactive to immediate environments and isolated events, and can leave those involved trapped in beliefs of inferiority and cultures of silence. Next, naïve transitivity is characterised by a lack of reflectivity, especially regarding internalised oppression, that fosters unquestioned assumptions, values, and dispositions. Although, active in the struggle, naïve transitivity may lead to inconsistent and irrational behavior, contributing towards opposing positions and conflict.

The process of CC is inherently cyclic as the praxis of reflection and action responds to the intersubjective situatedness of those involved. Much like ouroboros, a symbol for the concept of endless return, CC asks us to be prepared to move away from the comfort of what we think we know, applying learning, and then re-enacting the process from ‘a new cycle of unlearning, listening, learning and reaching out again at another level’ (Andreotti and Souza, 2008, p.29). We have argued elsewhere (Ogunnusi, 2019) that dialogue rooted in the quality of relationships will characterise the ‘depth in the interpretation of problems’ (Freire, 1974, p.14). These relational dynamics are juxtaposed with the discomfort and discombobulating nature of CC, co-produced from encounters that move us to let go of old configurations of ways of knowing and being to embrace a stance of decentredness.

Putting the ‘Critical’ into Peace Studies

In Peace Studies, oppression is understood more generally as being inherently violent, built into social structures ‘as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (Galtung, 1969, p.171), which impede human needs, potential and realisation. In allegiance with the ‘underdogs’, opportunities for peace represent a transformative social goal, located at both actor-based and structure-based levels, to transform conflict non-violently, and work towards the absence and/or reduction of violence of all kinds. This work includes the significance of the role of culture in perpetuating overtly symbolic, dominant, and hidden paradigms of violence, that serve to conserve the interests of those privileged by violence, by reinforcing and legitimising processes of violence e.g. the rich in capitalism, the white/ness in racism, and males in patriarchy. In turn, internalised and institutionalised structural violence, rooted in people and social systems, is understood to increase the likelihood of direct violence and the fear of violence.

In the context of CC, our knowledge(s) of peace must therefore reside deeper than our values and choice for freedom to include and deconstruct a shared subconscious of cultural violence that is ‘hidden to the unguided eye’ (Galtung, 2009, p.20). We are required to locate concepts of peace in the recognition and resolution of deeper-rooted structural contradictions, embedded in the normality of things, and to organise around the type(s) of counter consciousness needed to see beyond the contradictions and justification of violence in all of its forms.

Despite his critics, the global foundation of Peace Education has purposed Freire’s work to explore peace as something open and dialogical with a focus on education as a political act for change. As one example, Brantmeier (2011, p.356) outlines five stages of critical peace education that advance from raising consciousness through to reflecting on transformative action:

• Raising consciousness through dialogue
• Imagining nonviolent alternatives
• Providing specific modes of empowerment
• Transformative action
• Reflection and re-engagement

Developed for school based and community-based approaches, the model above epitomises the need for critical peace educators to be able to demonstrate problem-posing dialogue and transformative action, with a view to peace as personal, structural, and cultural change. In theory, problem-posing dialogue is inherent to CPE, and, by its nature, humanises and empowers those involved to realise their potential by exposing and transforming deep-rooted structural issues of, and barriers to, peace. Yet, crucially, such work is dependent on the ability of educators to understand and demonstrate ‘critical thinking and analysis’, ‘empathy and solidarity’, ‘individual and coalitional agency’, ‘participatory and democratic engagement’, ‘education and communication strategies’, ‘conflict transformation skills’, and ongoing ‘reflective practice’ (Bajaj, 2015, pp.162-163). The complexities presented by this process become even more acute when we include decentering from that which we are conditioned to know in an educational process aimed at developing egalitarian relations as a distinguishing feature for CC. For example, neglecting the impact of internalised adultism and cultural competence can severely curtail spaces for young people’s participation, decision making and ownership (Ogunnusi, 2006, 2019).

Dominant narratives and organising principles of peace are highly susceptible to manipulation by experts and those others privileged by violence in society. In response, CPE postulates that majoritarian narratives, such as Whiteness, Eurocentricity, (neo)liberal development, militarism, pacification, etc., should be peeled back to reveal deeper rooted orthodoxies of peace (building), regularly exported and imposed globally as forms of ‘external’ peace (Firchow, 2018). Similarly, global perspectives have contributed a reflexive account of knowledge production and enactment focused on new solutions to North-South disparity, hegemony, ethnocentrism, salvationism, and paternalism (Andreotti, 2012). CPE asserts that in an attempt to avoid homogenising and hegemonic narratives of peace, local indigenous and marginalised voices and histories must be engaged in consciousness raising, including alternative paradigms that disrupt and transcend the status quo. More so, a post-critical lens can help to examine how CC can be adapted to push against the dominance of Western rationality, comprised of how we think, word, and sense, our reality.

