Recommendations for the History Teaching of Intergroup Conflicts

The way recent and old intergroup conflicts are presented around the world in curricula, textbooks, civil society and social representations can be characterised by four main approaches. In the first approach, a moratorium is imposed and any reference to the conflictual past is avoided; the second is a selective approach where nation-states or groups keep silent about aspects that involve wrongdoing of one’s own group, here called “ingroup”, and offer either a positive presentation of the “ingroup” or a preservation of the memory of the conflict by reiterating master narratives of one-sided victimisation of the “ingroup”. Both of these approaches are highly problematic as they become an obstacle to conflict transformation by peaceful means and the cultivation of historical thinking. A third approach attempts to overcome conflict by a simplistic understanding of a single peaceful narrative of co-existence, which often follows outdated and unhistorical conceptions of essentialist identities as a tool for nation- building. Finally, there is the interdisciplinary approach of transformative history teaching, which attempts a critical understanding of the conflictual past through the cultivation of historical thinking, empathy, an overcoming of ethnocentric narratives and the promotion of multiperspectivity. The transformative history teaching approach is the basis on which we situate the present recommendations.