Peace Ed.

Almost a decade ago, members of the faculty, administration, and student body at Hope College started a conversation about adding a program of peace studies at the Holland, Mich. campus. Last fall, the process reached an important milestone when the first “introduction to peace studies” course was offered to Hope’s 3,400 students, part of the school’s first ever peace and justice minor.

Administration officials talked about the difficulties in starting any new program at the college level. “First, you have to make a good argument as to why the program is needed at all,” said Alfredo Gonzales, Hope’s dean for international and multicultural education, who took part in those early discussions. “It’s difficult to introduce one more program at a liberal arts institute where there’s just an abundance of programs. In what ways are we going to add a program without adding another burden to our students?”

And that’s just the start of the process.

Once people at Hope decided that a peace and justice curriculum was indeed a good idea, Gonzales said they dove headfirst into logistical questions, such as whether Hope wanted to start with a full-fledged program or if they wanted to introduce it incrementally. Furthermore, they had to figure out which departments ought to be involved in creating such a multidisciplinary effort and what the academic requirements would be.

The process included many conversations among a lot of people, Gonzales told Sojourners, but he said he knew it would be worth it, and that a peace studies program was a natural fit for a school affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. “If we look at our mission statement, it says that Hope College is to educate students for lives of service and leadership in global society,” he said. “So in that framework, this program looks at questions of reconciliation in a world that is deeply torn and is injuring people from the very youngest to the very oldest in ways that we don’t even understand yet.”

Drawing on best practices

In a sense, peace studies is part of Hope College’s legacy: Iconic peace activist A.J. Muste graduated from Hope in 1905. The Dutch-American Muste would go on to be executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation—an interfaith peace organization—and to mentor Martin Luther King Jr. In the late ’50s, Muste protested New York City’s civil defense drills alongside Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day, and in 1964, Muste participated in a retreat with a group of renowned peace activists, including Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan.

As an academic field, irenology—the study of peace—is thought to have its formal genesis in mid-20th century Europe with the advent of peace research institutes. In the United States, the first institutions to teach peace were colleges and universities with ties to the historic peace churches: the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Church of the Brethren.

There are various theories and concepts within the field—for example, some programs emphasize practical skills while others highlight philosophies—but the basic idea is this: Peace studies looks at the causes of violence and oppression and seeks to find solutions that promote justice and minimize violence.

To figure out what Hope College’s peace studies program would ultimately look like, faculty examined the approach taken at small liberal arts schools with established peace programs—such as Earlham College in Indiana. They also reviewed programs at their sister school, Meiji Gakuin University, in Tokyo and at their partnership school, Liverpool Hope University, in England.

Adopting what they considered best practices and discarding the rest, Hope put together its program: for now, a minor consisting of an introduction to peace studies course, 12 credit hours of electives, and, lastly, the capstone Christianity and the Quest for Peace.

Hope’s communications, religion, political science, and sociology departments collaborated to create the program and, by design, students are required to choose their electives from at least two of the fields. In this way, Gonzales said, students won’t be able to pigeonhole themselves into a single area.

“We want people to have a more comparative approach,” he said. “At the very end of the minor, we hope that they would have the competencies, the knowledge, the awareness, and certainly the understanding of how peace studies interconnects with historical issues and, perhaps more important, the contemporary conflicts that are emerging in many parts of the world.”

‘Kind of a no brainer’

In fall 2015, six students—all of them women—signed up for the inaugural introductory course, taught by retired opthamologist-turned-educator Thomas Arendshorst.

“I see my course as a foundation from which students can be empowered to understand how other courses and knowledge relate to peace,” said Arendshorst, who was recruited by Hope College specifically to teach in the peace studies program. “My course pushes students to advance their critical-learning skills and to see the intersections between prevalent society and the priorities of justice and peace.”

Arendshorst’s own journey to peace studies was slightly unorthodox. Before retiring from his ophthalmology practice in 2004, he volunteered for the boards of nonprofits in the Holland area. Working on the boards, he said, got him thinking more about justice and advocacy and how he could contribute.

“I was interested in having something better than just opinions to offer,” he said, “and I sort of serendipitously found the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.”

Arendshorst enrolled in a master’s program at the Kroc Institute in 2004, graduating two years later—just when Gonzales and his colleagues were beginning to seriously talk about a peace studies program at Hope College. In 2013 Hope invited Arendshorst to join the peace studies planning process and, ultimately, he was asked to teach the program’s gateway course.

