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Article No.
1
On Nourishing Peace:
The Performativity of Activism through the Nobel Peace Prize
Victoria Ann Newsom
Department of Communication Studies and
Department of Liberal Studies
California State University, Los Angeles,
USA
and
Wenshu
Lee
Department
of Communication Studies
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, California USA
Abstract
The Nobel Peace Prize as a global media spectacle centered in
Northern Europe is not without controversy. What we hope to
accomplish in this essay is two fold: first, to advance the concept
of "nourishing peace”, which we define as a process that combines
both negative peace and positive peace; and second, to use the
theoretical framework woven from Turner's social drama,
Conquergood's dialogical performance, and Appadurai's five scapes
and global disjunctive flows to engage students in unpacking the
Nobel Peace Prize critically, including the recent award of the
prize to American President Barak Obama. Our critical analysis notes
a few trends over the years of awarding Nobel Peace Prizes: awards
framed traditionally from the point of negative peace often went to
white men occupying positions of power in the West; and awards
framed from the point of positive peace narrowly and nourishing
peace broadly opened up more space for women and men of color and
organizations that promoted human rights and well beings. The
harbinger of this glaring elision in Nobel ideology is the missing
Peace Laureate, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was nominated five times but
never became a Laureate in his lifetime. Marking yet another trend,
the recent award to President Obama was not for a "completed
action”, but rather for a future oriented nourishing peace, i.e.,
the publicly stated goal of nuclear disarmament and bringing about
potentially a peaceful future. As teachers, we are encouraged to
draw on Obama’s “call to action” and use the Nobel Peace Prize as a
means of inspiring obtainable local action, so that each “aha
moment” in students' deep learning can become a turning point for
critical consciousness and an impetus for meaningful peace activism
both locally and globally.
Keywords:
Nobel Peace Prize, nourishing peace, positive peace, negative peace,
social drama, performative dialogue, five scapes, global disjunctive
flows, Barack Obama, women Nobel Peace Laureates, Neda, peace
movements, “aha moment” pedagogy, performative activism
In pursuit of nourishing peace
Peace
is a term that one may associate with the end of military threats
and active warfare, the end of political oppression, or the end of
hunger, subjugation, and slavery. The recent awarding of President
Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, as an example, reflects this increasingly
complex understanding of peace in the contemporary global context.
The desire for peace brings to mind, currently among other diverse
situations, the domestic and global carnage of the George W. Bush
era’s “war on terror”, the cyclical threat of nuclear weapons in
North Korea, the popular uprisings during the presidential election
in Iran, and the orphaned children of the blood diamond industry.
Writing in Los Angeles, we as co-authors are mindful of our labor in
the center of an empire in transition, an empire on its way to a
twisted decline if the Obama administration fails to make
significant differences in American and global politics. In the
aftermath of Bush political and economic disaster and the dawning of
the Obama pragmatism, we ask: What would constitute an ethical and
persuasive mode of advocacy for “peace” in the eyes of American
youth living in one of the most diverse metropolises in the world,
Los Angeles? How can we recognize which notions of peace may
resonate with a youthful population in an urban environment? Are
these notions of peace ones that resonate outside of local
knowledge? Can peace itself be created both inside and outside of a
local environment?
The Nobel Peace Prize
and nourishing peace
Advocacy for peace as
emanated from local impulses onto a global scale is best
crystallized, in a pedagogical sense, through the Nobel Peace Prize.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize is a ritual moment performed
on a global stage to recognize monumental work often spanning
decades of “peace”. The ritual assumes noteworthiness around the
globe, henceforth, a spectacular symbolic power, the granting of
which singles out certain positive evolution and change in the
humanity for praise while leaving other often equally meritorious
acts unrecognized.
A closer examination of
Nobel’s immense power of bestowal reveals that the politicized
rhetoric of peace, in its early days, was often framed as negating
forces in the trope of anti, e.g., anti-war, anti-terrorism,
and anti-aggression. In other words, the Noble Prize has been
awarded to a variety of performances of peace, including those
statesmen who worked to end specific states of warfare, transformed
acts that had grossly violated human rights, and cleared the ground
to render future peace activism viable.
These tropes that
negate, as powerful as they are, may fail to exert immediate local
impact on a particular community because the performance of peace on
a global scale as ritualized in the Nobel Peace Prize is often
distant, in a time, space and cultural sense, from the lived
experiences of individuals seeking peace in their everyday lives. To
utilize the Prize, then, to pedagogically engage a student
population in peace advocacy in a college classroom and beyond
presents a variety of challenges.
One such challenge was
brought in front of us in a recent discussion with our students. The
normative performances of peace substantiated by the Prize in its
century of tradition are marginally relevant to our students’
perceptions of peace and their perceptions of Peace Laureates
themselves. The performativity of peace, for our students, involves
a set of personally and locally legible values and needs, such as
taking up internships for youth at non-profit organizations to
reduce the involvement with gang activities and to seed the
motivation to obtain college education for social justice. Obama’s
recent win, especially given its current media frame of “hope” and
long-term efforts to avoid violence more closely connects with those
student perceptions.1 The links between the ritualized
performance of the early Prizes centering on anti-tropes and our
students’ concrete and locally legible acts situated in a city and a
nation that is fortunately uninfected by large-scale wars, though
potentially existent and empowering, are yet to be drawn and made
compelling. Finding examples that will reach our students, as in the
case of Obama’s win, is necessary if we wish to fully engage the
students in peace activism. In other words, we are in search of the
pedagogy of the “aha moments” which functions as an “instance of
active engagement in meaning-making, creating a level of awareness
that served as a new foundation from which continued experiences and
understandings were built” (Landerman, Rasmussen, King, & Jiang,
2007, p. 288).
Fortunately, more recent
performances of peace honored by the Nobel Prize in the past few
decades, those that often have human rights associations or
organizations as co-recipients, reflect a second meaning of peace,
which echoes Trostle’s definition (as cited in Sandy & Perkins,
2002, p. 5):
Peace is a state of
well-being that is characterized by trust, compassion, and justice.
