Civil defence education: (Non)specific dangers and destabilisation of actorship in education

Introduction

In an era when Western societies are strongly polarised over many values and real or perceived dangers, nationalism and populism are emerging as part of the legitimisation of many social and political protective projects (Bonikowski, 2016; Hadiz & Chryssogelos, 2017). Often almost as part of the mainstream public debate (Bevelander & Wodak, 2019). Researchers are concerned about the increasing tendency to divide society into “us” and “them”, while actors seem ultimately to separate into antagonistic groups that are seen as a danger to each other (Bugaric, 2019; Kotwas & Kubik, 2019; Woods & Debs, 2013). However, the definition and visibility of a danger depend on relations to legitimate ideas and actors – on legitimation practices. Populism enters into the structure of the political communication on the dangers and articulations of social problems in ways that usually create a binary “we” versus “they” opposition. De Cleen and Stavrakakis define it thus: “populism is a way of discursively constructing and claiming to represent ‘the people’, as underdog […] it interpellates citizens as members of ‘the people’, considered as an underdog, and opposed along a vertical down/up axis to ‘the elite’, conceived as a small and illegitimately powerful and privileged group.” (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2020, p. 2)

Education seems to be the first (legitimate) choice for dealing with dangers of any kind and as a means of stabilising societies and their progress and of healing their defects (Davies & Mehta, 2018; Popkewitz, 2000; Szelewa, 2021). This is a promise, which is still related to modern registers of administration (Popkewitz, 2001). It is argued that, although conditions today differ from those in which the modern nation and school emerged, contemporary educational ordering projects operate by reconstituting national imaginaries (Lappalainen, 2006; Millei, 2019; Popkewitz, 2001). Although a number of studies have focused on defence education projects, most have done so from the perspective of policy analysis (Kitagawa et al., 2017; Šimíčková, 2018; Spohrer & Bailey, 2020), curricular analysis (Kitagawa, 2015), or the agency of schools and children (Preston, 2016). As such they were policy, curricular, and historical responses to societal calls for more defence education. This wave of studies led to important insights into the social outcomes of such policies and curricula and focused attention on the reconfiguration of education in terms of controlling minds and behaviours (Spohrer & Bailey, 2020) or life skills for everyday risks (Kitagawa, 2015). However, in our study we focused on the possibility and source of such societal calls to education to change this or that way, which is a relational sociological question (for grounding ideas see Emirbayer, 1997). Therefore, the main questions posed by this paper are what one of these ordering educational projects, in our case civil defence education (CDE), does to education, how nationalism and populism intervene, and what it means for agential patterns in educational governance. By answering these questions through the lenses of relational and processual ontology, we hope to advance our knowledge of the social embeddedness of normativity in educational governance.

In this paper, we understand CDE to be a complex ordering project that has reshaped itself many times in relation to its environments, actors, international political situations, and the meaning of education. We trace the dangers and the endangered things that education should prevent. We ask whether stability has been created and how this CDE initiative has changed. Additional questions relate to both the form and relations of dangers and patterns of actorship. What is the relationship between the nation, state, and school? Which of these is in danger? And what exactly is that danger? Who are the actors promoting CDE and how are they involved in education? In what way is the CDE project a public matter, and how are the educational actors involved in this debate?

In the paragraphs that follow, we outline the history of Czech CDE in the international context. Describing the research case as contextual and relational, we conceptualise the relational nature of the dangers, patterns of actorship, and nationalist and populist content interfering in the legitimation of educational initiatives. We draw on relational sociology and the analysis of articulations in political sociology. The methodological part describes two comparative sub-corpora of data and the relational analysis of legitimation practices. The examination consists of several layers of analysis. We have divided the empirical part into three sections showing how the educational project has been transformed into a political battlefield and the specific external dangers have become a general ubiquitous danger. These transformations stabilised the subservient position of education and, mutually, destabilised the position of educators such as teachers, principals, academic pedagogues, and education officials. We conclude by observing that there is a dividing line between the world about education and the world of education.

International dimension of CDE

There is a long history of calls for civil defence education, often co-triggered by “exceptional” events. However, several versions of resurgence of this kind of education has appeared. These protective educational projects have developed in various ways in response to both local circumstances and histories and global events, whether in relation to natural disasters (Chadderton, 2015), the financial crisis (Lúcio & I’Anson, 2015), or the migration crisis (in our case), as we will show next.

