Education and peacebuilding

Butuan City—I am in this city briefly to participate in the 10th Mindanao Peace Studies Conference (MPSC) at the Father Saturnino Urios University (FSUU) during its first plenary session tomorrow, Nov. 19, 2024. I am honored to be sharing the plenary stage with an internationally recognized and esteemed peacebuilder, 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Leadership awardee, professor Miriam Coronel-Ferrer. Coronel-Ferrer is recognized for her contribution as the first woman chief negotiator for the Philippine government peace panel that negotiated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. To recall, the signing of the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) was the fruit of this arduous peace negotiating process. The CAB led to the crafting of the Bangsamoro organic law (BOL) creating the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

Coronel-Ferrer is the keynote speaker for this year’s MPSC.

This year’s MPSC has for its theme “Education and Peacebuilding.” This broad and much-discussed topic may not be new for us who have been in peace and development work for decades. But this year, it takes on a significant meaning because of concerns and issues plaguing not only our educational institutions but also, and more importantly, our entire social and cultural fabric.

In explaining their choice of this year’s theme, the FSUU organizers of the 10th MPSC noted the critical role of education in embedding in learners the “values of freedom, mutual respect, and solidarity in academic and social spaces.” Such spaces are what Pope Francis highlighted as crucial for educators to nurture in his message on the 2016 World Day of Peace.

Peace education has already been embedded in the curricula of many institutions of higher learning in the country, and even in different levels of basic education, including early and secondary. In addition, many different federations of civil society organizations have already made peacebuilding the cornerstone of their self-imposed mandates and thrusts. A few of them have forged collaborative initiatives with government and international donor agencies to enhance communication links between and among government agencies and institutions with grassroots communities.

This is true not only here in northern Mindanao, where FSUU is a forerunner in forging peace among its various partners, not only with government agencies, but also with civil society groups, especially organizations that are supportive of indigenous communities here in the Agusan provinces.

But forging an inclusive, enduring peace in Mindanao’s conflict-ravaged regions has always been elusive.

Thus, FSUU MPSC organizers deemed it appropriate to focus on this theme, to highlight that building peace is an interminable task, and that it is a journey, not a destination. It requires repetitive reminders of the crucial roles of educational institutions.

Educational institutions are multiplier agencies. They play pivotal roles in instilling reminders to its learners and its entire communities—faculties, nonteaching staff, including its maintenance workers—to make the values of peace part of their whole way of life. They may profess various religious orientations or beliefs, but they can agree on universal values that cherish and nurture enduring peace for all, regardless of ethnic backgrounds, sex and gender, abilities and disabilities, socioeconomic locations, and even political affiliations.

Our fabric as a human society has constantly been battered, twisted, distorted, and punctured in many various ways, in the past and in the present. But perhaps more so in the present.

On a daily basis, we are hapless witnesses to how residences in once flourishing cities in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon crumble after being bombarded by powerful missiles from Israel. Our hearts break at seeing thousands of children die as part of the carnage in Palestine that has gone on for more than a year now. Yet, international agencies like the United Nations and its different agencies for enforcing international humanitarian laws are unable to forge even a ceasefire. Instead, we are witnessing a more forceful Netanyahu-led Israeli government pulverize Palestinian communities wherever they are found. Now it is extending its military reach to Lebanon, to punish Hezbollah leadership that had allied with Hamas among the Palestinian communities.

But right here in our home turf—nationally and in many parts of Mindanao—we witness different forms of conflict. Many conflicts here are subtly being swept under the rug of imposing some national laws and policies, and of keeping a peace based on the principle of “might is right.”

This year’s MPSC hopes to foster relevant conversations and initiatives on to address various forms of conflicts plaguing us, our country and the world, and how to enhance educators’ role of forging enduring peace for all.

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