In this state, we can be encouraged to explore as well as celebrate
our diversity, and search for the good in each other without the
concern for personal pain and sacrifice…It provides us a chance to
look at ourselves and others as part of the human family, part of
one world.2
It is this “turn” in the
performances of peace as spelled out in the above quote, from a
“negative peace” that seeks to end wars and battles to a “positive
peace” that aims at the creation and sustaining of a state and an
infrastructure of well-being, that we find a viable framework for
the pedagogy of “aha moments”, one that our students can potentially
relate to and use as basis for their own acts of critical social
change. We call this turn as a process nourishing peace,
combining both the negative peace and the positive peace. Nourishing
peace is a peace process that often begins with the negating impulse
as the dominant motivation, yet this process continues on without
stopping when an end of war is declared, a peace process that
extends into the post-war and post-conflict infrastructure building,
a peace process that is long term and involves the everyday, a peace
process that is about the rights of human beings to live unharmed as
important as well and healthful, and peace that resonates with deep
needs both locally and globally. In our classrooms, using the Nobel
Prize as case studies of nourishing peace requires deep and
ethnographic translation that deftly weaves the local and the global
acts, and the negative and positive peace into a nourishing habitat
for humanity’s well-being. Henceforth, we offer the thesis that the
performance of peace that will most effectively reach our students
and constitute an “aha” pedagogy lies in a nuanced rhetoric of
nourishing peace.
In order to investigate
the performance of peace, and how this can be utilized as an
effective pedagogical tool, we are led to theories of performativity
and performative pedagogy. However, inspired by the metamorphoses of
British cultural studies in the non-U.S. academic world, we choose
to enact cultural performances as radically unleashed deep work in
the trenches, and refuse to perform the irony of highbrow
performativity scholarship. By this we mean performativity has the
potential rather than the guarantee of subversion and social
change. Theorists of performativity seem to be mindful of this
non-guarantee, yet the way the theory of performativity has been
preached and circulated seems to posture the certainty of
subversion. The pervasive abstract language and its occasional
inductive focus are rarely close to the everyday folks, wherein lies
the performative irony: the iterative meta-discourse of uncertainty
soars ever higher into the certain sky of theory, leaving behind the
sufferings of the everyday. Drag, after all, is quite a different
hailing than torture, hunger and infectious disease. As an
alternative, we migrate into and linger in the space traveled by
global theorists, like Victor Turner, Dwight Conquergood, Arjun
Appadurai, Starhawk, Susan Okin, Anna Deavere Smith, Paulo Freire,
and Henry Giroux. We want to live in and be inspired by their
arch-cases focusing on those who are disenfranchised in the global
rush for deep mobility, including the global poor and the
dispossessed mass, a space we loosely term as “a basic framework for
performative activism”.
Performance theory tells
us that personal identity is constructed both by the individual and
by communal and social processes. It is never the performer alone
that constructs her or his identity; instead we believe that
performance is iterated and reiterated by both performer and
community-audience. In the case of peace activism, the performance
of an activist, we believe, responds both to individual and local
needs. The circuits of knowledge of a local community, out of which
the performance finds critical nourishment, dialectically because of
its framing power, may limit the performer and the performance
itself. Performative social action and subversion, then, must arise
from such dialectical processes, and their ensuing ethical choices
become negotiated as a performer and her audiences struggle for
higher meanings.
Turner (1974) examines
political activism and its agents of change through what he calls
"social drama." A social drama arises from a disruption to social
order and the creation of a "breach”. In a more drastic situation, a
"crisis" in a cultural tradition may result in a “redressive
action”. Aspects of a redressive action, Turner further argues, may
be rejected or incorporated, in different degrees, into existing
cultural norms. Students will relate to Turner’s concept because it
is concrete and interesting enough to invoke storytelling, a form of
cultural performance. They can tell stories about different kinds of
social drama in the conflicts that arise between, for example,
friends, family members, generations, and social classes. They may
also compare different types of narration to instigate potential
“aha moments” of the “perspectives” chosen, consciously or
unconsciously for the telling. It is here, in the performative
narration of breach and crisis and the awareness of the perspectives
taken to narrate, that our thesis of nourishing peace bears the
potential resonance with students’ habitat. And we, as teachers, can
encourage such resonance by inviting our students to perform social
drama, bringing them to examples that reach into their own locales,
and asking them to help find the link between one’s perspective
taken and potential redressive actions that will be persuasive and
ultimately accepted, by the public, as solutions.
For Turner the liminal
qualities of social drama, in the narration of which may create a
moment “betwixt and between” (1967, p. 1) the “successive
participations in social milieu” (1972, p. 52) that allow
revolutionary activity and challenge normative cultural
performances. This process is itself performative. The resulting
performance, which involves the choices of what to narrate and what
perspectives used to narrate, creates the impetus for change by
opening the liminal space, a zone of what once was and could have
been, for informed and impassioned advocacy. For example, the U.S.
housing crisis and subsequent economic downturn in 2008 into the
present, when a more realistic rate of unemployment and
underemployment in the U.S. stands at 17.5% (Leonhardt, 2009,
November 6), provide an opening for social change because there is
now a glaring need that impels better and more responsible economic
practices and financial policies. Students’ narration of this
financial social drama and the perspective chosen for that narration
be it from the bankers’ view for deregulation, a policy maker’s view
for regulation, or a home owner’s view for assistance in foreclosure
proceedings, are performed for local and national audiences. If the
audience comes to agree on the impetus and solution, an adequate
redressive action may well become a focus for organizing, e.g.,
economic responsibility becomes reinforced at all levels, from
increased personal savings, to accurately documented loan processes,
to financial institutions’ verifiable information in derivatives to
assist savers’ and investors’ choices.
