Education And Religious Diversity In Conflict Prevention And Conflict Resolution

H.E. Amb. Ramon Blecua is currently Ambassador at large for Mediation and Intercultural Dialogue in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was  EU Ambassador to Iraq and Head of Political Section of the EU Delegation to Yemen. Previously he was Deputy Head of Mission in the Spanish Embassy in New Delhi. He held several postings in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassies of Spain in Ghana, Indonesia, Egypt and Guatemala from 1988 to 1996, as well as subsequent postings including Chief of Cabinet of the Director of the Cervantes Institute, Deputy Head of Mission in Teheran, Deputy Consul General in Buenos Aires and Cultural Counsellor in Cairo. He was Spanish Representative to the Palestinian/Israeli peace negotiations in Cairo from 1992 to 1995 and he participated in the International Commission on Security Sector Reform of Guatemala as Cooperation Aid Coordinator for implementation of the peace agreements. He is a frequent speaker at institutes and universities worldwide and has published articles and essays on international relations, development cooperation and cultural diplomacy.

Education has been at the heart of human civilization through history, since the ability to learn  and to apply that learning to social and personal development has been the defining element of humans as a species. Access to knowledge has been closely related to the realm of the sacred and the connection with divine powers, sometimes limited to a privileged priesthood in the past. The social , economic and political transformations of our recent history have  been closely linked to the expansion of education  to ever larger social groups and the intervention of the modern state as a provider of it. As all human activity, such a powerful tool has been often misused for social conditioning, ideological indoctrination and rejection of diversity.

Religion has also a complex relationship with the search for  knowledge, being one of the engines of the expansion of education, creating  schools and universities since ancient times, such as the Nalanda University in Buddhist India to the Confucian schools, the Christian monasteries and the Islamic madrasas in the Middle Ages. The School of Translators of Toledo in the XI and XII centuries is an example of cross cultural fertilization in Medieval Spain, when Muslim, Jewish and Christian  scholars and translators  worked hand in hand to transfer vast number of classical texts into Latin, starting the intellectual ferment of the later Renaissance. The flourishing of Talmud studies and the Kabala next to the Islamic studies of Ibn Arabi in Al Andalus, is part of this environment that is still remembered as a golden era in Spanish  history. I would like to point at that example of how religious diversity became the root of one of the richest cultural movements in Western history, that unfortunately had its backlash some centuries later with the imposition of intolerant and restrictive limitations justified by religious purity by the Holy Inquisition. Another amazing example of intellectual flourishing inspired by religious cross fertilization in the China of the Tang dynasty, when the interaction of Indian Buddhist and Taoist scholars produced an extraordinary intellectual movement that expanded through most of Asia as a new vigorous current of religious and intellectual thinking known as Zen.

The role of religion has changed considerably with the secular context of contemporary society, but it remains a prominent legal force despite the premise constructed and promoted by Western constitutionalism that it must be separated from the State. Education constitutes an area of human life that leaves ample scope for the expression of religious identity and shapes the citizens of the future. It is also the place of origin of a considerable number of normative conflicts involving religious identity that arise today in multicultural settings. Education and religious diversity interact in a dynamic way shaping both conflict and conflict prevention and resolution. The  educational program of ISIS in the areas under their control is a good example of how extreme religious intolerance would use education as a tool of social engineering  to transform a multicultural environment such as Northern Iraq into an incubator of fanaticism and violent expansionist policies aiming at the whole Islamic world. Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany offer also revealing models from the atheistic perspective but with similar operational tools.  In front of those highly effective models, education for tolerance based on religious and ideological diversity remains a challenge even in our multicultural liberal societies.

The changing social landscape  due to  migration  in many of our  Western democracies is having disconcerting effects that challenge our convictions of how multicultural realities can be incorporated harmoniously in a democratic environment. The way religious uniformity is giving way to diversity is enriching our world but it is also provoking defensive reactions and too often rising fears and aggressive populist movements.  Armed conflicts, economic inequalities and environmental degradation will increase the trend of massive population displacement, that will find their way to the affluent societies in the West, no matter how many restrictions we put on their way. What kind of religious education is best equipped both to challenge prejudice and intolerance in society and to develop responsible and respectful relationships between people from different communities or with different commitments?

We cannot leave out of this discussion about education and religious diversity the effect the technology innovation, in particular in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital transformation, is having  in shaping a new global order. Implications of the unequal access to information and communication technologies and the resulting dependency, pose extremely serious challenges since they question the basic tenets of national sovereignty and democratic principles. The current global health emergency provoked by COVID-19 is accelerating deep changes that will have far reaching implications not only for the way international relations are conducted but in every aspect of social life and economic activity. AI is part of a fierce worldwide competition.