Like Gonzales, Arendshorst said it made perfect sense that a Christian institution such as Hope would have a peace studies program. “We talk of Jesus as a prince of peace, not as the prince of wealth or capitalism or militarism,” he said. “So I think to have studies of peace and justice in a Christian college would seem to be kind of a no-brainer.”

Because he teaches Hope College’s introductory peace studies course, Arendshorst said he hones in on the most basic facts before getting into any of the theories and concepts; he wants his students to understand the oft-ignored reality that peace studies is a legitimate, evidence-based field of study. “As it turns out,” he said, “there’s a wealth of information that strongly argues that our longstanding ideas of how to maintain peace through violence and how to regulate society through coercion is quite ineffective.”

Once students understand that peace studies is a genuine academic field with a developed body of knowledge, Arendshorst said they can then start building their peace vocabulary. And once they’ve built their peace vocabulary, they are then able to examine recent history, parsing apart the idea of war and the ambitions that cause it.

Arendshorst likes to focus on history because he thinks much of history is disregarded for the sake of science and technology in the current educational system. But in order to understand what’s happening in the world today, he said, you have to understand what happened in the past.

“We talk about the changing patterns of war—what analysts call ‘new wars’ that don’t fit the old paradigms of one national state fighting against another for some kind of territorial gain,” he said. “Most of the wars being fought now don’t have anything to do with those old schemes. And that’s part of why even extremely strong and efficient military systems are finding they can’t accomplish much with war.”

The course also looks at international peace processes, the United Nations and other ideas of world governance, the development of human rights and the progression of conflict resolution to conflict transformation. Students also explore peacebuilding, which Arendshorst defines as “the deep, broad process of developing transforming relationships among peoples and between peoples.”

Seeing the world through a new lens

Aura Romero, one of the four women to ultimately complete Arendshorst’s class, said it changed her way of thinking about the world. “I hadn’t even imagined there were theories about peace,” she said. “I didn’t know there were different ways to look at peace or ways to understand it.”

Romero came to Hope College from Querétaro, Mexico, and because she was only studying in Michigan for a year, she wasn’t able to complete all the requirements for the peace and justice minor. However, the aspiring UNESCO officer who graduated with an education degree in June said she’s now thinking about a graduate program at the Kroc Institute.

“This course inspired me to change reality,” Romero said. “Even though I’ve learned about politics and economics, I get sad when I see that the actual system is not working or that power corrupts people—at least in my country. But now I know that there’s hope and there have been movements. It’s all part of a historical process that will eventually change. I think that’s pretty hopeful.”
Likewise, Hope College junior Gabrielle Werner, who also took Arendshorst’s class last fall, said she now looks at the world through a different lens. She initially signed up for it because she was curious about the peace process.

“I wanted to know if there was a way to solve conflict without violence because I hadn’t heard of any successful ways,” the sociology major said. “So when I heard about peace studies, I immediately thought, ‘Well, if that’s possible, does it actually work?’”

Since completing Hope’s intro course, Werner has become a believer. “It’s probably been the class that has changed my life the most,” she said. This summer, Werner was one of a group of Hope College students who spent two weeks studying post-conflict reconciliation in Rwanda, a nation that, sadly, has much to offer by way of case study. A number of nationwide efforts promoting reconciliation in the wake of the 1994 genocidal killing spree have resulted in a country that is still deeply hurting but that has also made major steps toward peace.

The tools to make it happen

What was most remarkable to the Hope College cohort, said Gonzales, who also went on the Rwanda trip, was that today genocide survivors are able to walk, work, and live alongside known perpetrators. “The words of love and forgiveness that we heard were just amazing,” he said, adding that their conversations made real for them why understanding and advocating for peace is so important.

“I think we came away with a sense that there’s not a passive need for peace and justice,” he said, “but there is a critical need for an educated society to learn how to not only live with the other but to grow with the other, whoever the other may be.”

And Gonzales said that’s what Hope College wants to foster through its peace studies program: an educated society that not only understands the need for peace but that also has the tools to make it happen.

The program is only in its infancy, but so far the results have been positive. When asked if the course was worth it, Romero’s face lit up and she let out a gasp. “I really loved it,” she said.

Romero said that Hope students should take Arendshorst’s introductory peace studies class even if they don’t intend to complete the entire peace and justice minor. “For people who want to change the world, I say take it, because you’ll find inspiration,” she said. “You’ll find the theory to support what you’re fighting for.”