However, change itself
is not guaranteed. It is highly dependent on the enacted performance
to reconstruct the audience’s memory of local knowledge so that
arguments for the promoted redressive action are deemed plausible
and, ultimately, persuasive. For us to effectively teach students to
envision and enact such change, we must thicken their rhetorical
competence and ethical commitment to help translate their
performance to meet a more holistic definition of peace. We can use
selective case studies of Peace Prize Laureates as a pedagogical
tool to illustrate for our students the narrative choices in the
retelling of a social drama and in redressive alternatives for peace
and activism. To do so, we may further cover Turner’s ideals of
performance ethnography, Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, Boje’s
focus on interpretive ethnographic storytelling, and Conquergood’s
dialogical performance to teach our students. As an example, we note
what Conquergood (2007) offered in the midst of othering and
ideological difference: taking a stance of “both/and” or “yes/but”
instead of “either/or” (p. 66) through a genuine and respectful
conversation. As Conquergood states, “one cannot build a friendship
without beginning a conversation” (p. 67). Through such a process,
two distinct voices interact via different ideas, symbols, and
values. Each voice in the conversation is able to explore and modify
its own locality in reference to the other. In addition, the
reflexivity that emerges from such dialogical performance may
“enable people to take stock of their situation and through this
self-knowledge to cope better (Conquergood, 1988, p. 180).
Thus, through combining
these techniques recommended by Turner and Conquergood we can
utilize a cultural performance as a means of opening conversations
to discuss injustice as well as substantive well-being. Turner’s
change agents, if reframed as Conquergood’s conversational partners
for critical awareness and effective coping, become intelligible
communicators our students may strive to become. They may morph from
erasure and silence into visibility through the performance of
dialogues on perspectival narration of personal/social crisis. As
teachers, we can invite our students into a conversation and they
can invite each other into the process of social change. The
conversation must then itself be framed as a project of locality,
and then these conversations must be expanded to discussions between
localities, and the varying needs and values associated with these
different localities. In this way, we can ask our students to
investigate what conversations about “nourishing peace” are needed
in their neighborhoods and experience to end transgressions and
sustain long term well-being, and how those conversations can be
broadened to a larger, global discussion. For this discussion, we
next turn to the work of Arjun Appadurai.
Arjun Appadurai
conceives of globalization as “disjunctive cultural flows” in a
world the more affluent and learned part of which has been
transformed by what we call “deep mobility”. Let us explain
further. Based on Appadurai’s (1990) classic essay on global
cultural economy, modern technologies of transportation have made it
easier and more affordable to move people en masse between locations
that are worlds apart, a feat impossible to imagine before the 20th
century. Here we mainly talk about transnational bodily
mobility through the invention of bicycles, steamships, trains,
cars, and airplanes. Modern technologies of information have also
made it easier and more affordable to move ideas and propagate
feelings en masse between locations that are worlds apart. Here we
talk about transnational virtual mobility through the
invention of telephone and cell phone, gramophone and stereo,
camera, radio, film, television, video, CD, DVD, and the Internet.
The current trend seems to develop from public, formal, fixed, heavy
and expensive technologies to ones that are versatile in a public,
private/informal and self-selectively anonymous sense, and
increasingly mobile, light, portable, simultaneous, and affordable.
Because of the potential deep mobility through technologies of
transportation and information, an ideal 21st century
human being is a fluid and often self-styled rootless individual,
one who can control one’s own physical movement and information
movement, with ever increasing amount of freedom, speed, ease,
convenience, and the choice to break free from time, place,
convention and decorum. Yet ironically there exists a cosmic paradox
associated with the deep mobility’s monumental mooring and
unmooring. Namely, our ideal human being’s desire to see, to
understand, to connect, and to chat with others, is transformed into
a craving for a ravenous belonging in autonomy and unrootedness.
Paradox aside, the
coupling of the transnational bodily and virtual mobility, thus,
creates what we mean by deep mobility. But human beings have
different capacities to access this deep mobility. American college
students possess deeper mobility than those who are poverty stricken
and variously labeled as slum dwellers, camp refugees, and
trafficked victims, many of whom, the often called transnational
entrapped and immobile, were empowered and transformed by and/or
with some of the Peace Laureates we shall teach.
Conceptually to grasp
the complexity of globalization and the global cultural economy,
Appadurai (1990) suggests a framework that is not based on “existing
center-periphery models” but on “certain fundamental disjunctures
between economy, culture and politics which we have only begun to
theorize” (p. 6). Specifically he proposed the following “five
dimensions of global cultural flow”, including ethnoscapes,
mediascapes, finanscapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes. These five
dimensions, like Legos, are the building blocks of heavily imagined
worlds. They are also “deeply perspectival constructs” affected by
“the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different
sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic
communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements
(whether religious, political or economic), and even intimate
face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods and families”
(p. 7). Their common suffix, scape, also points to “the fluid,
irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes which characterize
international capital as deeply as they do international clothing
styles” (p. 7).
The level of
communication technology in contemporary cultures and the borders of
the local are simultaneously shifting and expanding. The definitions
of positive and negative peace are moving with the ever changing
cultural context, as ideals of peace that were discouraged by recent
political rhetorics, such as disarmament, once again become a
priority in post-Bush society. Our students, who with their digital
awareness often address these scapes, albeit sometimes unknowingly,
hold the skill set needed to reshape current conditions through
reshaping these communicative constructs. As teachers of peace our
job is to encourage peace activism through whatever means or scopes
are available for our students. What Appadurai (1990) offers our
students is a basic theory of global cultural flows that sensitizes
their analytic reach into five fractal and overlapping dimensions on
people (ethoscape), machinery (techoscape), money (finascape),
images (mediascape) and ideas (ideoscape). Using it to approach the
Nobel Peace prizes as case studies, our students are then given a
tool to competently offer “a decent global analysis” (p. 21) of
nourishing peace and peace building.
