Conference Program

The volume The Other’s History: Israelis and Palestinians (PRIME, 2003) was published in Italy in 2003. It is a “small history manual” (ibid., 2003, p. 3) written by a group of twelve teachers, both Israeli and Palestinian. There are two versions of it: one in Arabic and one in Hebrew. The groups of students to whom the manual was addressed were presented with the history of the conflict both from the Palestinian point of view and from the Israeli point of view. The original manual featured both narratives on the same page, separated by a blank space: “so as to allow teachers and pupils to write their own observations” (ibid., 2003, p. 10). The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is characterized not only by extreme forms of violence and situations involving violations of human rights, but also by a conflict of memories, narratives, and imaginaries. Given the stratification of events as well as of memories, Daniel Bar-Tal (2024) places it within the framework of “intractable conflicts,” which have specific characteristics and are marked, on both sides, by the perception that resolution is impossible. Despite its complexity and the many difficulties involved, Bashir and Goldberg (2023) emphasize the need to bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba into dialogue in order to write “a new grammar and a new syntax” for the development of national narratives that are more complex, yet also more aware and effective. The Holocaust and the Nakba are defined by the authors as “foundational pasts,” borrowing the concept from Alon Confino (2012). They are considered as such because both memories assume an ontological dimension within Israeli and Palestinian societies respectively, and each presupposes the negation of the other’s trauma, thereby preventing forms of recognition and dialogue. The attempt to create a continuum between these two memories does not in any way aim to equate different events or to foster a competition of victimhood, as Said had previously argued (2011). Rather, through this project the authors seek to open up the possibility of mutual recognition in order to contribute to the construction of peace-building processes. The lesson of Bashir and Goldberg (2023) aligns with Todorov’s (2018) concept of “exemplary memory,” which presupposes the possibility of considering memory not only in a “literal” sense (narrowly tied to facts and contexts) but also as a tool for interpreting the present and contemporary forms of violence and conflict. Within these reflections lies the pedagogy of memory (Tomarchio & D’Aprile, 2021; Vaccarelli, 2023; Bravi, 2023; Vaccarelli, 2025), which conceives memory not merely as a commemorative moment but above all as a pedagogical device capable of becoming a driver of active citizenship, democracy, and processes of peace-building.

This contribution pushes the boundaries of education beyond institutional settings toward grassroots commemorative practices. It explores the emergence of a “third narrative” in the Israel–Palestine context, in its role of “cognitive and symbolic disarmament, peace-building processes, and the safeguarding of human dignity” (Panel A.02: Alphabets of Peace as Transformative Devices).

Drawing on the Joint Memorial Ceremony organized by Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle–Families Forum (Combatants for Peace, n.d.), as well as on the personal journey of Sulaiman Khatib (Eilberg-Schwartz & Khatib, 2021), the paper analyzes how a third narrative, can be a transformative symbolic space that challenges binary oppositions and reorients memory toward a shared future (Assman, 2011; Bashir, & Goldberg, 2023; Vaccarelli, 2025). The Ceremony disrupts the victimhood paradigm and the weaponization of memory (Klein, 2024). Particular attention is given to power asymmetry as an ethical condition shaping the possibility of articulating this third narrative.

This paper offers a critical analysis of pacifism and nonviolence as ideologies that can define legitimate forms of political action and set the acceptable limits of conflict. By shaping what is deemed thinkable and practicable, these ideologies can narrow repertoires of contention and, in doing so, contribute to the reproduction of domination.

The argument is developed in two parts. First, a dialogue is established among Giovanni Cosi (1985), Günther Anders (1991 [1984]; 2008 [1979; 1987]), Lev Trotsky (2000 [1917]), and Frantz Fanon (2007 [1961]) to expose the aporias of pacifism and nonviolence as principles and to trace their links to dominant interests. Cosi highlights the contradiction of radical pacifism when self-defense is denied. Anders stresses the limits of benevolent action and admits counter-violence as self-defense. Trotsky reads pacifism as rhetoric that manufactures consent and legitimizes imperialism. Fanon treats nonviolence as a colonial dispositive that disciplines revolt and makes decolonization compatible with new domination.

Second, in the case of the U.S. civil rights movement (Churchill, 1998; Gelderloos, 2015 [2005]), it is shown how nonviolent rhetoric can align with white ideology and how, once institutionalized, it can govern conflict from within. Three functions recur: contention is confined to orderly forms; internal control is enabled through respectability, moral surveillance, and censorship; deviance is regulated (De Giorgio, 2013) by drawing a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate protest.

Following Berger and Luckmann, nonviolence is treated as a partial symbolic universe anchored to a core universe of values and interests: tolerance integrates compatible universes, while incompatible ones are turned into objects of “therapy” or “annihilation” (Berger and Luckmann, 1969 [1966], p. 173). This helps explain how pacifist repertoires can be incorporated through adjustment and adaptation, neutralizing conflictual force while leaving the dominant universe intact.
This critique is not an endorsement of violence; analytical vigilance is called for, in line with Quirico and Ragona’s Panzierian perspective (2018: 36): «the necessity of perceiving the adversary and discerning whether these struggles reveal the objective, characteristic features of capital».

