This chapter argues for a concept of humanising dialogue as a relevant and beneficial way of conceiving of dialogue in peacebuilding contexts and a way of negotiating a ‘hybrid’ peace, or ‘critical peace’ (Jabri, 2013) that is
conscious of both micro and macro processes. On a conceptual level, conflict entails a process of dehumanisation and a breakdown of dialogue and
societies seeking to build peace must reconstruct peaceful relationships and institutions. This requires a concept of dialogue that goes beyond consensus
building or resolution of immediate conflict to allow for an ‘epistemic shift’ of participants to build peace constructively (Cremin and Guilherme, 2015) beginning from the local and personal level and radiating outwards. For Freire (1972) and Buber (1958, 2002), dialogue constitutes the essence of being human in this world or what Freire called an ‘ontological vocation’ and extends beyond organised ‘dialogue events’ to every aspect of life. This
conceptualisation of dialogue provides an ontological and epistemic foundation that can imbue peacebuilding, and education within it, with a stronger meaning of justice, freedom and humanity. Buber and Freire also emphasise the importance of dialogue in educational exchanges, both inside and out of formal schools and for both children and adults. This connection between dialogue, learning and peace is a critical component which may be lacking in other micro or macro peacebuilding theories. In this section, I outline the bases of Freire and Buber’s concepts of dialogue, humanisation and education. I then engage with critiques of their work and outline five primary elements of humanising dialogue.
The Foundations of Martin Buber’s Humanising Dialogue:
Martin Buber presents a distinctive concept of dialogue that pertains to the
‘everyday encounters of man with the world’ (Diamond, 1960, p. 3). His dialogic humanism has an eclectic range of influences including Judaic theology and Hasidism (Diamond, 1960; Buber, 1948), socialist utopianism (Buber, 1949; Honeywell, 2007) existentialism (Diamond, 1960) and
education (Cohen, 1979; Murphy, 1988; Morgan & Guilherme, 2014;
Weinstein, 1975). Events and movements of his time profoundly influenced Buber, including Zionism, the First and Second World Wars, the persecution of Jews in Europe and the creation of Israel (Friedman, 1998, 2002;
Guilherme & Morgan, 2009; Morgan & Guilherme, 2012, 2014). In education, Buber worked as a professor in Germany and headed the Jewish Office for Adult education when the Nazi regime began barring Jews from accessing public education; he continued his work in adult education as a professor and collaborator with the Israeli government in the 1950s and 1960s (Cohen, 1983). In his texts and acts, Buber can be seen as embodying dialogue towards peace in his outspoken beliefs on a bi-national Palestinian-Israeli
state. Also, some have attributed the strengthening of German-Israeli
relationship in the post-World War II era to Buber’s own openness to dialogue with Germany (Avnon, 1998).
At the root of Buber’s humanising dialogue is the belief that humans are constructed in relation to the world and to other humans. Buber reduces these encounters, or relationships, to two primary modes: I-Thou and I-It. I-It
constitutes a monological relationship grounded in experience and objects whereas I-Thou relationships represent true dialogue and are composed of mutuality and wholeness and exist only in the present moment (Buber, 1958).
However, one should not view these two relationships as binary opposites but instead as a two-fold way of being in the world (Metcalfe and Game, 2012): Thou cannot exist without It and humans constantly shift between It and I-Thou relationships with the spiritual, human and natural world. While Buber laments that moments of dialogue too rarely occur, he insists that I-It
moments of experience are necessary and allow society to function. In
Between Man and Man, Buber (2002) recognises the importance of speech in human dialogue and distinguishes between three forms of communication:
technical, monologue disguised as dialogue and genuine dialogue.
‘Monologue disguised as dialogue’ describes situations that bear the label of dialogue without containing true mutuality and may apply to many of the
‘dialogue settings’ that are created for the explicit purpose of peacebuilding.
Technical dialogue describes the myriad of communications that we undertake in our daily lives and genuine dialogue is a moment of I-Thou.
Furthermore, Buber does recognise that the I-Thou has different shades and variations between lovers, friends, colleagues and even enemies.
Buber’s dialogue occupies what he calls the ‘narrow ridge’ between objectivity and subjectivity, providing a ‘third way’ between individuality and collectivism which he viewed as community (Friedman, 1998). Dialogue and relations exist in the space between of two people, which he also deemed important to the notion of conflict resolution (Buber, 1988), as this between is occupied by the shared elements and mutuality and where divisions between the self and
other cease. These beliefs of shared community relate to Buber’s lifelong interest in utopian communities (Huston, 2007) and as early as the late 1890s, he belonged to a radical group of scholars who attempted to embody their beliefs in daily life (Simon, 1996), a foreshadowing of kibbutzim and his later experiments in utopian ideals.