Nobel and the global
performance of peace
How can we translate the
global performance of peace through the Nobel Peace Prize into a
meaningful embodiment relevant to the lived experiences of our
students in Los Angeles? We propose to begin by understanding how
the Prize itself is constructed and enacted to global audiences.
While the more recent Nobel Peace Laureates perform various types of
nourishing peace discussed earlier in this essay, the century
long history of the prize reflects a more traditional performance of
peace through the use of anti-tropes, e.g., anti-war peace.
The Nobel Peace Prize as
a global spectacle centered in Northern Europe is not without
controversy. Each year bestowed in the presence of the King of
Sweden in Oslo at the City Hall, the Prize itself consists of a
diploma, a medal, and a monetary award. The award ceremony is
followed by a concert, the next day, broadcast to more than 150
countries, and often includes celebrity participation. The
ritualized nature of the event reinforces the Western and
Eurocentric values held by Alfred Nobel himself. These performative
elements, embodied in the ritual process, serve to create and
maintain the global reputation of Laureates and to reinforce the
value of the prize as a global symbol, a trademark for peace. Though
we endorse the aims of peace as embodied by these Laureates, we
think it is critical for our students to understand that the Nobel
rituals are heavily hegemonic, exercising its power of bestowal in
the global disjunctive flows of people, machinery, money, media and
ideas. In helping students to map their lives onto various elements
of the Prize, which are often deterritorialized, we hope to
encourage them to create ultimately their own performative tools for
nourishing peace. In other words, while students will understand the
significance of the prize intellectually, the connection for them to
act on this level in their daily lives involves critical unpacking
and deep learning. What we hope to accomplish is to use the basic
framework woven from the ideas offered by Turner, Conquergood and
Appadurai to engage the students so that each “aha moment” becomes
students’ pedagogical turning point for “continued, sustained
learning opportunities resulting in the acquisition of critical
consciousness” (Landreman et al., 2007, p. 293).
The Prize was first
developed in an era of increased armament and sudden rise of
military regimes in Europe. Not surprisingly, it was created to
encourage peace activism through anti-war efforts. Framed in this
politicized context, it is not difficult to understand why debates
over whether Human Rights activism qualifies for the Prize or
deviates too much from anti-war peace are among the earliest and
longest-lasting discussions attributed to the ritual itself.
The Eurocentric
tendencies of the Prize are, at least in part, a result of the
composition of the selection committee members by the Parliament of
Norway, as mandated by Alfred Nobel’s will (Abrams, 2001). Nobel
himself intended the Prize to be for Swedish activists, among
others, though this has actually happened only twice. Nobel’s
(1895/2009) description of the ideal recipient in his will outlines
a specific type or standard for peace. The ideal recipient, he
states, is
the person who shall
have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations,
for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the
holding and promotion of peace congresses.
This description of
peace represents what peace scholars refer to as negative peace
or peacekeeping wherein peace is achieved through the removal
of the state of war or unrest (Galtung, 1967, 1985; King, 1964).
This is the type of peace effort Nobel himself recognized and wanted
to honor, and is generally performed by the statesmen and political
leaders whom Nobel expected the Prize to engage. This anti-war style
of negative peace or peacekeeping is contrasted to a positive peace
or peace-building/peace-making approach where programs,
institutions, and other efforts are made by individuals and
political entities to create a condition or infrastructure which
encourages peace, rather than attempt to remove a condition that
makes peace a challenge (Galtung, 1967, 1985; Hulme & Goodhand,
1999; Harris, 2004; King, 1964). Nobel’s intended focus for the
peace prize was on grand achievements in disarmament, however
Nobel’s statement that the prize should go to “the best work for
fraternity between nations” is used to justify the award given for
positive peace and Human Rights efforts in the later years (Abrams,
2001).
Negative peace or
peacekeeping, and the performance associated with this process as
specifically outlined by Nobel in his will, requires that the
performers have access to a global stage, who are usually, though
not restricted to, the leaders of warring factions or the governing
bodies of those nations involved in violent conflict. Men, primarily
Western European or American Statesmen with recognized political
status are the people most likely to play such a grand role in a
celebrated master narrative of peace-keeping. It is no surprise then
that, more often than not, women and men of color were left out as
the recipients of the Prize throughout the majority of its
existence. In other words, they were “unfit” for the auditioning,
and henceforth, the granting of a role in such a drama.
As the paradigm shifted
to include positive peace, the Prize more readily recognized relief
organizations rather than individual Laureates, especially in its
early history. Further, positive peace efforts often take a lifetime
of work or an extended series of efforts before they begin to be
recognized. Positive efforts are often focused on issues of health
and wellbeing, and the holistic status of people’s lived
experiences. Neither quick nor easily recognized, such efforts are
often incremental and collective. These efforts also most often
build from local efforts up to a global scale. Therefore, these
efforts are rarely sensational enough to bring to the awareness of a
global audience, particularly before the digital communications
revolution, as opposed to negative peace efforts which can occur
during a spectacular singular event or highly recognized series of
events. Historically speaking, therefore, and in accordance with the
official definition, positive peace efforts, especially by
individuals rather than organizations, did not fit squarely within
the historical framework of the Prize. Among the most obvious
examples was the “Missing Laureate”, Mahatma Gandhi (Tønnesson,
1999, December 1).
His life-long commitment
to the non-violent end of British colonization was performed more in
accordance with those tropes associated with positive than negative
peace. Gandhi was nominated five times for the award in 1937, 1938,
1939, 1947, and 1948. Regrettably, Gandhi never won, though in 1948,
the year he passed away, no award was made. Women leaders in the
peace movement also have a distinct history of being overlooked for
the Prize—a trend developed in the earliest years of the award. This
tendency is rooted in both the patriarchal norms of the era in which
the award began, and the nature of peace efforts typically
championed by women, e.g., the non-spectacular grassroots and local
peace-building work. To note, among the 120 peace prize laureates
(97 times to individuals and 23 times to organizations) only 12 were
women (see Appendix A).
