We Have Moved!

The home of the Passport to Peace project has moved to a NEW website!  The new website can be found HERE, specifically at www.passport2peacemovie.com.  This blog will remain up for the time being, however, all of the older posts and content on this blog have been moved to the new website.

www.passport2peacemovie.com

Peace Ed.: No rope climbing necessary

As promised, this post will dig a little deeper into the Costa Rican model for peace education. A 1997 law established every Costa Rican student’s “right to an adequate peace education.” As with many well intentioned laws, however, the peace education mandate went unrealized for years. It wasn’t until 2003, when the Academy for Peace was born, that teachers began to be trained in the field of peace ed.

The Academy of Peace is the main operation of the Rasur Foundation, a Costa Rican NGO founded by US expat Rita Marie Johnson. The organization found its inspiration in a prophetic story written by a former Minister of Education in 1946 that tells of a mysterious peace teacher named Rasur. Though founded in the spirit of a classic Costa Rican fable, Rasur’s methods are cutting edge. Rasur’s unique brand of peace education, BePeace, brings together two well-researched processes. In what Rita Marie calls “feeling peace and speaking peace,” BePeace combines the Institute of Heartmath's method for finding inner peace and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication techniques. These methods are adapted well for classroom use. The HeartMath technology, for example, includes games that illustrate the physiological effects of meditation (competitive meditation anyone?). Rasur has developed a number of kid-friendly techniques for practicing BePeace. You can learn about those in our interview with the Director of the Academy of Peace, Vera Lucia Salas.

The Rasur Foundation is currently working with the Ministry of Public Education and local school systems to finally implement the peace education mandate. So far, about 600 teachers have some BePeace training. Teachers who have completed a forty hour certification process become leaders in their school and build on-site peace teams. These special few, known as Rasurs, number about 13 at present. While the scope of Rasur Foundation’s work is still limited to a handful of schools, they offer a model which has applications in every school across the country.

What will it take for this model to spread? Well, if you can believe it, the government is totally on board with the movement toward incorporating peace education in every school. As it turns out, that 1997 law wasn’t just hot air. The Costa Rican state may lack the resources necessary to implement a national project, but its partnership with Rasur may be a match made in heaven. In a landmark move in September, 2009, the Costa Rican government established a national Ministry of Peace. Only the third country in the world to accomplish this leap toward institutional peace building, and the first non-conflict country (the other two are Nepal and Solomon Islands). Rasur Foundation played an integral role in motivating and organizing this unprecedented success and the new Ministry of Peace should be a boon to their work and that of all peace builders in Costa Rica.

If that all sounds a bit too ideal to be true, rest assured, the Ministry is no peace fairy doling out safer streets and schools in exchange for tax dollars under pillows. Peace isn’t built overnight, as they say. As of yet, we aren’t sure what the Ministry of Peace’s day to day operations entail, and it seems most Costa Ricans are oblivious to its creation. But for an organ of the state with only 10 months under its belt, what more can we expect? Our interview with the Vice Minister of Justice and Peace next Monday should answer some of these questions. We’ll fill you in on that soon.

Positive Peace

One month into our project, we must take the time to reevaluate our initial questions: What explains the Costa Rican culture of peace and can it be replicated in other societies?

Our thinking about these questions is founded on a simple theoretical framework provided in large part by Johan Galtung. Peace, according to Galtung, is not just the absence of war. Because two nations are not at war does not mean they are in peace. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States is the classic example, but look also to modern examples of negative peace between North and South Korea or Israel and Syria. Therefore, the mere absence of physical violence or war is a negative peace because the conditions that inevitably lead to violence persist. On the other hand, positive peace refers to a state of collaboration and support between states, nations, or members of a society.

In the case of Costa Rica, the 1948 Revolution led to the abolition of the military. Therefore, Costa Rica has been free of war for 62 years. Moreover, whereas many Central American states wielded military force against their own populations (Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, to name a few), Costa Ricans enjoyed a unique freedom from political violence.

But, though free from war, is Costa Rica truly a culture of positive peace? To answer this deeper question, we rely on Galtung’s notion of structural violence. Structural violence refers to the socially, culturally, or institutionally embedded measures of oppression or non-physical violence. Examples of structural violence include racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and the list goes on. Simply put, structural violence is built into the very social structure. In fact, the social structure may rely on it. To bring the theorizing full circle, positive peace is the cessation of structural violence. Sexism, heterosexism, and socio-economic inequality are plain as day in Costa Rica (CR’s Gini index is 46). Nonetheless, compared to its regional neighbors, Costa Rica scores very high in development indicators. It would seem, then, that while structural violence exists in Costa Rica, somebody is doing something about it.

That’s where we come in. So far, we have learned that Costa Rica is no “peace paradise.” That being said, we have witnessed a vibrant civil society making steps towards positive peace in all fronts. For us, some of the most exciting work is being done in the field of peace education. Our next post will explain a bit more about the peace education model being introduced in Costa Rican schools.

In the meantime, take a look at the website of Dramatic Problem Solving, an organization (run by Steven Hawkins) that uses theater methods to help communities solve their own conflicts. He draws inspiration from the work of Brazilian Augusto Boal and his Theater of the Oppressed, an important form inspired by Freirean pedagogy. Video clips will be uploaded soon.

Peace