The aim of this ongoing research is to explore dialogical spaces for peace education —both formal and non-formal— within all the institutional reception and integration centers for unaccompanied children with migratory backgrounds in a medium-sized city in Northern Italy with a long history of migration flows, which intensified in 2023 and slowed down over the past two years. Bringing social systems theory (Lumhann, 1990, 2002), critical pedagogy (Freire, 2014; Pirozzi & Rossi-Doria, 2011) and educational peace studies (Kester, 2008; Herrero Rico, 2018; Gürsel-Bilgin, 2020; Wyness, 2013) into a productive dialogue, I investigate how educational interactional communication systems are produced in the daily lives of unaccompanied children, stressing systems’ potential for change and expansion through horizontal dialogical activities.

I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with child educators, Italian teachers, linguistic and cultural mediators, and individuals holding political and administrative roles, as well as 12 co-designed dialogical activities between three different groups of eigth childrens and young adults (one group for each housing center). In these interactions, I used facilitation (Baraldi & Farini, 2013; Kovalainen & Kumpulainen, 2007) as a tool to empower children’s peacful agency, enhance their epistemic authority, and build community across social differences.

To create a dialogic interaction as horizontal as possible, I avoided proposing structured laboraties, games, or predifined activity, entering each space without imposing rules or normative expectations about a “right way” to partecipate (and, by contrast, a “wrong” or “deviant” one). As facilitation suggests, rules that could determine clear turn-of-talk, or demand attention to the partecipant’s story, were co-constructed in the dialogic system by the partecipants from themselves and peacfully enforced by them only when they feelt it necessary. When conflict of opinion arose, facilitation helped me to mediate them —not manage, nor resolve them—, exploring differences and supporting the co-construction of shared narrations.

Drawing from a non-essentialist view of culture, I searched for hybrid cultural-trajectories (Holliday, 2022; Baraldi, 2024) and immaginary of untested feasibility (Freire, 2014) co­constructed by the partecipants as they narrated their past, their present lives and the hopes they have for the future. The final encounter in each group focused on supporting them in developing proposals to improving their lives within the community, facilitating their agency in a peace-building effort that conceptualizes everyday peace as dialogically co-created, contextual, sustanible, responsibility-oriented and conflict-transformative.

The interviews were analyzed through narrative and thematic software-assisted analysis. The analysis of the video-recorded activities was also supported by conversational analysis (CA) techniques. CA allowed me to carefully observe how facilitation could (or sometimes failed to) enhance turn-taking processes and children’s epistemic authority (Baraldi 2022), fostering more responsible, free, and fluid communication in which mainstream metanarratives can be subverted and deconstructed, and small cultures and possible communities are co-constructed (Amadasi & Holliday, 2018; Tramma, 2019).

Finally, once everything will be analized, this research intends to share its result with the community of educators, producing guide-lines that could help them to create stable dialogic spaces in their housing centers, as a parallel and integrative educational tool of peace-building.

A subtle form of violence is increasingly shaping contemporary communication. While not always expressed as explicit aggression, it influences how individuals think, speak, and relate to others. In the platform society, social, economic, and interpersonal exchanges increasingly occur through online platforms operated by a small number of private corporations, which have become central infrastructures of everyday life (van Dijck, 2024). Since the early 2000s, economic, cultural, and political power has concentrated in the hands of a few companies that structure the main spaces of online sociality and information (Törnberg, 2023), such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, which play a decisive role in shaping communication and participation in public life (Rikap, 2024).

The growing presence of algorithms in social media raises questions about their influence on attention, perception, and thought. As digital infrastructures shape what we see, read, and discuss, they also influence the language through which we interpret the world (Brady et al., 2023). Public discourse in digital environments is increasingly characterized by aggression, simplification, and polarization, and these communicative patterns are gradually permeating educational contexts. University students often adopt communicative styles influenced by social media, including in interactions with instructors (Persano, 2026). This reflects a broader linguistic transformation in which the boundaries between formal and informal communication are becoming increasingly blurred (Rodgers, 2025), contributing to the normalization of more direct and sometimes confrontational forms of expression in academic settings (Caceres et al., 2025).

Language structures how reality can be represented. As Wittgenstein argues, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world (Wittgenstein, 1921). What cannot be meaningfully expressed in language cannot be clearly thought or communicated. The scope of what we can speak about defines the scope of the world we are able to understand. Words can function as doors that open dialogue, or as walls that close it (Rosenberg, 2003). Unlearning destructive patterns embedded in everyday conversation can improve forms of expression and foster connection and cooperation. For this reason language should be rediscovered as a tool for nonviolence. Versatile communication skills allows individuals to articulate nuance, recognize differences and sustain dialogue, building bridges that resist simplification and hostility.

Within this framework, the purpose of this contribution is to examine the role of nonviolent communication as a subject of instruction and to highlight its relevance within formal and non-formal education. In particular, the paper explores how nonviolent communication can be integrated into educational practices as a pedagogical approach capable of fostering dialogue, empathy, and critical reflection..

The authors - educators in adult and higher education- advocate for a renewed attention to nonviolence within educational environments. Drawing on their teaching experiences, they reflect on the pedagogical potential of nonviolent practices applied in educational contexts. The contribution argues that incorporating nonviolent communication and dialogical practices into educational settings highly support constructive forms of interaction, strengthen democratic values and promote a sense of responsibility necessary for cultivating a sustainable culture of peace.