Probably for the first time in history, technological innovation applied massively to the economic system is changing not just the conditions of human existence but its very purpose. Never before we had so much material prosperity, longer lives and guaranteed security but at the same time we are aware of the damage we are inflicting on the planet and on ourselves. We have the illusion of being the master of our destiny and neither gods nor nature have any more power over our lives. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, reflects on the future humanity is creating with the new power of technology and his predictions are truly terrifying : the economic product of the XXI century will be the human mind and the era of inorganic life is dawning on us with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Democracy could collapse under the power of the algorithms, that we are having imposed on us without debate or consultation, and we may renounce privacy in exchange of  the expectation of health. More worrying still, the inequality created by very limited ownership of the new technologies and the control of the algorithms will replace traditional political systems by some sort of digital feudalism ruled by a technocracy that serve the digital overlords.

Artificial Intelligence is developing rapidly and the connection between massive data harvesting and biometric monitoring with the implications of 5G technology will multiply the capacity of governments to control their citizens. If citizens had their rights previously restricted as a voluntary choice between freedom and security, now we will be presented with a new choice between health and privacy. If the rise of surveillance states is a matter of serious concern, it is even more worrying that the new technological instruments and personal data is actually in the hands of powerful private corporations. If not addressed now, the collusion between the surveillance state and digital feudalism will blur the difference between totalitarian and democratic states in ways that are still difficult to imagine. Many of the emergency measures taken now will become a fixture of life as the whole historical process will be fast-forwarded.

The changing role of education will be largely determined by   AI and machine learning, as well as the perception that cultural heritage will have in our world view. Again, we find the imprint of religious ideals in the build-up of our identity though what we call now art or cultural heritage in a secularized world view but those artistic creations have been for thousands of years the material manifestation of spiritual beliefs. Now the preservation of cultural heritage is part of our educational system but devoid of the soul that inspired it.  With the recent change in the EU Approach to Cultural Heritage in conflicts and crises, new opportunities are emerging. Heritage preservation, recording and sharing create new potential for the successful application of diverse forms of technology both in data recording and data analysis. Thus, AI changes the framework conditions of how data and information are produced and circulated, which has major implications for all social interaction.

From a European perspective, international cooperation, structured by means of organizations and institutions where governments, civil society, private companies, and academic institutions participate, is firmly engaged in contributing to general welfare and helping avoid technology becoming an instrument for dominance and control, and mitigating and managing irresponsible use of AI in situations where people face or are at risk of violence. International cooperation should also focus on strengthening innovative multisectoral coalitions to ensure that data, AI, etc, are used more deliberately as a means to build trust, resolve conflicts and support mediated approaches to ending armed conflict.

Precisely because technologies such as AI already have a considerable effect on our lives, new and stronger forms of cooperation and diplomatic relations are needed, enabling us to integrate the challenges of a global governance with those from technology, society, and economy. This is exactly what multi-layered technology diplomacy represents and should be addressed as a support tool for formal Diplomatic actors, so as to contribute to the debate about difficult policy challenges, incorporating results of dialogues often referred to as “back channel” diplomacy into their strategies.  Capabilities, social knowledge, education for and governance of technological diplomacy and AI in particular appears as the most demanding framing conditions when discussing open issues regarding the governance of the digital landscape at a global level. The new initiative should thus focus on building concrete actions, making sure they can deliver results and promote innovative governance mechanisms for peer-learning exchanges and replicability/scalability.

Experimenting with particular high-potential technologies appear to be required and should be based on the respect of human security, human dignity, and human equity, and on multicultural cooperation in the definition and establishment of e.g. digital twins, natural language processing, sandboxes, sentiment analysis, anomaly detection, contextual/personalized display of complex information, specific platforms and assistive services for mediation, and problem-solving strategies, among others. New technologies can contribute new tools for mediation and conflict resolution but also belongs to a new hybrid environment — physical (with its own particular craft) and virtual (with above-mentioned technological support), that is already part of the context. Investigating the implications of current living “in-between” the physical and online spheres is needed to better understand this new hybrid context and deploy appropriate solutions. Even if challenges remain in the usability and deployment of technologies, non-state / internal conflicts, preservation of respect, human dignity, discretion, privacy, existence of digital divides, cybersecurity risks, biases, false predictions and fake news fabrication, along with hate speech, the weaponization of information and, as a result, the erosion of trust, the time is ripe for Europe to develop new initiatives that include a technological governance framework and a European conflict resolution initiative within a more effective education model.