Fragmented Peace(s): Toward City-wide Peace Learning Systems

• In Event: Educating for Peaceful Futures: Storytelling, Hopepunk Futures, and Social Cohesion

Proposal

Fragmented Peace(s): Toward City-wide Peace Learning Systems

This paper introduces the concept of City-wide Peace Learning Systems (CPLS) as an educational framework that broadens the scope of peace education through a public pedagogy that engages multiple sectors and urban communities in generating and sharing knowledge about building peace. Unlike approaches that situate peace education primarily within schools, CPLS highlights the importance of various epistemic ecosystems where formal and informal educators; teachers, youth leaders, community organizers, cultural workers, and municipal actors contribute to collective learning processes.
This paper argues that education research must expand its focus beyond schools to embrace the wider ecosystems of educational practice where peace is both learned and sustained. CPLS provides one such framework, emphasizing the integration of diverse pedagogical practices, spatial coordination across neighborhoods, and the creation of meshed networks that may help disrupt cycles of violence and foster structural change.
To explore elements of how this framework operates in practice, the paper examines two case studies of interventions aimed at advancing City-wide Peace Learning Systems: the Baltimore Peace Summit and pilot project in the United States, and the Urban Peacebuilding Exchange (UPEX) with Valparaíso, Chile. Together, these cases illustrate both the opportunities and the challenges of building citywide infrastructures for peace learning in contexts marked by division and inequality.

Theoretical Framework and Justification
This paper attempts to conceptualize a peace learning system by framing it as a citywide educational ecosystem that organically and intentionally weaves together diverse actors, practices, and spaces to support the conditions for peacebuilding. Unlike traditional peace education models, which often focus on classroom-based curricula, or single programs, a peace learning system emphasizes connectivity, coordination, and adaptability across an entire urban context. This paper is anchored in interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of peace education, urban peacebuilding, complexity theory, and urban conflict transformation. Consistent with complexity theory, peace learning systems exhibit emergent behavior; outcomes arise from the interactions of many participants and initiatives, rather than from top-down design alone. Learning then can be understood as emergent property of these interconnected learning locals that make up the system and interact with each other. This requires novel methodological approaches to track pedagogical and curricular diffusion and knowledge dissemination across these spaces.

Methodology / Approach
The analysis uses an action research methodology to gather data and examine two pilot initiatives that are meant to play a role in exploring the possibilities for advancing a CPLS framework:
1. Baltimore Pilot Project and Peace Summit (USA)
o Convened 15 frontline organizations including violence interrupters, educators, municipal leaders, and community-based practitioners.
o Methods included interactive workshops, initial network and spatial mapping, and follow-up peer learning and professional development sessions.
o Data sources: field observations, workshop outputs, participant surveys, and peacebuilder maps
2. Urban Peacebuilding Exchange (UPEX) with Valparaíso (Chile)
o Structured as a three-phase exchange: pre-departure reflection circles, immersion workshops in Chile, and post-return integration sessions.
o Activities included cross-cultural dialogues, community site visits, arts-based pedagogy workshops, and collaborative storytelling.
o Data sources: reflective journals, group debriefs, and participant interviews.

Findings:
• Baltimore:
o Mapping exercises revealed some areas where there was a lack of contact across organizations that were in proximity but also latent potential for coordination.
o The Peace Summit catalyzed new partnerships and explored possibilities for a citywide peacebuilder map.
o Pointed toward potential for follow-up workshops and digital communication platforms to strength knowledge exchange
• UPEX Exchange (Baltimore–Valparaíso):
o Transnational collaboration exposed participants to arts and experiential based pedagogies in Chile and Baltimore in ways that catalyzed insights about peace pedagogy.
o Exchange participants reported enhanced contextual understanding, overlap of strategic challenges and identified future opportunities for collaboration.
o The process seeded comparative insights that re-energized Baltimore’s practices and inspired Chilean colleagues to adapt mapping methods locally.
Challenges:
1. Fragmentation across sectors: Formal educators, community practitioners, and policymakers often operate in silos, with limited mechanisms for collaboration or knowledge-sharing.
2. Spatial inequities: Without deliberate mapping and coordination, interventions risk leaving certain neighborhoods underserved, perpetuating cycles of exclusion.
3. Power imbalances: Partnerships across schools, governments, and grassroots organizations can reproduce hierarchies, marginalizing the voices of community actors or youth most directly affected by violence.
4. Resource sustainability: Citywide systems require ongoing investment in facilitation, coordination, and infrastructure—resources that are often scarce and vulnerable to shifting political and funding priorities.
5. Measuring impact in complex systems: Traditional evaluation frameworks may struggle to capture the relational, emergent, and long-term outcomes of CPLS in the future, making it harder to demonstrate effectiveness to funders and policymakers.
6. Navigating cultural and political contexts: Efforts to integrate diverse actors must remain sensitive to local histories, cultural practices, and political dynamics, which can either strengthen or undermine collaborative peacebuilding.

Significance of the Study
This paper makes four contributions to the field:
1. Re-examining the scope of education research: Rather than positioning City-wide Peace Learning Systems (CPLS) as a definitive solution, our findings suggest that efforts to integrate formal and informal educators open important questions about the possibilities and limitations of such collaboration. These efforts raise methodological challenges for researchers—particularly around how to document, track, and evaluate complex, evolving systems without oversimplifying them.
2. Operationalizing spatial equity: These efforts raise important questions about if mapping and coordination can help ensure that peace education is distributed more equitably across urban landscapes.
3. Advancing comparative methodologies: The UPEX exchange illustrates how city-to-city learning can expand peace education scholarship and exchange in the informal sector and potentially foster global solidarity through those connections can be difficult to sustain.
4. Building connective infrastructures for peace: By cultivating collaborative networks across sectors, CPLS may be able to contribute in the long run to systemic transformation, embedding education in the broader project of urban resilience, justice, and healing. Discovering the sources of vital energy, interest and participation that could help sustain such efforts remains a generative area research and practice.

Author

• Arthur Romano, George Mason University