The first woman
presented with the award did not recognize positive peace-building
efforts as an acceptable form of peace activism. An intimate friend
of the Nobel family, Bertha Von Suttner was a negative-peace
activist working to eliminate violence and asking people to “lay
down [their] arms”. Nobel himself wanted Von Suttner to receive the
award, but it took five years of the award being presented before
she was honored with the Prize in 1905.
This is not to say that
efforts toward positive peace uniformly went unrecognized by the
Prize selection committee. The very first Peace Prize in 1901 was
split between negative peace activist Frederic Passy of the Peace
Movement and positive peace activist and the International Red Cross
Founder Henri Dumont (Abrams, 1994). Von Suttner, among others,
protested Dumont’s award, claiming Nobel himself intended the award
for disarmament efforts (Abrams, 2001). Organizations working to aid
refugees were awarded the Prize in 1938, 1954, and 1981 (Abrams,
1994). In 1947 a religious order in the US and the UK, the Quakers,
won the Prize for their humanitarian relief efforts (Nobel
Foundation, 1947/2009). Another organization, United Nations
Children’s Fund [UNICEF], won in 1965 aiding children suffering from
hunger and disease (Nobel Foundation,1965/2009), and Amnesty
International won in 1977 (Odelberg, 1978). Individuals who won the
Prize for their humanitarian efforts in the first half of the
twentieth century were far fewer. One notable humanitarian Laureate
was Albert Schweitzer who won in 1952 for his work with lepers in
West Africa (Lewer, 1992).
The distinction between
these positive and negative performances of peace, and which styles
of peace were honored, reflects the ideological understanding of
peace as well as the political motivations of world leaders at the
time during which these performances were recognized. By the 1960s
these values were shifting, and positive peace performances became
more prominently recognized, in part because of the increasing
number of civil rights and student movements around the globe, and
in part because of the lack of large scale and sensational violence
associated with the Cold War. In 1970 the Prize was given to the
first and only person to receive the award for food production and
preventing hunger during the Twentieth Century, Norman Borlaug
(Hesser, 2006). Having passed away in September 2009, Borlaug’s work
is a significant example of positive peace-building not only because
it created new solutions for one of the conditions leading to a lack
of peace but also because Borlaug focused on changing agricultural
production methods for individual farmers and local farming
communities. Through these examples, we begin to see that the
performance of peace, as recognized by the Nobel selection
committee, slowly takes on the characteristics of local activisms
and long-term social change in capacity and infrastructure building,
rendering people or peoples less vulnerable to war, violence,
displacement, degradation, hunger and illness.
Women, too, become more
recognized as this process continues. Most of the earliest women
Laureates were recognized for negative peace performances,
particularly their disarmament work. Then, in 1979, Mother Teresa
was recognized for her lifetime of work in Calcutta. A political
leader in her own country, Aung San Suu Kyi, the next woman Laureate
to perform positive peace, was recognized in 1991 for her
“non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights” in Burma or
the Union of Myanmar. She continues to be the exiled elected
president living under house arrest for 14 of the past 19 years
(Fuller, 2009, October 9). In the official descriptions of her Nobel
speech, her performative struggle is compared to that of Gandhi.
Again, this focus of positive peace performances revolves around the
ideal of non-violent action and thereby simultaneously reflects
negative peace ideals. The merging of these, in the case of Aung San
Suu Kyi, as well as in the case of Dr. King, Jr., illustrates the
goal of positive maintenance of peace and non-violence. These
examples in particular illustrate that both positive and negative
peace are necessary to encourage the budding of, what we argue here
as a more lasting and, therefore, desirable form of peace,
nourishing peace.
In more recent years the
distinctions between negative and positive peace performances have
become less viable, as wars have become more recognizably local and
transnational, and as efforts toward positive peace have become
dependent on the success of negative peace and vice versa. It is
here that we begin to recognize the emerging pattern of
nourishing peace, which requires both a removal of violence and
an increase in institutions and resources in order to generate a
more lasting state of substantive well-being. Positive peace itself
is a type of nourishing peace when combined with the anti-tropes of
negative peace, and with the anti-tropes associated with Human
Rights efforts such as anti-violence, anti-child-and-sex
trafficking, and anti-slavery. Significantly, Human Rights efforts
as peace efforts are directly linked, in Prize rhetoric, to
non-violent action, therefore echoing negative-peace idealism while
recognizing positive-peace performances, and thereby illustrating
what we call nourishing peace.
Like that of positive
peace, the goal of nourishing peace is to create long-term and
lasting peace. Human rights efforts also exemplify this goal. In
particular, the Nobel committee’s official recognition of Human
Rights activism as an effort toward peace, beginning in 1960,
provided a greater viability for individuals to win the prize
through what we view as nourishing peace efforts. The first to win
for Human Rights work was Albert Lutuli (1961/2009) in 1960 for his
non-violent anti-apartheid work in South Africa. He would be the
first of several Laureates recognized for this goal, including
Desmond Tutu in 1984 and Nelson Mandela in 1993. Soon after Lutuli,
the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was recognized in 1964 for
his non-violent efforts to challenge and change the lived inequality
of African Americans. On the official Nobel Prize website, King’s
win is discussed, not in terms of a particular action to bring peace
to a situation but in terms of a series of efforts that avoided
violence and seeded nonviolent change.3 King’s own
acceptance speech (1964/2009) highlights how his efforts focus on
positive peace-building:
We must concentrate not
merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive
affirmation of peace…. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the
world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no
one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius
for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of
the nations of the world. (para. 33)
The focus on
non-violence would not be the only positive peace efforts awarded to
individuals, but it remains one of the Prize’s most visible and
recognized signifiers.
