Hope amid violence: youths’ agency and learning experiences to transform social conflicts in non-democratic settings

Participating youths’ selected conflicts

The social conflicts about which the participating youths expressed concern varied in type and degree across gender and socio-economic status. The higher SES boys selected brain drain as their group conflict. In discussing their topic, they focused on domestic and transnational political-economic inequities. They identified the country’s unjust and non-democratic economic and political structures as the main factors blocking their academic and professional aspirations. They planned or dreamed of migration to a Global North country. For instance, Figure 2 shows a drawing that one of the participants in the privileged boys’ school drew and brought to the group. The drawing shows a young man who has many degrees and certificates from the best universities in the world, yet he can only find unskilled labour work vacancies. The caption reads ‘no matter how hard we try to get the best education and skills in Iran, the opportunities, resources, and positions will go to the incompetent children of authorities’.

Figure 2

An image drawn by one of the participants from the privileged boys’ school for the Photovoice activity

The lower SES boys’ priority concern was also a resource conflict. These boys focused on their lived experiences of poverty and their possible future economic opportunities to escape it. Figure 3 shows an image that one of the boys in the disadvantaged school drew for the photovoice activity. The caption reads, on the top, ‘poverty means begging for money, grieving for not affording to go even to a hairdresser’, and on the bottom, ‘Poverty means that a child cannot visit a doctor when he has stomach ache’. These boys gave numerous vivid examples of the experiences of children living in poverty in connection with drug addiction, access to quality health care and education, unemployment, underemployment and child labour.

Figure 3

An image drawn by one of the participants from the disadvantaged boys’ school for the Photovoice activity

The higher SES girls selected freedom of expression as their group conflict. They expressed concern, questioning and frustration about ongoing gender discrimination in their experiences. They pointed at patriarchy as the main cultural factor restricting their freedom (to clothe themselves and to act in a way they desired) within family, school and Iranian society. Figure 4 depicts one of the photovoice images that one of the participants in the privileged girls’ school drew. The caption reads, ‘We cannot be and act as we want. We must wear different masks, one at home, one at school, one in streets … and still we are always judged and restricted.’

Figure 4

An image drawn by one of the participants from the privileged girls’ school for the Photovoice activity

The lower SES girls’ major concern was also a gender conflict, rooted in cultural stereotypes. They selected pervasive sexual assault and threats targeting young women and limiting their mobility and safety within their homes and society. Figure 5 is an example of a photovoice image demonstrating sexual harassment of young women in public. The caption reads, ‘It is unsafe for us to go outside alone. We can protect ourselves by wearing modest clothes, but even with that, we get harassed daily.’ These girls’ anonymous individual writings also reflected their deep concerns about ongoing domestic violence and their parents (mainly fathers) preventing them from continuing their education.

Figure 5

Photovoice image sent by a lower SES girl

School-based learning opportunities: moving towards violence or peace

The four schools shared many similarities and had some considerable differences regarding available mechanisms for students to practise collective participation to discuss and address the root causes of social conflicts affecting their lives. Lack of representation and participation systems at schools, through which students could practise dialogue, negotiation, sharing and hearing multiple (contrasting) perspectives, challenge students’ understandings of the structural and cultural roots of social conflicts, their hope and motivation for change, and their agency to transform conflicts into peace.

The participating students unanimously, and most of the interviewed educators in all four schools, acknowledged the absence of processes and spaces to encourage dialogue and sharing concerns about the social conflicts that mattered to students. Students said the focus group sessions we had together were their first experience reflecting on and collectively responding to social conflicts. For example, one lower SES boy said: ‘I have never been asked about my opinion about anything … during these sessions, I could freely share my ideas, and everyone was listening; it felt so good to be part of the decision-making process about a real problem.’ One lower SES girl also stated: ‘These sessions made me conscious of the fact that none of our classes requires us thinking … we just memorise useless stuff … in these sessions, we learned how to think and solve complex issues together.’