Contemporary CPE understands the possibility of reimagining peace, as CC, to deconstruct totalising narratives and let go of extant ways of knowing, and being, to generate conditions of altered consciousness. In turn, we can recognise heterogeneous knowledges that span ‘multi-dimensional worlds’ (Ahenakew, 2016, p.328), and be part of a wider dialogue about what should be preserved by those inside the problem of peace; to include onto-epistemologies that are othered, minoritised, non-Western(ised), and indigenous.

‘Critical Peace’ in Global Youth Work

The creation of a socially just and equal world where all can engage in the pursuit of happiness is the ultimate objective of a GYW pedagogic approach (DEA, 2004; Bourn and McCollum, 1995; Sallah and Cooper, 2008; Sallah, 2014). Founded as a theoretical framework in 1995, by Bourn and McCollum, GYW has become a subset of Global Education, which has been most widely postulated in the 2002 Maastricht Global Education Declaration; and now the Dublin Declaration enacted in November 2022. Whilst this is largely true, however there have been a sharp distinction drawn by some critics who highlighted that whilst Global Education and associated terminology focus on the first prerogative of provoking consciousness, it does not place enough attention on the second of taking action (covered in Sallah, 2020). This is especially pertinent in the disruption of global capital and its extractive process at the personal, local, national, and global levels.

Implicit in this construction is the attainment of the illusive concept of peace understood to encompass Development Education, Human Rights Education, Education for Sustainability, Education for Peace and Conflict. The Dublin Declaration (2022, p.2) states that ‘Global Education encompasses a broad range of educational provision: formal, non-formal and informal; life-long and life-wide’. In this case, GYW centres on the five faces of globalisation (economics, culture, environment, technology and politics), either as central themes standing alone, or as a constant interaction between the different components that make up a whole. In a GYW approach, there is a need to dismantle global inequality by working on all or one face of globalisation towards a much better and more peaceful world.

As a pinnacle of what GYW seeks to achieve, this pursuit of a better world is often contextualised in the Human Development approach to development:

Human development is the expansion of people’s freedoms to live long, healthy and creative lives; to advance other goals they have reason to value; and to engage actively in shaping development equitably and sustainably on a shared planet. People are both the beneficiaries and the drivers of human development, as individuals and in groups (UNDP, 2010, p.2).

Sen (1995) emphasises human development as human wellbeing and standard of living over the traditional economic measurements like per capita income, and argues that capabilities need to be democratically negotiated. Whilst Nussbaum (2000) on the other hand, proposed a list of ten capabilities: (1) life; (2) bodily health; (3) bodily integrity; (4) senses, imagination, and thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) other species; (9) play; and (10) control over one’s environment. In conceptualising peace in GYW (Sallah 2014), it is often conceived of holistically, as the height of development where all human beings are able to live with adequate food, clothing, shelter, water, and be able to freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

GYW often tries to disrupt existing configurations of ways of knowing and being (Sallah 2008, 2014). In trying to change the world and, in this context, to bring about peace, there is a need to first provoke consciousness so that the person or group of people concerned can develop an altered new way of seeing the world. Following the dialogical encounter, this provocation of consciousness can either be the generation of CC, or the stagnation in the domain of dormant consciousness. In keeping with the different types of consciousness presented earlier, CC denotes the emergence of a newfound or awakened consciousness which then synchronises into the real time action for social good; whilst the dormant consciousness remains asleep to be woken another day. The former fits well with critical transitivity, whilst the latter is generally used to describe a lack of problem-posing, reflectivity, and action in knowledge.

In teaching peace, GYW attempts to dismantle the tablets of oppression by provoking consciousness and taking action. GYW, in its first prerogative, attempts to dismantle the violence of the oppressed’s consciousness, and then, the second prerogative, enables action that transform from thoughts to concrete acts. Similar to Peace Studies, Global Education/GYW seeks to understand the structured nature of violence, discrimination, and oppression as interlinked; for example, as in Althusser’s (1971) articulation of the soft-core violence of the state (church, media, culture, and education) and the hardcore violence of the state (army, judiciary, police, administration); all of which combine to wreak havoc on the oppressed, and facilitate structural violence and psychological subjugation. This is also very complimentary to Thompson’s (2006) Personal, Cultural, and Structural model (as the three symbiotic layers of oppression and discrimination); there is not always an easy alignment of the symbiotic relationship between the three layers of oppression at the personal, cultural, and structural levels. Therefore, to effectively dismantle oppression and discrimination non-violently, requires a constructive alignment and simultaneous attack at all three levels.

