“Peaceful social order is not a point but a vast region of social orders from which violence is absent” (Galtung, 1969, p.168) Building upon the foregoing statement, the article attempts to explicate peace and violence intelligible from social distance perspective. By attempting to understand how peace is a functional and violence as a dysfunctional variable of social distance, the article offers avenues in which the concept of social distance can enrich peace theorizing and research. Hence, it is an attempt to understand social perspectives offering epistemological addition to the theoretical perspectives which guide and enrich the terrain of peace theory, practice and research. 

The article by deconstructing the tacit dimension of social interactions denudes the obscured violence which is ingrained in the normative social practices and structures. This helps us understand mechanisms underlying social interactions through which violence is penetrated which helps maintain the social distance.  One such mechanism is interactions between relationships of super- and sub-ordination. Understanding this mechanism helps engage with the complexities of an actor as the ‘normative inheritor’ of the social structure and how it negotiates roles and guidelines of the behaviour of hierarchy and hegemony reflected in social distance. The agency (if) fostered to negotiate social structures is then understood in terms of peace framework.

The paper explores this as it explores education at an International Residential School in North India that emphasizes EfP ideals of democratic principles, global citizenship and a commitment to peace. It discern how the School community enact and negotiate these ideals in the School and beyond, by paying particular attention to how the School community’s actions, conceptualizations, and discourses surrounding their experiences both intersect with and diverge from its stated mission. It contextualize these questions by locating them in the classical debate of how schooling interferes with education. For this I try to understand this how far EfP is (in) compatible to modern day schooling.  Hantzopoulos (2011) attempts the same and makes a similar call for empirical research on enactment of peace education at an institutional level. Harbor & Sakade’s (2009) empirical work raises serious questions on compatibility of EfP and formal schooling as it exists today.

Therefore the article attempts to understand the concept of peace through the prism of social realities. The central argument deconstructs violence and peace as a variable of social distance in the School. Consequently, social interactions become the mechanism of inequalities to underscore how asymmetries of power restructure the social distance. However, interactions are not always actualization of the pre-existing vertical social structures (shaped by power) but how agentic dispositions can counter the course of these interactions and the resultant social distance. The recalibration or maintenance of this distance through the agency is then understood in light of peace or violence framework. The course of analysis builds upon ‘structural violence’ and ‘School Convivencia’ as a measure of social distance in relationships at the School.

The central analysis of this article is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in-between April and December 2018 in an elite international residential School in North India. The work seeks to deconstruct schooling with respect to the ideals of ‘Education for Peace’ (EfP). The effort is to examine institutional practices in light of the EfP theory to render school ‘intelligible’ from a peace perspective. The research uses qualitative research method of participant observation over a six months long ethnographic field work, to study aspects of the self and the School community by being prolonged proximity to the everyday lives of the participants. The impetus for this project rooted in the lived experiences and pedagogical observations of the everyday life at the School. The thick description of qualitative data supported by field observation and reflective notes guides the analysis of this research. The researcher employed primary fieldwork methods in and outside the School like Participant observations, structured/semi-structured interviews, life history interviews, survey questionnaires, projective techniques etc. to gather understandings. A strict maintenance of field dairy remains at the heart of this research.

The article introduces social distance as a unit of analysis in ‘EfP’ research. It examines aspects of social distance from a peace and violence perspective by analysing how diverse social positions interact in the School. It deconstructs interactions as a negotiation between social structures and human agency in a variety of social situations. By mapping a set of social interactions, the article helps offer an understanding about how asymmetries in power results in asymmetric social distance in social relationships. Social proximity is a precondition towards possibilities of peaceful interactions and high power individuals who are also better capacitated to shorten this distance. It reaffirms that reduced social distance “helps hide durable inequality by naturalizing socially produced distinctions” (Khan 2011, p.16). This also reaffirms the faith that EFP is a question of method or forms of communication than content (Haavelsrud, 2008). Hence EfP manifest as embodied interactional knowledge in this case. Highlighting the Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality’, the article concludes social distance enabled ‘informal’ pedagogy as a more intrusive and more insidious form of pedagogy than the disciplinary one because it attends to the affective aspects of learning. It affirms that power needs to be filtered through structures homologous to the subjects in order to be effective. Subjects should to be compliant and participating in the structures. Foucault says that state’s disciplinary power “cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets”. It implies “knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it” (Foucault, 1982, p.783). Hence informal pedagogy provides for just a new kind of grip. It now asserts its power through more intimate but also more insidious way as it works on “social genesis of the cognitive structures” of its subjects (Bourdieu, 1996, p.2).

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