POTENTIATING VIRTUE, RESILIENCE BEFORE VIOLENCE: A RESEARCH FROM THE STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION TO BUILD PEACE CULTURES

Mexico’s current violent scenarios impulse the search for peace culture building with haste. However, the Mexican paradox lies in its low ranking of negative peace – ranked in place 152 out of 162 measured countries- while constantly ranking in the 65th place in the index for positive peace.

This is the motivating data to start research on peace and violence perception of our students, firstly by understanding positive peace as the capacity of societies to be resilient enough to not undergo in escalating violence spirals and secondly under this assumption pointing out the need to clarify, strengthen and potentialize the aforementioned peace.

This work will present the results of a study about peace and violence through 350 polled high school and university students. The general scheme of the poll was done through multiple choice closed questions regarding negative peace (understood as the mere absence of violence) and positive peace (understood as the full display of human life). Two open-ended questions linked with peace were included as well.

The first open-ended question was “what does peace mean to you and why is it important for you to think about it?” This question was crossed with multiple variables such as age, gender, word reiterations in opinions, as well as with the closed multiple choice questions complement.

The second open-ended question was “what can you do to build peace?” This question was intend to measure the perceived agency that students had about themselves in the peace building process. These answers, albeit being important to collect their opinions, was also intended to include their participation in the formation process, therefore inscribing said results in a theoretical framework linked with the ethics of virtue to allow feedback. Hence, 350 students were involved in a dialogue with their teachers regarding each group’s governing virtue and contrasting it with other virtues that can be applied to the peace cultures boding process.