Regardless of their different lived curriculum in the contrasting schools, the participating youths expressed disappointment and disaffection about student–teacher/staff relationship dynamics in almost every focus group discussion in all four schools, including belittling, humiliation, ignorance, corporal punishment (only lower SES boys and girls) and restrictions on physical mobility and clothing (only girls, particularly those in the lower SES location). They perceived authoritarian school environments as ineffective educational approaches. In interviews, one teacher and the superintendent at the disadvantaged boys’ school supported corporal punishment and viewed students’ submission to coercion as necessary to run the school and classrooms.

The lower SES students unanimously agreed that there was no system supporting them in the face of direct violence from authorities in their schools. In the absence of a support system to protect them from verbal and physical violence and in the normalised presence of direct violence, these teenagers applied the predominant alternative they knew through their lived experiences. Some had used violence against their peers when in a position of relative authority, or even against their teachers. I observed student peacekeepers’ use of violence against other students who did not follow the school’s rules. Instead of intentional action for change, they expressed a feeling of being cornered: ‘What else can we do when our accumulated anger bursts?’ (a lower SES boy). Such power hierarchy constrained students’ peacebuilding agency capabilities to get involved in peacemaking dialogue for resolving the conflicts they faced.

There were mechanisms in place in each school that, if functioning effectively, could provide students with spaces to represent their voices and participate in school decision-making processes. For instance, I observed ‘Suggestions and criticisms’ boxes in all four schools. However, none of the participants believed that their school staff would have attended to students’ comments, which discouraged them from participating in this potentially democratic space: ‘Downstairs, there is a “suggestions and criticisms” box, right above a garbage bin [everyone laughed], where students’ opinions end up’ (a higher SES boy).

Student council was another institutional mechanism that could potentially provide students with a participatory space to represent their voices in decision-making processes in their schools. However, none of the four schools implemented student councils fully (if at all). The students in all groups expressed little faith in the effectiveness of student councils. For example, one of the lower SES girls who had been a council member described her role as ‘A formality, I was responsible for taking naughty students to the superintendent’s office’. The higher SES boys, despite their concerns and doubts about the effectiveness of student councils, uniquely expressed hope of reviving their school’s student council by applying the techniques they practised in the focus group sessions to address school-related conflicts.

The pedagogical examples shared by the participating students and adults revealed that each school provided students with different degrees of inclusive and participatory spaces. The privileged schools, particularly the boys’ school, had more respectful and less violent student–teacher relationships, with relatively more interactive pedagogical approaches, compared with the disadvantaged schools. In addition, there was a school-based and student-led magazine in this school whose editorial group included four (out of six) of the participants. This magazine was a space to address contemporary topics and conflicts at the school from student writers’ perspectives. These higher SES boys also reported participation in other extracurricular groups in their school, such as cultural circles, maths or literature groups and football clubs. Such school-wide student-based groups had allowed the higher SES boys to practise dialogue and collective decision-making.

Despite enjoying more participation spaces, the higher SES girls and boys expressed more complaints about, and higher expectations of their teachers and teaching methods compared with their lower SES counterparts. They demanded more horizontal student–teacher relationships where their opinions and interests would be heard and valued. In comparison, the lower SES boys and girls mainly wished for the cessation of direct (not only physical, but also verbal) violence by their teachers and other school staff. The youths in the four contrasting settings strongly voiced their critical opinions about the irrelevancy of the memorisation-based learning opportunities and educational content to their everyday life experiences and the required skills to handle the conflicts affecting them.

The interviewed teachers and staff in all four schools expressed awareness of the predominance of lecture-based, non-participatory and memorisation-based pedagogical approaches in their schools. Many of them demonstrated a constrained sense of agency. They deflected the responsibility for providing peacebuilding learning opportunities to students away from themselves by blaming parents or the education system. Almost all the teachers (particularly in the disadvantaged schools) expressed fear and insecurity about directly addressing the conflicts about which their students were concerned. As one of the interviewed teachers in the disadvantaged girls’ school stated, ‘Every topic you discuss is political, with life and death consequences’.

