This study analyses South Africa and Rwanda's emergence from a past of gross human rights abuses, focusing on the articulation between the politics of memory and identity and history education. A common struggle of societies emerging from violent conflict is that of re-inventing or re-imagining the 'nation'. Education policy in post-conflict societies becomes an arena for asserting political visions for a new society - the history curriculum the means through which new collective memories and identities are reflected and asserted. The legacy of trauma is critical to the analysis educational change. This book examines the experience of transitional trauma arising from identity-based conflict as the focus of curriculum analysis. It raises questions about appropriate post-conflict curriculum and about the ways in which teacher identities formed during the conflict, filter curriculum knowledge. It contributes to the fields of education policy and curriculum studies in post-conflict societies and should be useful not only to researchers in this field, but also to education policy makers, historians and history educators and to NGOs in the field of education in Africa and elsewhere.

In many societies, histories of exclusion, racism and nationalist violence often create divisions so deep that finding a way to deal with the atrocities of the past seems nearly impossible. These societies face difficult practical questions about how to devise new state and civil society institutions that will respond to massive or systematic violations of human rights, recognize victims and prevent the recurrence of abuse. Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies brings together a rich group of international researchers and practitioners who, for the first time, examine transitional justice through an 'identity' lens. They tackle ways that transitional justice can act as a means of political learning across communities; foster citizenship, trust and recognition; and break down harmful myths and stereotypes, as steps toward meeting the difficult challenges for transitional justice in divided societies.

Cultural memory and the Construction of Identity brings together scholars of folklore, literature, history, and communication to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in a variety of contexts. Memory is a powerful tool that can transform a piece of earth into a homeland and common objects into symbols. The authors of this volume show how memory is shaped and how it operates in uniting society and creating images that attain the value of truth even if they deviate from fact.

The book investigates the politics of education in pre- and post-genocide Rwanda, examining the actors, interests, and discourses that have historically influenced educational policy and practice and in particular the production and revision of history curricula and textbooks.This study combines a systematic historical and comparative analysis of curricula and textbooks in Rwanda, stakeholder interviews, classroom observations, and a large-scale investigation of pupils' understandings of the country's history. Written at a crucial time of transition in Rwanda, it illuminates the role of education as a powerful means of socialisation through which dominant discourses and related belief systems have been transmitted to the younger generations, thus moulding the nation. It outlines emergent challenges and possibilities, urging a move away from the use of history teaching to disseminate a conveniently selective official history towards practices that promote critical thinking and reflect the heterogeneity characteristic of Rwanda's post-genocide society.

This groundbreaking volume explores the concept of self-censorship as it relates to individuals and societies and functions as a barrier to peace. Defining self-censorship as the act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles, the volumes introduces self-censorship as one of the socio-psychological mechanisms that prevent the free flow of information and thus obstruct proper functioning of democratic societies. Moreover it analyzes this socio-psychological phenomenon specifically in the context of intractable conflict, providing much evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moving from the micro to the macro level, the collected chapters put the individual as the focal unit of psychological analysis while embedding the individual in multiple levels of context including families, organizations, and societies. Following a firm conceptual explanation of self-censorship, a selection of both emerging and prominent scholars describe the ways in which self-censorship factors into families, organizations, education, academia, and other settings. Further chapters discuss self-censorship in military contexts, narratives of political violence, and the media. Finally, the volume concludes by looking at the ways in which harmful self-censorship in societies can be overcome, and explores the future of self-censorship research. In doing so, this volume solidifies self-censorship as an important phenomenon of social behavior with major individual and collective consequences, while stimulating exciting and significant new research possibilities in the social and behavioral sciences. Conceptually carving out a new area in peace psychology, Self Censorship in Contexts of Peace and Conflict will appeal to psychologists, sociologists, peace researchers, political scientists, practitioners, and all those with a wish to understand the personal and societal functioning of individuals in the real world.

This study in comparative literature reinterprets and reevaluates literary texts and socio-historical transitions, moving between the Korean, East Asian, and European contexts (and with particular reference to the reception of Dante Alighieri in the East). In the process, it reexamines the universality of literary values and reopens the questions of what literature is and what it can do. By close reading of texts, it aims to give exposure to Korean literature, in such a way as to attract more attention to the field of world literature and to focus on what kind of relationship they can form and what new horizon of literariness they can construct in the future. This work will help to put the geography of world literature on a more open and just basis, by showing the porous nature of literary migration and supplying the missing links in the current discourse on world literature.