Forging a new normal for peace with justice: Technology, history, pedagogy, and the Post‐COVID‐19 world – Meyer – – Peace & Change

Three and a half decades ago, a 1987 United Nations related report used the term “sustainability” to describe its vision of a world that would meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
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“Sustainability” has since become the rhetorical go-to for “progressive” self-positioning, from neoliberal heads of imperial and sub-imperial nation-states to international environmental agencies, to grassroots indigenous radicals. The difference across these cases, of course, is in the delivery. Peace, as iconic figures from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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to Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
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agree, can only be sustainable when the presence of consistently justice-based policies are in practice for all members of a given society. The sudden ruptures of the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown justice—and consistency—into a state of indefinite instability that raises urgent questions for all of us and for peace historians and peace studies scholars in particular.

Therefore, looking at a planet emerging not so much from one pandemic as from an historical moment when pandemics were temporary disorders, to a post-COVID-19 period of potentially permanent pandemics, we must begin to develop—as many Latin American scholars have already insisted—a language of “new normalities” for new studies and struggles. This Special Issue of Peace & Change, the first of the journal's 47th volume, spotlights the new co-publishing arrangement between the Peace History Society and the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) by featuring new work from each of IPRA's five major regional associations, the Asia-Pacific Peace Research Association, the Africa Peace Research and Education Association, the European Peace Research Association, the Latin American Council for Peace Research, and, serving North America, the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Their perspectives on what will be needed, from academics and activists alike, to build new “normals” in which we may begin to sustain one another's lives and communities in beauty and love and freedom.

Let us begin at civilization's cradle, on the African continent where 2021 began with IPRA's 28th biennial conference, the third in our history on African soil. At Kenya's MultiMedia University in Nairobi, led by IPRA co-Secretary General Christine Atieno and attended by a small group of scholars from around the world, the conference theme of “Peace Technology: Positioning Fourth Industrial Revolution and Emerging Technologies in Fostering Global Peace” could not help but be somewhat overshadowed by the collective attention on the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Nevertheless, IPRA's decision to go boldly forward with an in-person conference supplemented and joined by an online, at times interactive and hybrid event, enabled an unprecedented number of members and interested parties, including over one hundred students supported by a special UN-related scholarship fund, to take part in conversations which were centered in an Africa-based internationalist spirit. Experts such as Dr. Virginia Onyara of the International Telecommunications Union helped open the in-person event, connecting the themes of e-waste management, transboundary movement, and peace.

From the virtual viewpoint, Kitche Magak Vice Chancellor of Maasai Mara University and leading Kenyan peace studies and indigenous research elder spoke across the technical boundaries to the collaborations and relationships that we can and must make despite complications of travel and health in difficult times. Citing partnerships that Maasai Mara built with US/Cherokee professor Polly Walker, current Chair of the Indigenous Education Network and official liaison to IPRA from the North American affiliate Peace and Justice Studies Association, Magak called on peace scholars to “focus on relationships” and “make space for creative acts.” More and more, scholars from the Global South are moving peace studies practice, and colleagues from the Global North, especially toward taking the necessary risks that will come with a break from the past. As Magak emphasized: “we must have a willingness to risk moving beyond known violence into the possibilities of peace.”
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Even with deep research and a strong sense of history, the future holds no guarantees. But building new-normal ways of relating must surely rely upon being open, intellectually and otherwise to new risks.

The need for new dialogic and creative spaces within this emerging dynamic of openness was also a key theme of the plenary presentation by eminent South African academic Saths Cooper, President of the Pan-African Psychology Union, first African president of the International Union of Psychological Science, and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Durban. Cooper, who is also the African Governing Board representative of the prestigious International Science Council, asserted that IPRA had a special role to play in the coming years. “Most of our disciplines,” Cooper noted, “play little role in helping to shape policy at most levels of African life and society. Regarded at best with skepticism in most countries, the social sciences tend to lapse into internal navel-gazing and tendentiousness, which limits our impact and reduces our potential to seriously influence public discourse and credible transformation. IPRA can and should suggest ways that the quest for peace can fly high, especially in vulnerable contexts where most have lost hope in Africa's ability to rise above the seemingly indelible marks of recent history.”
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Cooper went on to suggest that a “participatory action research” needs to be developed and followed, which would be based on “decolonizing research” which would be both “centered on indigenous paradigms and would resist epistemic violence.” This type of research, to be effective, must resolve the issues of unequal power relationships between most researchers and the participants in the research. There would have to be “diverse methodologies” and “inclusion of true diversity” at all levels of research and the academy. “There must be collaborative engagement across differing paradigms,” stated Cooper, in which participants are understood as “the co-creators of knowledge” within this truly transformative praxis. The opportunity that IPRA and our associates have before us is nothing short of substantial.
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It is within this context that this Special Issue—originally conceptualized as a collection of “best of” presentations from the Nairobi and virtual IPRA conference in January 2021—came to be. Well beyond its original focus on technology, these works reflect the challenges we face as we live with and past the most difficult social realities of the global pandemic. As Social Science Research Council Program Director Cyril Obi noted during the virtual opening plenary of the IPRA conference, we imagine that “peace technologies will be even more critical in a post-COVID world.” Bridging the gap between our conference theme and the pandemic surrounding us, between our African “base” and our global reach, Obi—who serves as director of the African Peacebuilding Network and the Next Generation Africans in Social Sciences program, and is also an IPRA United Nations representative, added: “Africa is a place where peace is both in great demand, but also where we continue to witness a lot of innovative and exciting peace initiatives.”
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It is noteworthy that, since the development of this manifesto, popular sentiment in favor of these ideals have greatly intensified, with participation in recent CLAIP conferences increased by 500%. In part this speaks to frustrations with what is seen as moderate and old-fashioned approaches to deep-seated problems, and, in part, grassroots movements geared toward obviously needed mutual aid have taken on more resistance-oriented models across ideological lines—forging unity out of the dissatisfaction with governmental responses to COVID-19.