In the Czech Lands, CDE occupied a relatively strong position in people’s memories beginning in the Communist era, when CDE was associated not only with physical training, but also military and nationalist content. This applied to many countries directly or indirectly under Soviet domination. Until recently the general curriculum retained elements such as physical fitness, first aid, and field orientation (Šimíčková, 2018), although CDE as a subject was dropped after the revolution in 1989. Nonetheless, the totalitarian legacy of CDE created special conditions for its contemporary renewal in terms of the composition of the actors and discursive divides. CDE does not have a stable position in the Czechia today: the only policy to have materialised was the POKOS project (preparation of citizens for state defence), which was created under the Ministry of Defence and became part of the law in 2013. Under this initiative several school subjects contained components of protection and responses to exceptional situations, with children learning first aid and key concepts relating to the work of the security forces, the army, and international military bodies. In addition, students attended special army presentations in school to “naturally expand their knowledge” about the work of the armed forces (Šimíčková, 2018). These presentations were greatly criticized for their “militarisation” (Czech Journal, 2016). However, in the eyes of most proponents CDE has not been appropriately enacted because it is not yet a separate school subject. Similar military pushes in education are not uncommon in a range of countries. Depending on the promises of such interventions to education systems, the idea is that they will generally help reverse some of the failings of the system and protect endangered values, by for example increasing the disciplinary powers of teachers in excluded localities, as in the British Troops to Teachers (Chadderton, 2014), improving discipline among troubled young people, as in the Australian boot camps (Mills & Pini, 2015), or increasing defence capacity against the “invasion” of immigrants (Sedláková, 2017). These military pushes vary but share a common denominator: a general attitude that holds education as a universal tool that should serve whatever.

People in many European countries also have historical experience with a certain articulation of the concept of danger and threat in the education system; in the United Kingdom, in the 1980s, there was an effort to educate children in self-care in the event of war or other serious dangers through a formalised transformation of the curriculum (Preston, 2015). The aim of this policy was to set up a system for teaching children about how to protect themselves in dangerous or risky events. The content was not primarily ideological as it was in Communist education. It was part of “critical infrastructure protection” and relied on the involvement of a wide group of actors including the private and civic sectors (Kitagawa, Preston, & Chadderton, 2017: 1451-1452). The concept of “disaster education” also emerged in German education, but was part of lifelong learning so it was designed for the whole population within the framework of voluntary education, not just for children. The agenda was implemented at the national level (Chadderton, 2015). Apart from preparing citizens how to behave in dangerous situations, it included components such as building a national identity and the formation of occasional or cultural patterns that would be further reproduced in society. Outside Western Europe, variations on the concept of protective education have been developed and promoted in Serbia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United States (Beres et al., 2016; Kitagawa et al., 2017).

The migration crisis that started in 2015 had a great effect on educational governance. Across Europe a socially-oriented xenophobic nationalism appeared (Bugaric, 2019; Krzyżanowski et al., 2018). A kind of “nationalist, authoritarian populism, that combined with either economic protectionism or almost left-wing-oriented social policy, promises to protect the ordinary people abandoned by the liberal elites” (Bugaric, 2019, p. 391). Such promises appeared in Czechia, where there was pressure for bolstering CDE as a separate school subject. Actors from the far right and far left were the most publicly active in this regard. They not only exploited the media coverage on the “crisis” (Nygaard, 2019; Sedláková, 2017) but also actively created a moral panic about the threat to national values and the right to defend them (through education) in publicly expressed opinions (Krämer, 2017). Political scientists have described this as a populist tendency that translates the broad and complex issue of the migrant crisis into a limited repertoire of national problems (Haller et al., 2019). This salient feature – bringing the CDE debate into public and media articulations also influenced our methodological choices. Much of the research on political populism has demonstrated how populist leaders and political actors used the crisis to make themselves visible, popular, and influential in public and political discourse, typically through the media or social network platforms (Hameleers, 2019; Moffitt, 2015). In the Czech CDE debate, the migration crisis and the associated debates on security issues were typically used to declare genuine concerns about people and society. These crisis references were considerably articulated through the so-called alternative (far-right) media, as in other countries (Císař & Štětka, 2018; Haller et al., 2019), and helped much to make CDE appealing. While the focus on populism has been extensively covered in the research (media analysis and political science), the sociological question of what these crisis preparedness agendas have to do with education remains. In fact, education has been portrayed as a universal healer for the dangers defined by both the far-right and liberals worldwide (Splitter, 2022).