Katz (1983) claims that Buber’s work implicitly upholds a Kantian thesis, highlighting Kant’s ‘noumenal’ as a direct equivalent to Buber’s ‘Thou’
whereas Kant’s ‘phenomenal’ equating to Buber’s ‘It.’ However, Perlman (1990) refutes this, claiming that while Buber’s two-fold existence may derive from Kant, a point also maintained by Walters (2003), that Buber allows for knowing through relation and includes knowing of a supreme Thou or God.
Walters (2003, p. 6) also states that ‘[w]hereas Kant’s grounding is in reason, Buber’s is in experience,’ and that Buber is focused more on how knowledge and being are created in the everyday. Nonetheless, Kant’s influence on Buber reveals itself particularly in his valuing of human life and, as Kant, to treat human as ends and not means.
Buber’s concept of I-Thou extended to his beliefs about education and about the student-teacher relationship. Dialogue should be the foundation of
education (Kramer, 2013) and presents an alternative to what Buber views as common approaches to education: the ‘funnel’ and the ‘pump.’ The ‘funnel’
represents education where students are seen as empty vessels that teachers funnel information into, similar to Freire’s ‘banking,’ or that students can
themselves generate or ‘pump’ out knowledge independently without a teacher guiding them. Dialogue in education, as the third way, allows for mutuality and giving and receiving of knowledge, and strikes a balance between students generating knowledge and being instructed. Critical reflection for Buber occurs when children begin to actively ‘select’ the world, involving ‘a radical process of conversion by which objectified, impersonal meaning is converted into the realm of the personal, or the I-Thou’ and such learning must take place in a culturally and historically contextual manner (Murphy, 1988, p. 104). This concept of education also reflects Buber’s view
that decision-making is a unique human capacity and humanisation requires treating others as independent, responsible and capable of making decisions (Friedman, 1954; Huston, 2007). While Buber’s concept of I-Thou and I-It was not exclusively developed in the context for education, Buber wrote at length about the topic and frequently connected them (Weinstein, 1975). However, he did not develop a specific pedagogy like Freire, perhaps as this could prevent acknowledging the uniqueness of each encounter.
Buber maintains an ontological historicism which Batnizky (2006) explains is primarily concerned with remaining open in the ‘between’ rather than a
‘timeless essence. Both the past and the future do not exist in a moment of dialogue, which exists only in the infinite potential of the present (Buber, 1958), thus the future is open to infinite potential. Buber’s ontology is based on human relationality, which Walters (2003) also argues makes his work compatible with postmodern feminist thought and has been used extensively by Nel Noddings in her development of a feminist ethic of caring (Noddings, 1984; Johanessen, 2000).
In describing Buber’s epistemology, Perlman (1990, p. 106) claims that Buber rejects an ideal description of the I-Thou encounter. Buber (1958, p. 126) suggests that I-Thou is defined or described by ‘drawing of a circle excluding everything else that is not part of the encounter’ and ’when the individual goes forth to the relation, he draws a circle around his reality, as it were, to indicate, but not to grasp, his Thou.’ Buber resists a distinct typology or categorisation of what I-Thou resembles. This may explain why Buber’s philosophy is implicit in many peace and conflict resolution programmes but is difficult to fully
operationalise. A major weakness and critique of Buber’s work is its relatively non-concrete nature and his resistance to categorisation makes empirical studies based on his work difficult to execute. Furthermore, Levinas critiques in many instances the weak ethical nature of ‘I’ towards ‘Thou’ in Buber’s work (Bernasconi, 2004). A better understanding of his contributions, and explicit usage, could enhance strategies for conflict resolution (Morgan and
Guilherme, 2014).
The Foundations of Paulo Freire’s Humanising Dialogue
Paulo Freire offers a critical, humanistic form of dialogue as praxis, or a
process of reflection and action. Freire (1972) derived his influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed from experiences as an adult literacy instructor in the
impoverished Northeast region of Brazil where he began to relate disparities in education to the chronic oppression and destitution of the populations.
However, a military dictatorship forced Freire into exile in 1964 and until the early 1980s Freire further developed his pedagogy teaching and working in diverse places such as the US, Chile, Nicaragua and Guinea-Bissau and through his work with the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Freire’s work has been expanded upon by North American critical pedagogy (e.g. Macrine, McLaren and Hill, 2010; Giroux, 2005; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007;
Kincheloe, 2004; Roberts, 2000, 2003) and popular education in social movements in Latin America (Kane, 2001). Peter Rule (2011) acknowledges the significance of dialogue for Freire throughout the span of his career:
dialogue is not just a descriptive category but also an ethical, axiological and ontological one. Dialogue is something that characterizes authentic human beings and their relationships as they strive to become, as they engage in their ontological vocation of being human.