Ursula Oswald-Spring, a founder and leader of CLAIP, helpfully traces the historical trajectory that brought the authors of this manifesto to their forward-looking ideas and ideals, and that shaped the formation of this special issue. In an essay, outlining the historical development and theoretical roots of the organization which has come to represent thousands of professors and hundreds of institutions throughout the region, Oswald-Spring's review of CLAIP's past, present, and future puts the militaristic and unjust policies of neoliberalism on full display. In her view, CLAIP's more generally, only “a holistic cosmopolitanism-critical approach from a feminist understanding of new power relations” can bring about sustainable peace in the complex future we face. Oswald-Spring proposes a “HUGE” change in the way we think about conflict and safety in the world: with an emphasis on “human, gender, and environment-based security.”

Jean-Marie Kasonga Mbombo's contribution focused on the paralysis of the United Nations Security Council that was especially evident during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, is no less visionary in its implications for the future of the field. Mbombo, a senior professor at the University of Ilorin's prestigious Centre for Peace and Strategic Studies, reviews UN practice through a peace studies lens. Noting that “pandemics have always forced human beings to break with the past and fashion new ways of life,” Mbombo is also clear that the “mainstream” definitions of peace and conflict resolution from UN and governmental points of view are often statist and military-based. Thus, this period presents us with a bitter irony, in which “rich nations spend billions on nuclear arsenals while their medical doctors and nurses have to make critical choices” about who lives and dies. The next tasks for peace researchers must include a more people-based and holistic understanding that “peace is health” and the global agencies that we have looked for must at very least be drastically transformed for lasting peace to be realized.

Peace educator Sikander Mehdi contributes the next featured essay which looks at post-COVID-19 pedagogy and methodology from his specialized perspective. Mehdi insists that all contemporary superpowers—the US, China, Russia, the UK and France very much included—share blame for the spreading “ideas of mass destruction” which, like the weapons which became buzzwords during the Cold War and since, have pushed the planet to the brink of disaster. COVID-19, in Mehdi's view, represents one just one aspect of this multifaceted crisis, which includes environmental and military-based interconnected components. This point is signified in his assertion that the current crisis portends “the collapse of the traditional national and international economic and security order.” Therefore, civil society leaders—with great input from peace scholars of all fields—must be at the center of new social structures which will resolve long-intractable colonial conflicts (such as in Kashmir and Palestine) and focus on constructing “bridges to connect different peoples, different cultures, and different civilizations.”

Finally, the Special Issue concludes with two essays from Olga A. Vorkunova, whose loss we mourn as she was taken by the pandemic in 2021, just as these insightful pieces were under revision. The first of Dr. Vorkunova's pieces catapults us directly into the technological realities of the modern world in an assertion which must be seen as a great truism of our time. “The industrial mode of development,” she begins “is giving way to an informational mode.” Wherever we may be personally in our love–hate relationship with Zoom or its alternatives, life in pandemic times has only intensified that fact. Communication, between those from every corner of the planet, is both more possible and in some cases less intimately personal than ever before. Paraphrasing an old pacifist elder, US War Resister David McReynolds, “we have been invaded by the 21st century!”
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Vorkunova provides evidence that our most effective means of dealing with the educational and policy-oriented implications of our 21st century challenges is by better understanding the innovations developed in “regional peacebuilding clusters” which grow directly out of zones of conflict. She cites examples from the Middle East and Central Eur-Asia, but the same argument holds for the work being done in Sudan and South Sudan, covered in this issue's Research Note.

Dr. Vorkunova's final essay, and the concluding essay of this Special Issue, centers around “complex identity” in a post-COVID-19 world, and the role of culture in sustained peacemaking. From one viewpoint, the changing nature of the nation-state and national entities give rise to political instability amidst the growing of regional supranational entities. From another, the struggles over the meaning of democracy in this context can give space to authoritarian repression and more vibrant challenges to actual, participatory engagement of civil society in concrete aspects of peacebuilding. Communication and new technologies can be powerful tools for facilitating this participation, as our electronic devices become “the active medium for the construction and contestation of new identities.” As more public spaces become both militarized and contained (as the commons get usurped and shrunken), the vital importance of engaged local governance directed by an involved social core only increases. The emergence of justice-based complex identities at the point when COVID-19 exists in a less crisis-driven form may provide the foundation for lasting social change. Vorkunova has hope and evidence-based beliefs that justice rooted in the realities of our complex identities “lie in the set of unrealized possibilities” which, once realized, connect us to a world with peace and freedom to which we are “closer than we sometimes appear to think.”

From an Africanist perspective on what role southern actors can play in the context of failing super-power entities such as the UN Security Council, to the Latin American calls for a new normalcy which will replace neoliberalism altogether, from an analysis from Asia on how to combat the ideas which continue to affirm colonialism, neocolonialism, and hyper-militarism, to a declining US empire suffering from the stresses which come from internal injustices and contradictions (which one recent independent panel concluded amounted to “acts of genocide against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples”
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)…the argument that we are closer than we think to some solutions is a heartening conclusion indeed. One bitter irony of this formulation—on a personal level for the contributors to this journal—is that Olga Vorkunova, the most clearly optimistic voice in this special issue, suddenly passed away due to COVID-19-related illness as we were preparing it for publication. Her essays give us reason to be hopeful. As we recognize that the new challenges amount to opportunities to rebuild peace movements based in part on the research we conduct, we have a responsibility to work with greater creativity, vision, and action than ever before. We hope that this issue, and this journal in general, provides special tools to guide the scholarship that will pave the path ahead.

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