Healing our communities: making peace education practical in post-genocide Rwanda

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Learning, curriculum & pedagogy

Proposal

If we
• make peace education available to out-of-school youth,
• bridge the gap between them and elders in a hierarchical society, and
• integrate the principles into facets of everyday life,

we greatly increase the sustainability of peace education. Karuna Center, Aegis Trust, and two other Rwandan organizations are putting this hypothesis to the test in a three-year USAID-funded program in 16 communities throughout Rwanda.

Peace education often focuses in schools for good reason; shaping youth’s perspective for a lifetime sets a great foundation. And yet youth can be highly challenged to know how to put the ideals into practice. They can get fired up and then have nowhere to go with it. Worse, in a hierarchical society where it is disrespectful for youth to speak in a setting with elders, youth’s enthusiasm for peace practices can be squelched if elders don’t agree.

Karuna Center for Peacebuilding has implemented peacebuilding programs in more than 30 conflict-affected countries since 1994. It co-designs and co-implements programs with host country organizations, keeping structured dialogue, conflict analysis, and conflict transformation at the center.

In Healing Our Communities: Promoting Social Cohesion in Rwanda, this peacebuilding consortium seeks to overcome these barriers so that youth respect cultural norms while sharing leadership to prevent a slide back into the decades of discrimination and violence that culminated in the devastating genocide. This project combines didactic peace education with intergenerational dialogues as a foundation for a common understanding of peace principles and skills along with intergenerational respect. The project’s youth arm works with post-secondary school youth—whether they graduated or not—to continue their learning and provide a sense of purpose at a stage when many youth are adrift. It provides many opportunities for guided application, so youth meaningfully contribute to their communities while conceiving what it means to put peace ideals into practice. And it embeds this youth education into sustained dialogues, and trauma healing work, among older genocide survivors, perpetrators, rescuers, bystanders, and refugees.

Each arm of the project promotes self-reflection and connection across these severe divides. It draws out the resilience of those who survived a horrific experience and helps them take another step toward healing and coming back together as a community, rather than merely coexisting. It provides opportunities to learn from each other, including youth learning about the genocide experience—some for the first time—and elders learning from the youth about conflict drivers and prevention.

Karuna will present on its work with over 4,000 individuals in 16 communities across Rwanda to promote social cohesion. We will take a deep dive into one aspect of the program - Youth leadership projects – a transformational process to build young leaders through trainings of turning applied research into impact-based service projects. The chair will then facilitate a discussion on the scalability of a model like this and how intergenerational dialogue can be applied in other educational programs and settings.

Author

• Ginny Morrison, Karuna Center for Peacebuilding