Don’t diss the peace activist!

While many of my students may think I am all theory and no fun, in fact I am always up for a good laugh. So, when I picked up the recent Goofordian, eager to get my laugh on over a restful lunch at Jams Deli, I was disappointed in what I found. As I came to the “article” titled “Local GuilCo Hero Pumpernickle peacefully protests for world peace,” I was struck by the way in which humor was being used to delegitimize important identities and re-inscribe dominant stereotypes about “peace activism” and social change activists. In reading this spoof article, I found myself getting frustrated that the work that many of us believe is critical for the creation of just social transformation was being, yet again, disrespected and undercut.

Don’t get me wrong — I am all about invoking caricatures in good fun. But what I read struck me as so misinformed and reliant on cultural stereotypes and delegitimizing tropes that I quickly found myself getting angry and frustrated. How could any critical Guilford student write such ill-informed and un-analytical humor? Why do people in our society continually delegitimize actions aimed at bringing about positive peace and pro-social change?

Beyond simply using cultural clichés to draw a laugh, this piece goes a step further. Connecting “doing a lot of things in the community” to both “playing his acoustic guitar” and “protests for the legalization of marijuana” outside local coffee establishments, the spoof belittles the many amazing things that nonviolent activists for peace and change do everyday in every society. Without noticing the powerful interests rolled up in such discourse, it is all too easy to, in an attempt to create laughter, recreate unequal power. Such public discourse acts to re-inscribe stereotypes about a growing field of inquiry that is much more than 1960s era hippies singing “Kumbaya.” The Peace Studies scholarship of your dad’s generation has evolved — I like to say the field is emergent with possibilities.

On a recent visit to my alma matter, George Mason University, I found that 250 undergraduates have chosen to study Peace and Conflict Studies as their major. This is not the field of pot-smoking, guitar-playing students like James Pumpernickle — Peace and Conflict Studies has come of age as an emerging interdisciplinary field that attempts to bring together theory and practice in a way that traditional disciplines struggled to do with the complex social realities of both conflict and peace. Peace and Conflict Studies students realize the need to bring together many disciplinary lenses to solve the many wicked problems the world faces. This peace action is not through protest alone, but through policy change, peacebuilding/development activities and playing a myriad of third party roles in conflict.

Ironically, a few days after reading this “article,” I was sitting in The Hut listening to a Palestinian peace activist talk about being taught not to hate by his parents who lost 10 of his siblings as he and his four remaining siblings grew up in a refugee camp in Palestine. The resilience of activists for social change is something we should be celebrating at Guilford, not lampooning. By playing into the stereotypes of the past we do a grave injustice to the ongoing fight for peace and justice in the future.