All these variations (geographical, political, educational) show that CDE does not represent any stable content and that its many manifestations need to be scrutinised in relation to the actors and interplay between external and internal events in the topological demarcation of legitimate goals and actors in education.

Topological relations – dangers and legitimation in education

In this article, we focus on dangers and education as a matter of the practice of legitimation that brings about more or less shared definitions of endangered things that should be protected by education. Such a discourse-practice-governance approach has a long Foucauldian tradition in the sociology of education (Ball, 1990; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998) that goes beyond a structural theory of reproduction to a social theory more attentive to the dynamics of action and knowledge (Popkewitz, 2001). With insights from social topology (Allen, 2016; Harvey, 2012) and relational ontology (Abbott, 1995, 2016; Benjamin, 2015; Emirbayer, 1997) recent research in education has moved on from essentialist presuppositions about actors, knowledge and formal distances (Decuypere & Simons, 2016). This research (for comprehensive and exhaustive overview of relational approaches see Vandenberghe, 2018) focuses on practices of topologically demarcating legitimate goals and actors in education, within both formalised, ex ante, sets of coordinates and those created by these practices. Practices of demarcating educational normativity do not necessarily exist in a stable relation; the situation is processual and continues to tie various elements together (as actors, spatiality, knowledge) that are inherited and coded in ensuing situations. In this it is amenable to change, disruption, loosening, or disintegration. For Abbott (2016), a processual sociologist, neither actors nor locations are pre-existing positions; the relational process is prior to them and constitutes and delimits them. Therefore the patterns ultimately vary in terms of their temporal duration and degree of exclusion, whether they are single individuals, groups, alliances, or overlapping or exclusive actors (Abbott, 2016, p. 46). Employed in educational governance, this approach allows us to empirically trace and indicate various relations that shape different and (or conflicting) educational reasonings and actors’ positions and their externalities/internalities. Positions that legitimate different dangers and relations to education stabilise various versions of “us” and “them”.

A relational approach therefore focuses on relations that enable the presence of a given ordering project through the stabilisation and destabilisation of coordinates and arrangements (agential, contents, knowledge) (Allen, 2016). ^[1] This approach does not focus only on policy or the curricular content of a given ordering project. Applied to civil defence education, we focus on the sociality of this agenda, on the actors and audiences involved (proponents and critics), and on their relations, which lead to change and continuity in the normative situations promoting CDE. Destabilisation therefore means a change that significantly alters the previous relations (for example, in mainstream sociology of education it is taken for granted that state governance bodies formally responsible for education determine educational goals (Robertson & Dale, 2008). On the other hand, stabilisation does not have the negative meaning indicating the untouched previous state of affairs. Similarly, as destabilisation never means completely abandoning old relations of normativity, stabilisation is a process of fixing new relations that allow for normative situations. Stabilisation and destabilisation therefore do bear any moral meaning of good and evil in relational terms rather than essential ones (Emirbayer, 1997). Thus, our question was what relations are involved in the long-term CDE agenda, how do these change, and what effect do they have. What are the relations constituting the elements that allowed such a situation (noneducational military enthusiasts, populists, and far-right politicians calling for civil defence education) to develop?

This line of thinking is congruent with concepts from nationalism and populism studies (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017, 2020). Like these authors, we think that in the case of educational governance the creation of “us” versus “them” is both open and limited by actual situations and practices. Nationalism and populism are not stable things with predetermined content; they are dependent on their relations. Empirical questions are precisely the various articulated elements that revolves around the axes of “us” and “them” (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017). Categorising “us” and “them” – making “others” (people and things) a “danger” – is a well-documented practice in political battles that constitutes national imaginaries (Popkewitz, 2001). Through relational lenses, the nation may then occupy various positions – of danger, an endangered thing to be protected, or the basis for those who proclaim to be its representative – and these positions are topologically related. Moreover, various elements may be found within these positions. As indicated, we consider the public debate about CDE to be a complexity (Law & Mol, 2002); it entails changing and variably connecting/disconnecting political, educational, and social dimensions.

