Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, did not set out to write explicitly about armed conflict or state-sanctioned violence. And yet, in his searing critique of oppression, done through the filters of education and liberation, he offered up one of the most urgent philosophies of violence available to us today. His work, forged as it was in the slums of Recife and the prisons of a military dictatorship, was a call to arms. Not with rifles and rounds, but with words. Where others offered despotism, he suggested dialogue. And where others demanded silence or obedience, he urged people to speak out the truth of their own lives – and, through doing that, dare to change their world (and the world).
For Action on Armed Violence, which seeks to understand how violence and power is enacted – and resisted – Freire offers a framework not just for critique, but a pathway towards transformation. His famous “pedagogy of the oppressed” is also a method of teaching, against violence. And it teaches us this: that violence does not just begin with bloodshed. It also begins when people are denied their voice.
Violence as dehumanisation
Freire’s key insight is – in a way – devastating in its simplicity.
“Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise others as persons,” he wrote.
Taken from his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this sentence sums up his insistence that oppression itself is violence. It is because it denies the humanity of the oppressed. It reduces people to numbers, to problems to be managed, to statistics in a casualty report.
This is where Freire’s voice becomes crucial for NGOs such as AOAV. When we document explosive harm in Ukraine or monitor drone casualties in Gaza, we are not merely gathering data. We are resisting the dehumanisation of those whose deaths are too often written off as collateral. We are asserting, as Freire would demand we do, that the first act of liberation from violence is to name the violence – and to name the victims as subjects, not objects.
Banking violence
Freire’s metaphor of the “banking model” of education – the idea that knowledge is “deposited” into passive recipients – offers up a powerful and disturbing analogy for how modern systems of violence work. In this model, authority is never truly questioned. The teacher speaks, the student sucks it up. The powerful command, the powerless have no choice but to obey.
This is also how states wage modern war. Targets are identified from afar. Orders are issued. Civilians are instructed to evacuate, to comply, to submit. In Gaza, in Sanaa, in Kramatorsk – the people on the ground are expected to behave not as thinking humans, but as obedient chess pieces on a bloodied black and white board.
Freire’s response to this is to challenge the entire dynamics of power: he calls for what he calls “a dialogical model”. This is one where knowledge is co-created; where humans engage in mutual transformation.
Freire demands that we ask: who is speaking? Who is being silenced? And what would justice look like if it began with the voices of the oppressed? If we applied these questions to international relations, to military interventions, to so-called humanitarian bombing campaigns, the results would be very different from the framings we are offered up by them today.
Conscientisation and critical awareness
Freire’s novel idea of conscientização – perhaps best translated as “conscientisation” or critical consciousnes – extends beyond the limits of education. It is, in the end, about taking off the veil that blinds us. About awakening people to the structures that shape our lives.
To do so is deeply threatening to pre-existing violent systems of power. It risks showing them to be what they truly are: self-serving.
When people begin to see that poverty is not their fault, but the result of economic violence. When they understand that racial inequality is not accidental, but institutional. When they realise that the bombs falling on their homes are not a failure of policy, but an expression of power…. then the system is revealed.
Freire’s pedagogy, then, is a pedagogy of rupture.
It does not seek to reform or even accomodate systems of violence. It seeks to unveil them, to strip away their legitimacy. And in doing so, it arms the oppressed with that most powerful of weapons: awareness.
Illumination is, in this regard, as powerful as intimidation.
The oppressor within
But Freire does not stop there. He also warns of something arguably far more insidious. That the oppressed, raised in a world of domination, may – over time – internalise the logic of the oppressor.
That they may come to believe in their own inferiority. That they may even replicate systems of violence if they are ever given a brief seat at the tables of power.
His, then, is not a call to some moral equivalence. His is a call to transformation. Freire is adamant: liberation cannot be achieved by reversing roles, for that usually turns the oppressed into the new oppressors.
So when Fidel Castro and his guerrillas overthrew the Cuban Batista regime in 1959, they did so in the name of liberation. They did so promising justice, equality, and empowerment for the poor. And yet, slowly but surely their promises became dust. The revolutionary government centralised power, silenced dissent, and imprisoned political opponents. Those very structures of domination that had once oppressed the people were not dismantled by the revolutionaries. They were just served back up in a different language.
True liberation, Freire argued, has to be mutual. It has to humanise both sides. Domination alone does not change the world: dialogue does.
And this is where any human-rights-facing NGO must be vigilant. In calling out the violence of states and militias, we must all resist the dangers of romanticising resistance. Rebellion is not a moral force alone. Freire is there to remind us, constantly, that the ends do not justify the means.
That liberation must be ethical and shared and constant and remembering of its origins, or it is not liberation at all.
A pedagogy of hope
Of course, Freire was not naïve. He knew violence intimately – through his exile, his imprisonment, and the surveillance that was met upon him. And yet, he insisted on hope.
“What if we discovered,” he once wrote, “that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become more fully human?”
This has to be the question that lurks at the beating heart of any serious philosophy of violence.
Not whether violence is legal. Not whether it is strategic. But whether it helps us all become more human – or less.
For AOAV, it lays out a distinctive framing of accountability and memory.
To record violence, yes. And to expose it. But also to hear the voices of communities speak back. To support victims not just with data, but – where we can – with solidarity. To treat testimony not just as evidence, but as dialogue. As the living word.
Conclusion: naming the world, changing the world
Paulo Freire’s legacy then is not a theory of war. It is, rather, a theory of voice, one infused with dignity. and resistance without hatred. It speaks directly to the dehumanising logic that stalks military violence today. In Gaza, for instance, grassroots educational initiatives led by AOAV aimed to empower students through storytelling and critical discussion – even amidst the rubble of war – to produce this film of discourse.
To engage in Freirean ethics is to refuse silence. To teach, not to dominate. To listen, not to extract. And to believe that even amid brutality, there is the possibility of an encounter. A meeting.
As Freire wrote: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful – not to be neutral.” And in a world where violence is increasingly abstracted, automated, and justified through metrics, perhaps this is the most radical stance of all.
He urges us, then to take a side. To name the violence. And then to begin again – with dialogue. Anything else just urges history to repeat itself, and terribly.
Further reading:
- Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. Penguin Books, 1996.
- Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness (1974). Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Did you find this story interesting? Please support AOAV's work and donate.
Donate