From the 60’s through
today, the ideal for peace as disarmament promoted most aggressively
by Nobel himself became less of a focus of the award. There are a
number of factors that contribute to this welcomed shift, including
the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, fears of the Domino
Effect, the growth of the weapons and defense industries which is
often termed as the military-industrial complex, and the increased
naturalization in the rhetorics of defense. This pattern continues
after the Cold War and morphs into the rhetoric of the new War on
Terror. As global authorities were firmly vested in the arms race,
and the global economy became focused on the defense industries,
performances of positive peace became more urgent and fortunately
encouraged into greater acceptance by the Prize. Ironically, with
the War on Terror and the new focus on economic globalization,
particular global concerns have started to become more recognized
and discussed in the media that highlight the need for disarmament
and the end of violence in war-torn areas of the world. In
particular, as international terrorism has become associated with
genocides, weapons and human trafficking, work in the arena of Human
Rights has returned, in part, to an anti-war focus.
These new performances
of nourishing peace are often rooted in the positive peace
associated with local needs while simultaneously reflecting more
widespread anti-war and anti-violence goals. This is reflected, for
example, in how Guatemalan activist and the 1992 Laureate, Rigoberta
Menchú Tum, performs peace on the global stage. Tum is recognized as
an activist for Human Rights for Mayan Indians and other indigenous
peoples, particularly those civilians who are victims of the
violence and trafficking associated with guerrilla tactics utilized
in many recent civil wars. During one of the military coups in
Guatemala, it is estimated that at least 70,000 civilians
“disappeared,” most likely either killed or sold into slavery. Tum’s
work, and more importantly, her powerful testimonial (Beverley,
2008) to bring events like this to the attention of the world
highlighting, in her own words from her Nobel lecture (1992/2009),
“the struggle for peace, for Human Rights and for the rights of the
indigenous people, who, for 500 years, have been split, fragmented,
as well as the victims of genocides, repression and discrimination”
(para. 2). The shift in understanding peace as both welfare and
disarmament is further illustrated by a particularly poignant
episode in Tum’s career. As discussed during Tum’s Nobel ceremony,
after her nomination, the very man who killed her mother during one
of the violent episodes in her country’s long revolution
congratulated Tum on being a Nobel nominee.
More recent performances
of nourishing peace by women Laureates include women and children’s
rights activist Shirin Ebadi (2003) of Iran and Wangari Muta Maathai
(2004) of Kenya for her visionary work on tree planting with women
groups, the Green Belt Movement and a Pan African Green Belt
Network, and other ecologically sustainable development. These
recent performances of nourishing peace are significant not only
because these women perform their work in both peace-building and
peace-making, but also because they perform these as women of color
not located in the hegemonic West This shift in recognition for how
women perform peace is significant when we note that, with the
exception of Mother Teresa, all of the White American and European
women Laureates seemingly received the award for performing
negative-peace. However, a more longitudinal review of their
respective accomplishment leads to the observation that, at one
point or another, they were involved with substantive positive peace
building efforts. For, example, Jane Addams’s prominent work in
civic responsibility, women’s suffrage and social justice in the
greater Chicago area, and Alva Myrdal’s work on social welfare and
housing and school problems. This pattern is also evident when
observing the performances of recent male Laureates, who with a few
notable exceptions such as Jimmy Carter and Al Gore who were
recognized for their performances of positive peace, are
increasingly men of color and non-Western architects of nourishing
peace. Because these Laureates are focused on the well-being of
people in an era of global disease, a recognized resurgence of
global slavery, and in an era where the “War on Terror” has created,
for many, a new level of paranoia and destitude, these are also the
performers most able to resonate with our students in their daily
lives.
The pedagogy of
nourishing peace as performative activism
This past summer
protesters in Iran made their voices heard around the world using
the same communication technologies, particularly via social
networking Internet sites that our students regularly use in their
daily lives. By posting YouTube and Facebook videos, by reporting
the conditions of Iranian election protesters via Twitter and blogs,
the young people and activists in Iran gained support and media
attention that the Iranian government itself worked diligently to
shut down. Support for Iranian protestors continued to grow online,
as these social networking sites and other websites became spaces
for the exchange of information and the organization of protests.
The major news media, further, used the digital communication that
was provided by protestors as their own primary sources for
understanding the conflict in Iran, as they were prohibited from
using more traditional media means after the elections. This type of
communication is activism that illustrates the need for human rights
in a local space—activism that speaks of the abuses of
government-sponsored violence.
This is activism that
echoes the way that our students, a majority of whom grew up as part
of the millennial generation, communicate on a daily basis. The fact
that these local communications were performed on a global stage to
global audiences, an embodiment of their deep mobility, emphasizes
how individuals can function in what has been associated with
powerful statesmen and leaders: negative peace. Further, this
communication moment, enabled by the relatively privileged access to
deep mobility, illustrates that individuals need to reconcile their
tools as opportunities to also create nourishing peace of the sort
that can be shared and spread to other localities. This form of
activism suits our students in their abilities and capacities for
peace, among other social change goals. Because of its familiarity,
ease of use, and accessibility, the visibility of this form of
activism in Iran may play a significant role in educating our
students on performances of nourishing peace in the Nobel process of
recognition. This, in turn, reflects the breach and crisis in our
student’s own understanding of peace activism that can resonate with
a broader audience’s understanding of peace.
Here we return to the
performative pedagogies built on the work of Turner, Conquergood,
and Appuradai. Appuradai’s tropes are clearly represented by the
situation in Iran. In particular, the case of Neda Agha-Soltan, the
26-year-old woman shot to death in the protests erupted into the
social conscience of the global stage as a human story that
illustrated the need for peace at it was used to contest the
corrupted presidential election in June 2009. Her blue jeans and
black top which the global youth could identify with effortlessly
were tragically contrasted with her beautiful yet blood drenched
face and the frenzy a few male protestors went through to try to
save her. The death of a young innocent non-violent woman provides a
breach that demands a drama for redressive action. Coverage of the
global recognition of Neda’s death in The New York Times
(2009, June 22) provides a good starting point for the use of
Appadurai’s five scapes to craft a nuanced global analysis. The
narrative of how the video made its way into YouTube and CNN was
fascinating:
Shortly after Ms. Agha-Soltan died, the man whose 40-second video of
her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation
in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran's censors.