As with CPE, understanding the transformative nature of education as a tool for social good and change is fundamental to understanding GYW as a pedagogic and conceptual model. It is centred on the very nature of the purpose of education. As Freire stated, rather than education for critical consciousness, governments have mostly sponsored Banking Education, superimposed on a colonial legacy, with epistimicidal tendencies. Banking education often results in subjugation and the maintenance and reproduction of oppressions, it does not, as Freire argues, produce liberatory education. GYW, in its Freirean approach, is centred on social good and social justice aimed at dismantling the oppressive tablets that inhibit working men and women (and children too!). From the clutches of structural violence, oppression, and discrimination, GYW attempts to develop counter-orthodoxy spaces where young people, especially, can engage in resistance and acts of insurgency against the status quo. The first prerogative in the duality of GYW is to impinge on the young people’s construction of social reality, and therefore how they construct meaning, and therefore act with the world. The second prerogative is then to support action as a result of this new found consciousness. These actions, whilst individually negotiated, are meant to be disruptive, designed to negate banking education in all its manifestations towards a liberatory model, by getting people most affected, to break their shackles and transform the world into a more peaceful one.

Exampling Disruptive Counter-Narratives for Peace Consciousness and Mobilisation

This section will offer micro examples of practice in multicultural Leicester, UK, to illustrate how young people have made sense of peace in terms of critical engagement and impact, and what this revealed about CC as the duality of praxis and consciousness.

The first study to be discussed involved one of the authors working with 21 young people (aged 15-24) in five groups in different inner-city settings in Leicester, UK. The projects were called Young People Peace & Change and together they constituted the first ethnographic study in England to explore young people’s conceptualisation of peace (Ogunnusi, 2020). Methodologically, the research was influenced by Participatory Action Research, and built around an original approach to Photovoice, to elicit young people´s perspectives and concerns (Ogunnusi, 2019, 2020). The findings clearly demonstrated how the participants, described by gatekeepers (and themselves) as being marginalised, vulnerable and at-risk of violence, made sense of, and enacted, their knowledge of peace as praxis and critical transformative agency. Furthermore, problem-posing solutions for peace within and outside the scope of the research meant that the young people identified barriers to peace as being structured into their everyday life e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, militarism, economics, and culture; and understood the significance of their collective ‘youth voice’ as the enactment of peace as knowledge, power, and resistance (Ogunnusi 2019, 2020). Three groups went on to act in their knowledge of peace as small-scale activism and public engagement.

During Young People Peace & Change, the participants actively self-represented their visualisations and readings of peace with others, moving from their first impressions to complicate their procedural knowledge of peace (Ogunnusi, 2019). As critical thinking, this process was analytical and challenged the participant’s individual and collective knowledge of peace as something given, singular, objective and fixed. Instead, their knowledge of peace was reimagined in their knowledge, opinions, stories and values. With regard to CC, problem-posing dialogue emerged more distinctly when young people considered how they thought about peace and their familiarity with languaging peace. Collectively, they revealed questions about why they were more knowledgeable about war than peace, and the subsequent need to “think deeper”. These ideas were crucial as an emerging critical transitivity that provided both consensus and impetus for action. Instead of magical and “stereotype” accounts, a joint consciousness evolved with a critical curiosity about the dynamics of peace knowledge and what such knowledge might serve or disrupt.

As another example to communicate the process of CC, all of the participants in the study mentioned war and its local-global implications as a barrier to peace in their everyday life, (re)making sense of their own knowledge, and translating this into action. “War” represented an emotionally generative word, linked to perceptions of injustice; whereby, young people spoke about some of the structural causes of war, clearly challenging its legitimation and purpose. Critical of adults, and in particular politicians and leaders, who were deemed to cause war, young people questioned the morality for armed conflicts. It was argued that politicians “should know better”, and there was discomfort with the idea that certain countries dominated international relations regarding war and peace. The local significance of war moved from individual to collective narratives involving the young people’s experiences (and perceived threat) of stereotyping, discrimination, Islamophobia, racism, and micro-aggressions, as part of their day to day life in their city, community, and in college.

By moving from the concept of war to the politics of war, the young people expressed frustration and distrust due to what they understood as being the duplicity involved in how certain leaders appeared to utilise conflict for their own purposes. As a barrier to peace, this issue was problem-posed as discriminatory, oppressive, and adultist; and involved how hegemonic powers and forces shape people’s thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and consciousness. For one group, the politics of war became a primary concern for their self representation and public engagement with representatives from their local community. Consistent with CC, the young people acted on their knowledge of peace, leading dialogic activities, sharing antidotes, and using photography to present their voices visually; with the hope they would stimulate their audiences into further dialogue and action to challenge the legitimacy of war (Ogunnusi 2019, 2020).