In addition, all 14 (out of 16) school staff and eight non-formal community educators who were interviewed expressed hopelessness about teenagers’ capability to respond to a conflict effectively. For instance, the religion teacher at the disadvantaged girls’ school stated: ‘These students are totally off the rails. They have no idea how to approach a problem.’ The students showed awareness of and disagreed with such a disempowering perception. One of the higher SES girls said: ‘We cannot trust our teachers when they don’t believe in us and think we are spoiled, incapable children’. The predominant disempowering perception of teenagers’ capacity to handle conflicts affecting their lives positions them as passive recipients of a version of truth that the authorities offer them. It justifies and normalises the authoritarian culture in the schools, where those in power (and who are ‘wiser’) made decisions for and expected conformity from ‘incapable’ students.

Students’ conflict transformation agency for peacebuilding

Many of the participating youths, across gender and socio-economic status, articulated all three structural (particularly boys), cultural (particularly girls) and political participation (particularly higher SES youths) dimensions when discussing the symptoms and causes of their selected conflicts. Most demonstrated their understanding of the need to redistribute power, wealth and opportunities to move towards equity and inclusion. However, the students did not articulate political mechanisms of how such reallocation could happen, what entities and institutions would be involved in the process, and what their roles could have been in the social change process. The youths’ repertoires of actors and actions were very limited when discussing alternatives for responding to those conflicts. Below I discuss students’ agency based on Lederach’s conceptualisation of conflict transformation capabilities.

Students’ knowledge, understanding and concerns about conflicts’ symptoms, causes, actors and actions form what Lederach (2003) calls the head capabilities in conflict transformation for peacebuilding. The participating youths were not simply the passive recipients of national ideologies promoted (inside and outside school) by the explicit curriculum. For instance, despite the explicit narratives in the state-controlled school curriculum and media emphasising positive perspectives on religion, when students mentioned Islam, they mostly portrayed it as a negative contributor that exacerbated social conflicts, or as impractical and irrelevant curricular content, particularly in the privileged schools. For example, four (out of 10) lower SES boys questioned the religious leaders’ disproportionate access to resources and power. Two (out of 12) of the lower SES girls explicitly blamed clerics for exacerbating sexual harassment, although without being more specific about how this occurred.

The participating youths’ lived experiences of injustice eroded their trust in the state, school authorities, families and peers. This distrust endangered healthy and equitable relationships – what Lederach calls the heart capabilities essential to conflict transformation agency for peacebuilding. The explicit state-controlled schools and media curricula promoted (divine) impunity for non-elected institutions and figures, and citizens were not allowed to question their actions. The higher SES youths openly articulated their distrust of the theocratic elements of the Iranian governing system. Even some of the girls and many of the boys in the disadvantaged public schools, who were more often exposed to violent threats and control mechanisms within their schools and had limited access to non-state-controlled sources of information, expressed doubt as to the adequacy, appropriateness and effectiveness of the state-supported political agenda and the ruling clerics’ position of power.

The youths’ expressed capabilities and willingness to participate in peacemaking processes in their school or to have political representation at the national level were consistent with the differing participatory spaces available to them. These are the hands capabilities in Lederach’s theory of conflict transformation. The higher SES boys’ wider access to participatory structures to voice their opinions and to practise negotiating and discussing conflicting perspectives within their school had expanded their expectations for, sense of entitlement to, and fluency in talking about participating in smaller- and larger-scale collective decision-making and problem-solving processes. In comparison, the lower SES youths’ (particularly girls’) considerably narrower access to multiple sources of information and spaces to represent their voice without fear of punishment had limited their repertoires of possible conflict-handling options to what they had already experienced.