He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube
and Facebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him
and his family.
Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who
quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper
The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe,
with a message that read, "Please let the world know." It was one of
those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted
it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.
Copies of the video, as
well as a shorter one shot by another witness, spread almost
instantly to YouTube and were televised within hours by CNN. Despite
a prolonged effort by Iran's government to keep a media lid on the
violent events unfolding on the streets, Ms. Agha-Soltan was
transformed on the Web from a nameless victim into an icon of the
Iranian protest movement. (para. 5-8)
The complex technoscape
(e.g., cellphones, computers, television sets) and mediascape
(through the disjunctive flows from emails to print and electronic
media outlets and social networking sites, carrying the video onto
safer global shores) featured a complex ethnoscape (including an
unsung hero, the nameless Iranian man who shot and emailed the
40-second video, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, and many
media workers in England and elsewhere who were involved in the
circulation of Neda). Combined together, these scapes also made the
ideoscape, the ideas for freedom, democracy, fair election,
martyrdom, state censorship, the Iranian protest movement, and a
desire for basic human rights legible for the global youth.
Students are likely to
relate to the performance of peace illustrated by the protesters
such as Neda because the conversational moment between these
protesters and our students is both recent and direct. However,
students are less likely to associate themselves with Nobel
Laureates. The performance of peace that students associate with
Nobel Laureates, and therefore the Prize itself, can be an important
starting point to engendering student peace activism. Then we can
look to other moments, such as the case of Neda, through which to
build the connections between Nobel and our student’s lives and
actions.
Another propitious “aha
moment” in peace is the recent award of the prize to American
President Obama. Obama’s performance of peace is particularly useful
as a case study for students because of its framing, by the White
House and global media, as a “call to action” (NBC News, 2009, May
9; CBS/AP, 2009, May 9). Obama’s win is not for a completed action,
but rather for the publicly stated goal of nuclear disarmament and
bringing about a potentially peaceful future. Significantly, the
Nobel committee is cited as choosing Obama in order to help promote
his goals: “to build momentum behind Obama's initiatives to reduce
nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress
diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism” (NBC News,
2009, May 9, para. 2). Obama’s win, therefore, indicates a peace
process that is only beginning, yet one which will encourage
disarmament in congruence with health, social welfare, and other
necessary implementations. It is significant that this futuristic
goal reflects both the anti-tropes of negative peace and, because of
the long-term goal elements implied, the lasting tropes of positive
peace. Thus, Obama’s Nobel performance is that of nourishing
peace.
Just days after Obama’s
win, the media reports debate over why Obama won the Prize, the
first sitting United States President to do so since Woodrow
Wilson’s win for promoting the forerunner to the United Nations.
Conservative Fox News and other similar voices suggest strong
challenges to the win, citing that Obama has not accomplished a
single act deserving the Prize. However, Nobel Prize committee
members stress that they sought to recognize Obama’s push for change
in the overall focus of global power, echoing the awarding of the
prize to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The performance here, unlike in
the case of Neda Agha-Soltan, derives in part from the hegemonic
traditions of media and power. Nobel and the Nobel performance in
the case of Obama provides the moment of crisis required of Social
Drama, as it illustrates the abrupt change from Bush-era policy and
values and the worldviews of other nations toward the U.S.
Ironically, conservative and liberal media voices both suggest that
it is Obama’s post-Bush approach, rejecting the outright war and
military build-up of the former President, that is really being
honored. CNN’s Steve Clemmons (2009) explains, “They want a world
where America is benign and positive, and where other leaders help
in supporting the struggles of their people for better lives rather
than securing themselves through crude power” (para. 3). The
resulting ideoscape makes legible for global youth similar values to
those illustrated in the Iranian protest movement: freedom,
democracy, fairly elected officials, media censorship (though this
time represented by Fox News and other conservative media in
conflict with the state and the Nobel committee), and the desire for
basic human rights.
Obama’s own discussion
of his win can be used as a tool for teaching students peace
activism. At a news conference, Obama stated, “Let me be clear, I do
not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather
as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations
held by people in all nations” (CBS/AP, 2009, May 9, para. 6).
Obama’s claim that the award is a “call to action” for others
inspires peace activisms and reinforces that such goals reflect the
ends desired by many peoples in many localities. He promotes
performative activism that inspires our students, and is made
meaningful and viable for multiple peoples’ intrinsic needs.
In teaching our students
nourishing peace, the parallels between the ideal explained
by CNN’s Clemmons and the necessities of human rights that touch
their own lives need to be illustrated. The performance here is
nourishing peace: to negate forces of violent oppression and the
immediate elimination of unbearable violations and to simultaneously
create forces and infrastructures which can ensure the presence of
basic human entitlements such as health, safety, education, food,
water, and dignity. These are the very needs that are echoed in our
students’ local communities, as well as in local cultures across the
globe. With our guidance, and examples like Obama’s Nobel and Neda
Agha-Soltan’s death, our students will be more likely to draw
critical though often unnoticeable connections between nuclear
disarmament and health care plans, civil action and equitable access
to clean and drinkable water as types of peace and human rights
efforts, and then to connect those efforts to local peace and human
rights work here in Los Angeles, and in students’ other
localities.
The end goal:
Engaging students in Nobel
The Nobel Peace Prize
is situated as a lofty goal, something out of the reach of most
people, including our students. The road to the Prize, though many
of us will be persuaded to walk, can be materialized only by the
few. To focus on the winning of the Prize as a personal goal seems
to devalue the award itself. Yet the importance of the award
resonates, and while students can only name a few Laureates, in
class discussion and surveys they generally respond favorably to the
ideal of the Prize.