Methodology and material

The case of the Czech CDE debate limits us to specific empirical occurrences (articulations); it has taken place mainly in public discourse through various media promotions, opinions, criticisms, justifications, reasonings, moral panics, ironic metaphors, and other practices, operations, and qualifications. Nevertheless, such public discourse has mutual consequences and is driven by specific patterns of actorship. Therefore, the methodology selected for this research was qualitative media research, together with interviews.

In both the media entries and interviews, we traced legitimation practices in public articulations that stabilised various relations of agential positions and discourses as statements that were possible to make (or not) and justify or criticise. For this purpose, we used relational analysis as our tool for analysing the textual content of media entries and interview transcription. Analysis was based on Beno Herzog’s new critical approach to discourse, which goes beyond classical critical normative assumptions and aims at revealing the reconstruction of the normative basis of arguments used in social practices (Herzog, 2016). We complement this relational analysis with De Cleen and Stavrakakis’ suggested articulation analysis (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2020). Our approach, although going beyond the assumption of predefined content of nationalism, populism, and dangers, does not go beyond a structured view of these phenomena. The minimum structural element is the logical analytical axis of ingroup/outgroup articulations (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2020). Both of these methodological resources are compatible, and it was necessary to use these since the research question was about a complex and evolving initiative and focused on relations between various elements, not just one specific element. Therefore, we needed to capture normative relations (Herzog) and dividing relations (De Cleen & Stavrakakis) to understand the relational topological arrangements in the CDE project. The combination of these methodological resources enables us to discern various topological arrangements of the political (in a broad sense) connectivity (Knutsson & Lindberg, 2017).

We chose material that was normative in the sense of containing claims about what ought to be. To do that we analysed the lines of arguments and their systems of reasoning in media content produced to promote, justify, and criticise CDE, such as media entries, press releases, published interviews, and blog posts. Our dataset consists of media entries from the Newton media archive of full texts of media reports from all the Czech media (NEWTON Media, a.s.). We filtered out a total of 554 media reports, based on lemmatised Czech keywords (Eng: civil defence education, patriotic education), published from 2012 to 2019. From this we selected a group for closer examination: a group with the largest number of media reports about education mitigating particular dangers (total 275). Subsequently, we made the division in this group on the basis of thematic analysis identifying different meanings of danger linked to the CDE agenda. In the first cluster, from February to September 2016 (83 media reports), we identified a focus on dangers coming from beyond Czech national borders. In the second cluster of public debates, from September 2017 to May 2018 (192 media reports), we identified a focus on potential dangers within the Czech state and society. In both clusters we traced the content and the meaning of the “danger” that the education would have to address. Omitting regional, special interest and hobby magazines, we selected broad-coverage media, newspapers, blog servers, radio broadcasts, and television stations. Mainstream media dominated in the two clusters. Most CDE proponents were published in alternative (far-right) media. Table 1 displays the percentage of the type of media and gives a breakdown of the media entries.

The main actors in this dataset were identified by the number of published articles written by the actor or in which the actor was the main voice. To the corpus we added six semi-structured interviews with those either in favour or against introducing CDE into Czech education, from across the political spectrum. The interviews focused on the formation of normative expectations about the CDE agenda, the development of legitimation practices (over time and in the context of external influences), and the involvement/actions of other actors. Another important aspect was the way in which the interviewees related their views on the CDE agenda to their experiences (personal, professional, political). The interviews took place during the spring of 2021 and were held online owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each lasted around an hour and was recorded with the explicit consent of the respondent and subsequently transcribed. The respondents’ political affiliations are given in Table 1.

