Education for Peacebuilding: Tensions and Opportunities for Future Research

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Education for Peacebuilding (EfP) explores how education can support the peacebuilding process (Novelli and Smith 2011). Scholarly engagements in this area call for reforming and reconstructing education systems (resource allocation, governance structures, curricular revisions and language policies etc.) to address education inequalities and promote peace and social transformation (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2015, 2017, 2019; Lopes Cardozo and Shah 2016, 2021; Novelli and Higgins 2017). As captured by Novelli and Smith (2011, 14), EfP entails ‘the need for structural and institutional changes that involve changes to existing power relations within society’. In essence, then, EfP foregrounds the political role of education. It is about how education can play a role in moving toward the notion of positive peace: the presence of social justice and the absence of structural and cultural violence (Galtung, 1976).

An increasingly employed conceptual framework that explores how education might contribute to goals of social transformation and peacebuilding is the 4Rs framework (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2015). Combining social justice and transitional justice thinking, the 4Rs framework seeks to recognise multiple dimensions of inequality that often trigger conflicts and work to address the legacies of these conflicts in and through education (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2015). As expressed by Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith (2019), the framework’s central position is that inequalities and injustice (including within the education system) are essential for understanding the reasons for the outbreak of civil wars (the drivers of conflict) and that addressing inequalities (including in education) is necessary to bring about sustainable peace and overcome the legacies of conflict (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2017). Drawing on this framework, this panel considers cases where education is a key driver of conflict, but also offers hope for the future.

Through the development of four cases (violence in schools in the US, gendered corruption in Vietnam, intergenerational trauma among Karen refugees in Thailand, and increased in-migration in Nordic countries), we explore tensions and present new insights from the field. In our comparative analysis, we consider how ‘authoritarian’ or ‘illiberal’ peace (Lewis, Heathershaw, and Megoran 2018; Owen et al. 2018) are at play. We consider Basma Hajir’s (2023) work to reflect on how ‘the paradox of liberalism’ and ‘the paradox of decoloniality’ inform interventions and policy solutions, and consider opportunities to consider how educators can work on peace-building in the midst of post-conflict violence. The panel offers theoretically informed reflections and questions to stimulate further conversation.

Sub Unit

• Peace Education SIG

Chair

• Kristy Kelly, Drexel University

Individual Presentations

• Schools as Sites of Violence - Kathlyn Elliott, Boston Children's Hospital

• Corruption at the Crossroads: Gender, Education and Violence in Vietnam - Kristy Kelly, Drexel University

• Managing Transgenerational Trauma through Schooling: The Case of Migrant Karen Students Along the Thai/Myanmar Border - Mike Barrett, International Rescue Committee

• Intergroup Dialogue as Peace Education in Nordic Countries - Cindy Yovanov, Drexel University School of Education