Conference Program

Demilitarising schools entails more than adding “peace content”: it calls for educational frameworks that interrupt collaboration (i.e., non‑cooperation) with war as a social system. This paper focuses on Aldo Capitini’s principle of non‑collaboration: refusal to participate in war‑making, withdrawal of consent from militarised institutions, and construction of participatory alternatives (1,2,3). In this sense, it proposes a pedagogical praxis for cultural disarmament within everyday schooling. In a time of securitised borders and renewed war economies, non‑collaboration functions as a method for unlearning enemy‑making and for cultivating a universalist humanism grounded in the “tu‑tutti” (10).

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) was an Italian philosopher and educator who made nonviolence a central category of political action and educational renewal. He promoted a democracy “from below” and experimented with participatory forms of public deliberation, linking ethical transformation to collective organisation with his Movimento Nonviolento.

The study combines a historical‑educational reconstruction of the 1963 International Seminar on Nonviolent Techniques (Perugia) with a conceptual analysis of Capitini’s later systematisation in Le tecniche della nonviolenza (1967) (4,5,6). The seminar is interpreted as a critical junction between educational theory and grassroots associative politics, translating “power from below” into learnable practices: civil disobedience, conscientious objection, economic non‑cooperation (including boycotts) and strategies of progressive disarmament. The paper also frames peace as an active sequence of social acts rather than the mere absence of violence.

From this perspective, demilitarisation acquires a clear pedagogical meaning for schools, as it entails a comprehensive transformation of governance, curriculum, and symbolic culture within educational institutions. The paper outlines pathways for mapping how militarisation enters educational spaces and for developing curricular inquiry in civic and historical education, through participatory inquiry into supply chains and public budgets. It also proposes collective practices of non‑cooperation as educational exercises, including scrutinising procurement and sponsorship, declining military‑led activities, and re‑designing rituals and spaces in ways that cultivate inclusive forms of remembrance.

Transnationally, Capitini and the Movimento Nonviolento were embedded in international pacifist circuits, such as the War Resisters’ International, showing how training, educational resources, and anti‑militarism campaigns circulate across borders and can be pedagogically adapted to schools today (6-7).

From Capitini’s 1963 Seminar to Le tecniche della nonviolenza (1967), contemporary anti‑militarisation can reactivate non‑collaboration as a pedagogical praxis of cultural disarmament, translating refusal and non‑cooperation into learnable techniques. By tracing Capitini’s influence across current Italian and European initiatives (11), the paper frames the school as a laboratory of active nonviolence and grassroots democracy, where universalist humanism is enacted through democratised language, agency, and institutional power rather than abstract moralism (8,9).

Educators and policymakers are invited to treat non‑collaboration as curriculum, method, and institutional policy for demilitarising educational life.