Political divides – relations between (non)specific dangers and politics

The thematic content analysis revealed that there were political divides in the way the dangers were perceived or discussed that in some way reflected the political divides in Czech politics. Actors referred to what they considered threatening in a specific or nonspecific manner and developed different arguments legitimising the introduction of CDE. However, political actors of different ideological persuasions commented on CDE with varying intensity. Historically, in representational politics extremist parties have won a relatively small share of seats in comparison to the democratic mainstream, although they have become more popular, as in other countries (Bevelander & Wodak, 2019). Although far-right and far-left parties held a small share of parliamentary seats during the time of the research (21.79% of all votes in the 2013 elections to the Chamber of Deputies, 18.4% in 2017) (Czech Statistical Office, 2013, 2017) and won only about one-fifth of all votes, actors from these parties were the main proponents (among the parties) of making CDE a separate school subject. The descriptive analysis of the media entries shows that far-right and far-left media channels (mainly alternative media) were a major platform for proponents (political or otherwise) of this agenda, whereas mainstream media and public broadcasting provided space for news and criticism of CDE. Given the methodological statism (Robertson & Dale, 2008)– they should not succeed in pushing a particular policy – and they did not. However, they did succeed in setting the discourse and arranging conditions for legitimation practices in which some actors, knowledge, and relations were stabilised or destabilised.

On the one hand, CDE was not a key issue for representatives of the “traditional” (mainstream) (Venizelos, 2021) centre-right and centre-left parties (ODS – the Civic Democratic Party, and ČSSD – the Czech Social Democratic Party); although, they did emphasise the general need for preventive lessons so children can respond to emergencies and crisis situations, provide first aid, or gain basic knowledge about the military’s function. Children should learn these skills through CDE so they can automatise certain habits as much as possible and be capable of relying on them in a potential (unspecified) crisis situation. On the other hand, parties on the far right and far left of the political spectrum (KSČM – the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, and SPD – Freedom and Direct Democracy) adopted a more populist approach that depicted the elements of danger as a simplification of reality, and in doing so purported to present a natural common sense approach (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018). Far-left actors considered terrorism and school shootings to be the main threats, arguing that not even the police, let alone the education system, were prepared for these situations (Interview 4 – KSČM). For the far right it was not only migration and terrorism that were dangerous, but the shift away from values they considered important. According to one respondent, this shift could lead to “moral decline and loss of values” (Interview 5 – SPD). The argument was that there should be greater emphasis on national values in children’s upbringing and human values should be strengthened with references to the past: “it was better then” (Interview 6 – ANO), along with skills such as those taught in technical studies (Sedláková, 2017). The far right thought these skills and habits should be taught and embedded in curriculum.

Taken together, in the non-mainstream opinion spheres (far-left and far-right) we observed a more specific articulation in which danger provided the justification for introducing CDE into education. Conservative values and society seemed to be endangered by specific dangers, by the alienated state, migrants, and those referred to in populist terms as elite decision makers who forget about their nation. While far-left views operated by articulating the dangers in everyday events that one should be prepared for, the far-right views of danger tended to personalise them in relation to specific social groups or phenomena. Both camps, however, debated the legitimacy of CDE without taking into account pedagogical expertise or the state administration. One political proponent of CDE even accused the Ministry of Education of not taking any real steps with regard to this agenda and said that “the Ministry of Education pretended not to know anything” (Interview 3 – ČSSD).

Transition of dangers and their topological patterns

The political divides described above were not the only agential pattern identified in the empirical material, and politicians were not the only actors involved in the CDE project. Below, we will demonstrate how specific topological patterns of legitimation practices evolved around CDE and dangers.

Destabilisation of actorship in education

From the very beginning, the CDE agenda was largely captured by far-right politicians and their “military experts”, who were often recruited from former Communist police bodies, and set the discourse against the EU, NATO, multiculturalism, and globalisation, and in favour of the idea that CDE is a natural, necessary lever for defending the nation. The far-right dominance of CDE remained, but the strong tone was slightly diluted and more critical and diverse voices appeared. The danger was less specific, but CDE was still the means of gaining a political agential position. Although the image of migrant crisis disappeared, as previously mentioned, the CDE agenda was not abandoned; it turned into permanent preparation for various dangers. The promotion of such education continued to gain attention, and helped stabilise political positions in the public debate in the pre-election period and beyond. Education was the most stable element in all these debates, always being called upon to perform different tasks. However, education was not the “central subject” in the nation – danger – education trinity; central subject was a presence in a political position. As one blogger noted, “politicians make themselves visible by giving tasks to the Ministry of Education” (8.2.2018, idnes.cz).

Despite differing in agential patterns, definitions of dangers and topological arrangements, in the two periods the extent to which educational actors such as teachers and school principals have a voice did not change. Similar journalist interpretations of the short opinion surveys and similar answers prevailed. Although some of these actors welcomed the initiative for a separate, stronger CDE, the majority were more concerned with specific didactic and pedagogical problems.

