The Purposes of History Education in the Context of “Flourishing Life”, “Powerful Knowledge” and Political Reconciliation

Stretching beyond its theoretical field, the debates about the purposes of history education are of great importance to curriculum writers and classroom practitioners. The content selection from a broad field of history is connected to what educators deem an overarching purpose of education. With this in mind, this paper aims to examine the purposes of teaching history against the background of the two general theories of education, namely – the theories of a flourishing life and powerful knowledge. While the theory of a flourishing life encourages the development of personal autonomy, allowing individuals to make successful choices, the theory of powerful knowledge examines the importance of traditional academic knowledge for individual success. The paper will also use the context of post-conflict societies, to reflect on the question of possible purposes of history education.

Inquiring the Political Strategy of Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) in Post-2018 Ethiopia

The upsurge of TPLF led regime to power installed ethnic politics and deconstruction of Ethiopian history with corporate corruption, ultra-vires and pseudo-federalism. The misappropriations of national assets added with autocratic nature of the regime procreated erratic political oppositions and protests since the party set on to power. The political marginalization at intra-party level also created split, which brought state elites in Amhara and Oromia regions to support the acute popular protest. These political scenarios have compelled TPLF to abscond into Mekelle and the coming of reformist leaders to power in 2018. This paper thus aimed to uncover TPLF’s political strategy in post 2018 Ethiopia by employing a qualitative case study with a secondary data obtained from Mass Media, commentaries and digitized outlets. The loss of key political positions and attachment of the regime’s wrong deeds to TPLF has bugging its elites after the coming of the new premiership. As counter to the reformist leaders, TPLF undertook huge militarization, destabilization and proxies, inducing popular fear, supporting like-minded regional oppositions to propagandize sensitive political issues to regain its lost prestige. This power rivalry created political absurdism, where political decisions and policies of the reformists had continued to be officially banned by TPLF in a way that disastrously impacted the survival of the state. Thus, it is important to undertake political reconciliation to freeze the prevailing political deadlocks for the continuation of the polity.

Between the ethics of forgiveness and the unforgivable: Reflections on Arendt’s idea of reconciliation in politics

The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation.

A Christian Response to Global Conflict: Realism and Reconciliation

This article considers avenues for fruitful engagement between international relations and public theology in order to ask what an ethical Christian response to global conflict should entail. The process of mediating principles of biblical justice into a contemporary international context requires interpretation in a reality of territorial bounded states, with rules and norms governing international interactions that are unique to the present day. This article draws on two theologically oriented contributions to international relations, Christian realism and political reconciliation to probe the question as to how we conceptualise justice as a pursuit in international relations from a Christian worldview. It reflects on the contingencies of the present-day context of global conflict, and the implications for praxis from a public theology standpoint.

Development Programs with a Territorial-based Approach in Colombia: An Agonistic multi-level Political Reconciliation Analysis

This article analyses the Development Programs with a Territorial-based Approach in Colombia, established in Item One of the 2016 Final Agreement to End Conflict and Build Peace, from the notion of political reconciliation. It argues that, in the current complex post-agreement setting, the program can be positioned as a space for political reconciliation as long as an agonistic multi-level approach is adopted. Only through the simultaneous and comprehensive implementation of institutional, constitutional, and relational peacebuilding efforts, the recognition of both the conflictual relations among all actors and the relevance of public contestation would be possible, so as to advance in the participatory territorial planning for peace and its successful completion. The dynamics in the Catatumbo region, one of the focalized zones for the program, demonstrate the need for applying an alternative and critical perspective of political reconciliation in order to move towards a sustainable and long-lasting peace in Colombia based on the interconnection between peace, reconciliation, and development.