Peace Education on the Margins: Afghan youth complete online class on nonviolence
A group of multi-ethnic Afghan students gathered around a laptop at the Borderfree Center for Nonviolence in Kabul, Afghanistan. They eagerly listened to Patrick Kennelly, director of the Center for Peacemaking, who was teaching the students how to complete an online class about peace and nonviolence facilitated through the Center for Peacemaking.
By Lexie Athanasourelis-Athis
Over the past five years staff and alumni of the Center for Peacemaking regularly visited the Afghan Peace Volunteers, a group of multi-ethnic Afghans committed to learning about and practicing nonviolence. The partnership between the two centers has evolved to include the launch of an online class which provides Afghan youth a way to learn the principles of peacemaking and nonviolence.
The idea for the class originated from a conversation between Kennelly and Dr. Wee Teck Young, known by Afghans as “Hakim.” Hakim, who serves as a mentor to the Afghan Peace Volunteers, expressed a desire to connect marginalized Afghan youth with the intellectual resources of Marquette University and the Center for Peacemaking.
Kennelly quickly went to work composing an online class based on the four key components of Marquette’s peace studies curriculum: peacemaking, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and nonviolence. After determining the curriculum, Kennelly and Billy Malloy (Nursing ’11) traveled to the Borderfree Center for Nonviolence in Kabul to meet the first group of students and launch the class.
The class includes ten lessons consisting of a reading, a group discussion at the Borderfree Center, and a short response to online questions. The discussion and short response help to evaluate each student’s understanding, analysis, and application of the lesson’s content.
Through participation in the class, the Afghan students came to appreciate the wider community of academics and activists willing to share resources on nonviolent methods, approaches, and strategies that can be used to transform the current situation in Afghanistan.
In the written responses, the students demonstrated a clear understanding of important nonviolence concepts.
Responding to a prompt about power, Bassir wrote, “I think power has two main sides, just like a double-edge sword; one is the very basic meaning of power as ‘to be able’, that is to be able to do stuff the way you want and you can. The second one is the ability to control the other, to monitor what they are doing and to get the other to do what you want them to do.”
Another module explored the difference between retributive and restorative justice and how these concepts relate to peacemaking. Fatima wrote, “Restorative justice believes in rehabilitation of offenders. However, retributive justice believes that punishment is the only way of decreasing crime and bringing justice.” She continued to explain how, “Retributive justice promotes the feeling of revenge and does not give time for the victim and offender to talk directly with each other to solve the conflict. But, restorative justice can play an important role in peacemaking between victim and offender because they can negotiate with each other. By finding answers for why a crime was committed, the victims may forgive the offenders and can reconcile with each other.”
Throughout the course, students were challenged to relate the content with the current situation in Afghanistan. Many of these responses mentioned a sense of personal responsibility to work as peacemakers.
Hoor explained, “I believe peace comes from within us. We are all human beings, so we should know each other well, and most importantly, we must know ourselves well. Afghans do not trust each other. In order to show that we can all live under the same blue sky without any difference, we must make communities made up of different ethnic groups, like the Afghan Peace Volunteers did in Kabul. The challenge we have is with ourselves and one another, and if we really want peace in Afghanistan, we have to be able to live together.”