This ontological vocation of being human required a constant struggle for justice and liberation of the oppressed and the oppressor through constant love and hope and this struggle required a dialogic foundation of education.
Not dissimilar to Buber’s ‘funnel’ and ‘pump’, Freire argued against a ‘banking’
education where teachers deposited knowledge into students without
encouraging critical reflection on the world and relied upon non-democratic, dehumanising teacher-student models. Freire’s pedagogy was focused on literacy, primarily as this problem plagued his native Northeast Brazil and other contexts where he worked. Freire argues that a liberating education must be grounded in learners’ experiences; to do so, teachers, through familiarising themselves with the students’ world, should create ‘generative themes’ based on words and issues relevant to out of school lives. The concept of the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ interlink and demonstrate Freire’s belief
in literacy as the possibility of literacy creating the construction of new ontologies and epistemologies (Roberts, 2000). Then, teachers can use themes to ‘codify,’ using pictures and symbols to assist students in naming and recognizing concepts. This relates to Freire’s belief in the importance of dialogue in education for students to name the world, as discussed below.
While conceptually similar, Murphy (1988) argues that Freire’s emphasis on literacy extended Buber’s global reach by framing it within a distinct literacy-oriented pedagogy.
Freire observed that the educational system reflected and replicated a society-wide dehumanisation and oppression that could only be upended through a radical process of reflection and action which Freire (1972) called
‘praxis.’ Through this, students would become aware, or develop critical consciousness (conscientização) which would enable them to radically change social structures. Freire’s concepts of dialogue and of revolution are born from his dialectical materialist views, founded on Marxism and Hegelian dialectic thinking. Freire also participated in a broader movement of Marxist Catholics in Latin America called Liberation Theology and his deeply religious views transcended to his concept of love and humanising relations (Darder, 2002; McClellan, 1987).
Freire himself acknowledges the impact of Buber’s I-Thou on his own conceptions of dialogue and humanisation. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1972, p. 135), he states:
The antidialogical, dominating ‘I’ transforms the dominated, conquered ‘thou’ into a mere ‘it’ in Martin Buber’s phraseology.
The dialogical ‘I’, however, knows that it is precisely the ‘thou’
(‘not-‘I’) which has called forth his own existence. He also knows that the ‘thou’ which calls forth his own existence in turn constitutes an ‘I’ which has in his ‘I’ its ‘thou’. The ‘I’ and the
‘thou’ thus become, in the dialectic of these relationships, two
‘thous’ which become two ‘Is’.
Freire’s own understanding of Buber’s I-Thou contributes to Freire’s own concept of self and other. Love and hope also features as a central theme in
Freire’s work (Darder, 2002; Freire, 1997, 1998), which is central to Buber’s perspective as well (Friedman, 1988, 2002). Glass (2001) points out that hope is also important the formation of Freire’s historicity, for with hope can one remake oneself in spite of oppressive historical and social circumstances that construct us.
Freire’s work has undergone critiques for several aspects of his work. Some have primarily centred upon the inadequate theoretical basis of his work and his insufficiently explained combinations of somewhat opposing approaches, such as historicity and humanism (Glass, 2001: Weiler, 1996). Others have commented on the limitations of a binary view of power and oppression, especially in post-conflict settings. In war torn societies, Gur-Ze’ev (1998) claims that:
his uncritical understanding of power/knowledge relations draws him to observe the decolonization process in Africa and elsewhere (undoubtedly a progressive development in itself) as suitable contexts for a national realization of critical pedagogy.
Here, Gur Ze’ev questions how Freire approached revolutionary contexts such as Guinea-Bissau and his possible oversight of oppressive relationships that existed in post-revolutionary societies where new leadership continued oppressing marginalised classes and argues that national projects of critical pedagogy in these contexts were not adequately implemented. Weiler (1996, p. 360) also notes that Freire’s work was often conducted in post-revolution societies or environments receptive to his work, whereas in Guinea-Bissau which was undergoing a revolution, ‘he was forced to take direct political positions rather than put forth generalized inspirational calls’ and also may represent how Freire himself encountered complexities of implementing his work in complex settings. However, Freire himself, through the span of his career, modified his beliefs and his later writings (e.g. Freire & Shor, 1987;
Freire & Freire, 1998, 2007; Freire & Macedo, 1996; Freire, 1993, 1998) present evolving perspectives on struggle, power and oppression that are less
binary and more based on complex and conflict-ridden situations such as his experience in reforming São Paulo’s education system.