Security, Conflict Management, and Peacebuilding: Formal Education in Intrastate Political Agreements, 1989–2016

• In Event: Changing Educations in Conflict and Peace: War, Violence, and Education Reform

Proposal

The rhetoric of international donors and policymakers has firmly established education reform as key to peacebuilding in all its phases. However, major questions remain as to the frequency, context and framing of education reforms in peace accords worldwide, hampering understanding of the theories of change underpinning global education reform; of the norms guiding the design of peace accords; and of the obstacles to realising the peacebuilding potential of education.
This study answers these fundamental questions through a mixed methods analysis of a novel dataset of education reform in all the 286 political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2016, providing the most extensive and fine-grained data on education in global peace accords.
It shows that peace agreements severely circumscribe the peacebuilding potential of education in three respects: education is a rare component of peace agreements; the geopolitical context and broader contents of peace accords have limited impact on the inclusion of education reforms; and education reforms are primarily employed to further short-term negative peace (through a security frame and a conflict management frame). Only rarely peace accords use map positive peace through education (peacebuilding frame). This analysis also offers novel insights on the values and assumptions underpinning the design of worldwide political agreements.

Author

• Giuditta Fontana, University of Birmingham