“I think it’s stupid. Whenever something is missing in society, someone tries to throw it at the schools. At the same time, we already teach children elements of the old civil defence education in other subjects.” The principal does not hide his disagreement. At the same time the principal pointed out that the time allocated to other subjects would have to change. “With a new subject, we would have to remove English, for example,” he concluded. (22.2.2018, Deník)

In these rare articulations of CDE from school principals and teachers, the idea that CDE should be a separate school subject was seen as redundant, as it was already taught in other related subjects. From inside the world of education, the CDE agenda was considered alien to pedagogical practice, as being pushed externally by those less easily identified since the governing bodies did not provide the schools with adequate timely information, and because even these formal bodies occupied a weak position in the public CDE discourse for they were not involved in the discussion, they were not partners but task takers.

These topological arrangements of actorship among proponents, critics, teachers and principals, state officials, and academic pedagogues indicate the specific destabilisation of internal/external certainties. Let us highlight two things relevant to our argument about the stabilisation/destabilisation of education. On the one hand, the topological arrangements of actorship around CDE stabilised the idea that education is a given but not part of the debate, so to say, as something which is taken for granted as being here to serve and as a means of achieving various goals, in our case defence. This utilitarian approach was present in the public articulations of both far-right and liberal proponents. On the other hand, however, such a means can work only when it is stable, fixed, and given (Abbott, 2016, p. 283); that means when made governable (Grimaldi, 2019; Seddon, 2014). Nevertheless, our findings did not fit this argument of making education governable, but irrelevant. In the CDE debate education was not something that should be governed, but that should serve.

The inner world of education was not a relevant part of the debate and nor were actors such as teachers, principals, academic pedagogues, and officials, with the particular exception of the Czech School Inspectorate. We are not saying that these actors were not present, nor that they did not voice their opinions in any way, nor that they were silenced by the powerful ones. In the CDE debate, educational actors’ position as important subjects was destabilised by the stabilisation of education’s position of subservience. The internal world of education – its own processes, time dimensions, curricular issues, pedagogical psychologies – was not in the relevant position; it was external to the public debate on CDE. And this touches on the second part of the argument. The CDE debate was external to the internal problems of education; it separated itself as a debate about education, but without education, through the process of justifying and criticising enacted by the main actors in the public debate about CDE. This resulted in mutual externality between debate about education and internal world of education and rendered internal educational issues and the public debates about them irrelevant. Thus, we think that it was here that the world of education and the world about education became divided – this case did not set up what might be called a common table over CDE, with the chairs around it reflecting different opinions. Rather, education was a black box that should simply function as others decided.

Discussion

This section will discuss our findings about the transformation of dangers, ideological basis triggering a public agenda, topological patterns, and destabilisation of educational agency with respect to the current CDE research.

Specific threats such as natural or energy disasters can be seen as a potential threat to the nation in many countries (Chadderton, 2015; Kitagawa et al., 2017; Mills & Pini, 2015; Preston, 2016). However, in the Czech situation there was a gradual change in the framing of dangers, in which they became vaguer and were articulated more generally as threats to Czech national (or European, Western) society. Unlike the communist version of the CDE, the current CDE is not framed directly on an ideological basis. In the Czech case, however, conservatism exerted a particular influence, focusing on the continuity of nationalistic values and its power to strengthen the ability of people to take care of themselves and their safety and thus protect their own nation from various dangers. Although the risks have changed their form towards more general and ubiquitous, the migration crisis was the key trigger for this conservative return to education through the CDE public agenda, in contrast to other countries. Foreign comparative studies have not reported this kind of ideological education content (Kitagawa et al., 2017).

Previous research has also addressed the issue of actors who either actually participated in protective educational projects or ideally should make this type of education more comprehensive (Kitagawa et al., 2017; Splitter, 2022; Spohrer & Bailey, 2020). We found a similar claim in our interviews: that the education sector and the defence and security forces should cooperate in implementing the CDE. Nevertheless, this cooperation with educational actors never took place within the time frame we studied. Moreover, the primary intended recipient of CDE was primary and secondary school children. In Germany, for example, these pedagogies were part of the lifelong learning system (Chadderton, 2015).