Finally, the learning experiences available to the participating Iranian youths, both lived and in school, had not offered them broad repertoires to build what Lederach (2003) calls ‘legs and feet’, the capabilities for social-structural and cultural transformation of power relations to promote equitable redistribution of resources, opportunities, recognition and representation. In most instances, their lived curriculum at school had not addressed the political, cultural and economic structures underlying the conflicts the youths discussed. For instance, the disadvantaged schools predominantly responded to students’ economic difficulties by providing affirmative remedies (for example, individual charity-based activities), without providing a space for students to understand and challenge (and transform) the political and economic structures underlying the unequal distribution of resources. The lower SES youths (particularly boys who discussed poverty) mostly suggested alternatives similar to those they had experienced in their everyday lives or had been told about at school. These youths’ lived experiences of poverty and dependence on state social protection programmes and public services had given them feet-first insight into the deficiencies of such programmes and services in addressing economic inequalities in the country. They were living with the failure of the national political and economic structures. These lived experiences had enabled them to see and speak about the politics of economic inequalities and the participation of government in implementing policies to improve the redistribution of resources.

The youths in the privileged schools had not had the opportunity to attend to the social-structural and political structures underlying the transnational economic inequalities they discussed. Students from higher socio-economic backgrounds, like those from lower SES, discussed the shortcomings of national political, economic and cultural systems. However, they had the advantage of accessing diverse and transnational information sources, which their lower SES peers lacked. While these higher SES students mentioned fewer specific domestic inequalities than those in disadvantaged schools, they were more aware of global disparities. They were particularly attuned to resource and political differences on an international scale, often comparing their situation with that of citizens in wealthier, more democratic societies in the Global North.

The young participants readily identified individual actors involved in the conflicts they discussed. However, their discussions in the initial focus groups lacked depth in analysing the cultural and structural roots of these issues. This tendency to blame individuals can overshadow the broader political, economic, social and cultural structures that fuel these conflicts. For example, in the early sessions, many girls and some boys in the disadvantaged schools either remained silent or echoed state ideologies on gender conflicts (such as sexual harassment and enforcing the compulsory hijab policy via moral police patrols. They initially blamed women who faced sexual harassment for not dressing modestly. However, as the sessions progressed, they began to understand and address the deeper structural and cultural causes of gender discrimination. While higher SES girls, along with some higher SES boys and a few lower SES girls, opposed the compulsory hijab, they did not fully articulate how this policy discriminates against women’s active participation in various societal domains, including decision-making processes. They advanced their articulations in the later focus group sessions as well.

Even though the lower SES youths voiced the government lines, for example, when talking about gender-based violence or economic hardships, in many instances they showed capabilities to negotiate, disagree and represent their voice more subtly, particularly in the later focus group sessions. In the absence of opportunities to exercise their civic voice, and in the normalised presence of direct violence, many of the lower SES youths seemed at first to have fallen into conformity with the power structure. However, they (particularly boys) could articulate government policies and practices concerning inequitable resource redistribution based on their lived experiences of economic injustice and state-supported mechanisms. They wanted the government policies to be implemented such that there would be a fair redistribution of resources and power. Even though the lower SES youths predominantly did not discuss (or question) the authoritarian governing structure of the country, they criticised officials and clerics for their lack of commitment to actualising their resource-based election promises and available resources in favour of the marginalised populations.

In addition, the participating girls and boys in the disadvantaged schools often expressed disagreement with their parents or school staff in their focus group discussions or confidential writing activities. Therefore, the conformity that many of them showed regarding the values and mores promoted in the explicit curriculum inside and outside their schools could not always be interpreted as constrained agency. For instance, four (out of 12) of the lower SES girls, in the confidential survey, wrote about their choices to express conformity with the imposed restrictions within their homes and school so their parents would allow them to continue their education and spend some time outside home (and school). These girls’ conformity with the imposed hijab or the stricture to not go out alone could reflect a negotiation between the possibility of coming to school and going out, or staying home and expecting an early marriage.