Alternatively, in a different group, having spoken about the morality of war, and by questioning and contesting the legitimacy of war, the young people reached a consensus about the permeance of war as part of human nature and social reality. War-thinking, and the function of war, including the relativity of peace as an outcome of war e.g. as violent struggle for human rights, was considered so normal it was described as “mundane”. The notion of a world without war was believed to be “weird”, or unattainable; perhaps indicative of a magical consciousness that positions war as both inevitable and essential to the human condition in ways that are beyond our control. The fixedness of war, and deeper-rooted assumptions about how human beings are hardwired for violence and warfare, were left intact to obscure possibilities of agency and change.

Another example we would like to share took place in Leicester, UK, in early 2000. One of the authors worked in a Community College at this time as a Community Youth Tutor in charge of Youth Work provision within the college and its surrounding area as part of the Leicester Youth Service. This example was precipitated by the scarf of a Bangladeshi British girl being pulled off by an African Caribbean boy, in jest, in the playground during their lunch break. This led to a confrontation of African Caribbean young people against some Muslim young people (of Pakistani, Somali, Bangladeshi and Indian origin) in the school community, which then spilled into the wider community, as both sets of communities called for reinforcements outside Leicester, including leafleting. There was a day when both sets of communities came out and stood against each other, ready for confrontation, but for the presence of the police. Sitting in a circle, the young people from both communities were brought together to explore the causes of the confrontation, its potential impact, and possible solutions led by those inside the problem. In this dialogic encounter, the young people explored the incident using PLiNGs, and were able to establish that the individual act of pulling off the girl’s headscarf, whilst in jest at a personal level, fed into a local narrative aimed at “Muslims taking over”; the national narrative of disproportionate “stop and search” of “Muslim looking people” in the aftermath of 7^th July 2005 terrorist attacks in London by British of ethnic origin, and the national tabloids stoking the fire; and at the global level on the “war of terror” experienced as George Bush’s “axis of evil” and the bombing of the Tora Bora mountains.

Over several weeks, through critical dialogue, young people established and correlated the PLiNGs as a way to find commonality as situated in the context of their lives and in the historicity of the moment, evidencing the first objective of GYW, to provoke CC. The second prerogative occurred when the young people took action using short videos to engage and educate communities both within and outside the school; culminating in representatives from both communities coming together to a launch event, as well as the wider dissemination of the videos as resources to support dialogue and practice elsewhere.

Conclusion

It is vital to recognise that CPE and GYW are problem-posing pedagogies that task all those involved to move between social analysis, political agency, and social action, to challenge violence and advance peace. Far from being neutral, if violence is woven into the local-global dimensions of social reality, then the pursuit of peace as a social goal must surely constitute a disruptive counter-narrative. Having outlined some of the core motives of CPE and GYW, this paper has started to demystify and demonstrate peace consciousness formation and mobilisation premised on the need to re-centralise CC. Often conflated with, or reduced to, critical thinking, the authors have illustrated how CC is made distinct by the duality of praxis and consciousness, concerned with how young people engage and take action as active global citizens in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies. By doing so, the paper offers some clarity, that is often missing in the literature, for how, through dialogue that involves transformative action, reflection and re-engagement, young people interrogate micro and macro social contradictions in the ontology of their everyday life. There will be discomfort in the learning process, possibly anger, confusion and even rage, but these feelings must be tapped into to feed the process, rather than being dismissed. The pursuit of CC will be planned and organic, responding ‘in the moment’ where meaning, context, and form are constantly recalibrated.

In the examples given, it was important for young people to discuss and engage in dialogue to examine opportunities for peace as a dichotomy between the actual and re-imagined state of the world. Such work has value in itself for young people who have felt excluded, misrepresented, and sometimes fatigued by their experiences as young people; including those who can be theorised as having lived in cultures of silence. As theory in practice, the local-global pedagogic approaches of CPE and GYW are well suited to emphasise the power of the people involved in the stories to gain a new understanding of the world, following the provocation of CC. Such ideas are important for the reimagination of peace within CPE and GYW, especially for new stories with young people emerging from their lived experiences and understanding of the tension between agency, social structure, and structural impediments that perpetuate violence and diminish human development, wellbeing and social justice. CC necessitates a critically acute and analytical awareness of how language, knowledge, and power, are negotiated and negated in ‘real life’ relations and learning; and crucially CC is deeply bound to transformative action. To simply raise our awareness of the challenges in the world is not enough.

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