Inter-Group Contact through Peace Clubs in Shaping Positive Inter-Ethnic Relations: Ethiopian Public University Students in Focus
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Date
2024-05
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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the role of Peace Club towards building positive inter ethnic relations of students in Addis Ababa, Ambo and Gondar universities. The study chose Peace
Club as a CoC inter-group contact platform, which has objectives of relationship building and
non-violence. Three research questions and two hypotheses were developed to address the
research objective. The study adopted a convergent parallel mixed research design and data was
gathered through questionnaires, interview and document review. Two set of questionnaires were
developed to measure the nature of students’ IER (Q-A) and the contribution of Peace Clubs for
IER of students (Q-B) respectively. Accordingly, 346 students (150 Peace Club members and 196
non-club members) took part in responding to Q-A and 333 valid questionnaires were returned.
For Q-B, 150 Peace Club members filled the survey and the return rate was hundred percent.
Additionally, 24 students, six instructors and six management personnel were engaged in source
of data in the qualitative part of the study. For document review, 14 policy documents relevant to
Ethiopian higher education system were examined. Both Descriptive and Inferential statistics were
applied and the major statistical tools used were frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation,
an independent samples t-test, as well as linear and multiple regression analysis. Thematic and
content analysis techniques were applied as qualitative analysis tools. The results showed, the
legal frameworks of Ethiopian Higher Education System indeed leave some room for CoCPs and
improve IER of students. However, the significance of CoCPs and how this can be implemented is
not explicitly stated in relation to IER of students. It is further disclosed that students can be
classified as having a fixed, mixed or a neutral view of ethnicity which has direct relations with
the nature of IER of students that is manifested either negatively or positively. Particularly,
students with mixed-ethnic background and those who choose ethnic neutrality display positive
IER typified with willingness to learn from out-group fellows and non-violent attitude. However,
students with fixed views of ethnicity seem to choose to resort to intra-ethnic cliques. On the other
hand, the mediation analysis disclosed that, Peace Club is found to be a notable co-curricular
platform to build positive IER among students in Addis Ababa, Ambo and Gondar universities.
This platform is particularly relevant interms of equipping members with necessary knowledge on
existence, acknowledgement and appreciation of difference as well as displaying non-violent
behavior during conflictual situations with out-group fellows. The moderation analysis also
revealed that, around 40.1% of variance in students’ IER is explained by inter-ethnic contact
through Peace Clubs. Moreover, Peace Clubs seem to achieve more in instilling knowledge that
help students to learn about out-groups and display respectful behavior towards them than
imparting affective ties like empathy. However, there were gaps on regularity of contact, equality
of learning opportunities among members, setting suitable settings for dialogues and rewarding
positive behaviors to make clubs impactful. Finally, the need to create Inter-Ethnic and Co curricular Policies and Inter-cultural and Co-curricular wing in the Federal MoE officeis are
proposed so as to systematically manage CoCPs in general and Peace Clubs in particular in a
way they can contribute for positive IER of public university students in Ethiopia. Further more,
areas of future research were implied.
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Keywords
Co-curriculum, inter-ethnic relations, inter-group contact, peace club, students, public universities