Partly, this preference
exists because of the few Laureates cited most often by students
themselves: The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother
Theresa, the Dalai Lama, Al Gore, and, in recent conversations,
Barack Obama. These Laureates are people for whom students express
respect, particularly in relation to why they were awarded the
prize. Significantly, Mahatma Gandhi is also listed by a large
number of students as a Prize Laureate, though he never actually
won. The examples of these relatively recent Laureates (and Gandhi)
are not limited to the White, Western men in seats of political
power traditionally recognized with the Prize, and Gore himself won
after tenure in his public office ended. Instead these examples
represent primarily persons who reflect many of the ideals we
associate with a performance of nourishing peace. These are
narratives that represent the storytelling moments promoted by
Turner to which students can relate. These are also narratives that,
once told critically, through the lens of global disjunctive flows
and deep mobility, can become “aha moments” in our pedagogies for
student peace activism.
Nourishing peace is
further reflected in human rights narratives that our students also
recognize, in news media discussions and from popular culture
interpretations. Blood diamonds, Invisible Children, and Human Sex
Trafficking are all issues students bring up in class discussion and
public speaking exercises, and connections between the Nobel Peace
Prize and these human rights issues encourage more of the necessary
“aha moments” in our pedagogies. Students’ awareness of Laureates
and their work is evidence of this “aha” potential. Along with the
Nobel Laureates listed above, our students also commonly cite Nelson
Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Aung San Suu Kyi as Laureates, though at
a lower frequency. These examples distinctly represent performative
human rights activism as nourishing peace; as these Laureates seek
both the end of warfare and political aggression, and an increase in
resources and safety for oppressed peoples. To further investigate
how students frame the Prize, we can ask our students to “nominate”
people to the Nobel Committee, and “nominate” people for the award.
We may also ask them to suggest projects that will, in their view,
be Nobel worthy.
Deepening the
discussion, we can ask students to compare public actions as acts of
peace. For example, Clinton’s act of saving two Asian-American women
journalists in North Korea can be contrasted with Neda’s death in
Iran. The controversy over Obama’s win is another example for debate
in our classes. For our students, who is the more worthy of the
Nobel Peace Prize? What forms of peace did each embody? This
assignment may enhance the pedagogical power of the Prize for our
students. Then, we can ask them what local activities can be done
that would reflect similar forms of peace, or similar action. We can
also suggest that they look for other forms of peace action in local
projects, including their own.
Ultimately, and in
conjunction with the goals of performative pedagogy as we claim it,
we should be teaching through examples and encouraging projects that
utilize the technologies that students use. We should draw on
Obama’s “call to action” and use Nobel Prize as a means of inspiring
obtainable local action, even if the Prize is less often awarded to
those who do not eventually claim the global stage. We should be
mindful in not simply using paper and analyses of peace and peace
activism as they exist elsewhere, but encouraging that students
start doing things that will generate nourishing peace exemplars.
Notes
This
article was begun months before reports of President Obama’s 2009
Nobel Peace Prize. Obama’s performance of peace, however, reflects,
for us, the type of peace to which our students respond in classroom
discussion, and represents the types of peace-building and
peace-keeping efforts in which our students choose to participate.
[2]
Trostle’s definition of
peace is cited in
“The
Nature of Peace and its Implications for Peace Education” by Leo R.
Sandy and Ray Perkins, Jr.
(2002, p. 5).
In
this study, Sandy, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and an active member
of Veterans for Peace, engaged in dialogue with “fellow veterans to
explore the nature of peace and, based on their own experiences of
war, to provide a satisfactory account that could serve as a guide
for all peace-makers who seek a world without war” (p. 1). The study
draws on that dialogue with fellow veterans (such as Trostle) who
served in the military between World War II and the Vietnam War and
who are members of
Veterans for Peace (2009), a nongovernmental organization of
“veterans working together for peace and justice through
nonviolence” (p. 1).
[3]
Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize is described in a similar fashion: less
about a single event he accomplished than about the efforts
undertaken to ensure a wide-ranging peace.
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Appendix A:
The 12 Women Nobel
Peace Laureates
1905 - Bertha von
Suttner
1931 - Jane Addams
1946 - Emily Greene
Balch
1976 - Betty Williams
1976 - Mairead Corrigan
1979 - Mother Teresa
1982 - Alva Myrdal
1991 - Aung San Suu Kyi
1992 -
Rigoberta
Menchú Tum
1997 - Jody Williams
2003 -
Shirin Ebadi
2004 -
Wangari
Maathai
About the authors
Dr. Victoria Newsom’s
research centers on the negotiation of power, gender, and identity
in performative and communication contexts. Her current projects
include work in media activism, peace studies, postcolonial
feminism(s), and performative pedagogies. Victoria is an active
researcher with book chapters and articles in Communication
Yearbook, Femspec, and Feminist Media Studies. Victoria's
current research and activist interests lay in the preservation of
human rights and human dignity. Dr. Newsom is an instructor in the
Department of Communication Studies and
Department of Liberal Studies at
California State University, Los Angeles. She serves as
faculty advisor to two student Human Rights organizations Los
Angeles, and is developing a nonprofit foundation for Human Rights
and Media Activism. She can be reached at
Victoria@victorianewsom.net
Dr. Wenshu Lee
(Ph.D., the University of Southern California) is Professor in the
Department of Communication Studies at
Loyola Marymount University. She teaches qualitative research
methods, critical intercultural communication, and critical
organizational communication. Her current research focuses on
transnational womanism and feminism in theorizing social justice,
deep codes in intercultural interactions, transformative pedagogy,
and the trope of “health” for human rights and global equity. Her
work appears in the journals of communication studies (e.g.,
Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Applied Communication
Research, Howard Journal of Communications), interdisciplinary
journals (e.g., Journal of Homosexuality, Industrial Marketing
Management), and various scholarly anthologies on rhetoric,
social justice, and the human condition.
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