Discussing existing research, we see that CDE actors have different approaches to identifying the dangers the population should be protected against. However, in our case, the solution was education regardless of the perceived danger (migrants, values, disasters), or what was perceived to be in danger (the nation, democracy, society), and regardless of the actors’ relationship to the system. Therefore our findings partly fit the argument that education is being reconfigured into a new, modern administrative register (Popkewitz, 2001; Spohrer & Bailey, 2020). The finding that the dangers are becoming more general also partly fits the argument that there are new ways of distributing risks in advanced or late modernities (Giddens, 1997). However, in our paper we argue that CDE presents different ways of generating normativity in education which are more topological.

Before and during the pandemic, it gradually became harder to identify clear enemies in a world of diffused or universal dangers. In Communist society, it was much easier, and it was geared by the explicit topographical ontology given by the Cold war. In CDE the transformation of the dangers went from specific to general. However, clear topographical means have given way to more topological constructions of dangers and agential positions (Allen, 2016). The Czech CDE is part of this process. Nevertheless, even if education is seen as a tool to fight a general enemy, the educational actors end up in more destabilised situations. The circumstances described in our study did not bring about greater stability (for the nation, education, or agency); quite the contrary. We observe that the educational domain is less and less the domain of education, which is a more general trend we think across Europe, where many battles are taking place over whom education belongs to (Elken, 2018; Fumasoli et al., 2018; Kauko et al., 2018; Wirthová, 2021).

Conclusion

In this paper, through the lenses of relational sociology and topological analysis, we tried to offer thinking about CDE that aimed at securing society against different dangers as complex and changeable topological arrangements. Through these arrangements, the CDE as an educational ordering project became a place for various actors that actually displaced the educational ones. In the introduction we posed two sets of research questions: the first was about how dangers and endangered things are defined, and the second was about actorship patterns. We presented a four-fold argument: first we argue that specific external dangers are being transformed into general, internal, and ubiquitous dangers, and that these dangers rendered education responsible for something that was explicitly framed as unpredictable. This was demonstrated through the thematic and relational analysis of political divides in the first two empirical sections. The second part of the argument concerned the centrality of political positioning, and the third part, the paradoxical stabilisation of education. Education’s subservient role was stabilised mutually as educational actorship was destabilised, which was demonstrated in the last empirical section through relational analysis of the production of distance and irrelevance. The fourth part of the argument concludes the empirical section and relates to the process whereby the world of education is separated from the world about education.

Our empirical findings indicate that there is a relational loop of elements as actors, knowledge, dangers, and positions. Post-communist CDE was initiated by military enthusiasts and experts that came as a totalitarian heritage of Czechoslovakian CDE. During international events, these actors transformed into far-right political actors, and stabilised their unstable position among the political mainstream by an educational (social) agenda, framed as being for all ordinary people and against specific and personalised dangers. This process pushed the genuine educational issues (such as pedagogy and didactics) into a subservient role and educational actors (such as teachers, principals, and officials) into the position of respondent (the audience). In this loop, the CDE was legitimised as a military or general security problem that was reproduced by liberal actors, even though they were against CDE. Active presence in such an educational issue helped stabilise one’s agential position in the public space. This arrangement legitimised actors from non-educational spheres. Politicians, public experts, and military enthusiasts became relevant agents in defining new educational goals while educators were rendered irrelevant. Therefore, we suggest that contemporary nationalists’ claims in the sphere of education should be seen not as a sign of the reawakening of natural nation-states but as a sign of the reshaping of topological arrangements among political, educational, and civic actors in terms of divides, externality, and irrelevance. Divides, externalities, and proximities were achieved through the relational loop mentioned above, not through traditional formal (modern) jurisdictions.

It turns out that this understanding of education as something that must serve does not bring stability to either the nation or education, but destabilizes the agency position of real educators. We will probably see many new pushes of this kind, not necessarily in civil defence, but almost certainly against dangers and towards resilience. One such example is the COVID-19 pandemic, which is not only prompting a renewal of the idea of the “old” project to protect critical infrastructure (especially public healthcare and the education system), but is also bringing about new calls for general resilience, especially at the European transnational political level. It is also evident that further research is needed on the divides, externalities, and proximities and the potential ways in which the two worlds will grow apart, including in relation to various media genres and channels.