Critically understanding education for peace and trust: a global network to overcome injustices

The potential role of education in both fueling and tackling the intractable aspects of conflict, and its possible influence over peace, trust and respect for human rights, is widely acknowledged. Yet, there continues to be a disjuncture between education and peacebuilding. This has limited the potential of education to build sustainable peace and disconnected education responses and policies from broader peace and conflict dynamics. Practical engagement of peacebuilding and education is often critiqued for being disjointed, with the primary focus being on Peace Education initiatives that often overlook structural inequities and overly focus on globally defined programmes of individual attitudinal and behavioural change (e.g. Novelli and Smith, 2011; Lopes Cardozo and Shah, 2016).

This network posits that rigorous inter-disciplinary exploration of the limitations and opportunities for peace focused education interventions is required. To overcome the disconnect between education and peace, education interventions should draw on a range of disciplinary knowledge bases, including understanding political and historical contexts, memory and peace and conflict studies. To address the current knowledge-gap in this area the proposed network partners IFRC, UoB and UU have developed a framework to facilitate critical engagement with education for peace. Taking existing lessons learned from a range of disciplines that have been developing theoretical arguments, the framework presents three interdependent obstacles or 'areas of injustice' that limit the success of peace focused education interventions. These are: 1) structural and historical injustices, through which historical legacies, including of colonialism and imperialism and entrenched inequalities in contemporary political economies limit possibilities for peace; 2) epistemic injustices, through which individuals' and groups' knowledges, contributions and leadership potentialities are undervalued and made irrelevant, limiting creative and relevant approaches to peacebuilding education; and 3) neo-colonial injustices, through which education goals are limited or undermined by the influence of other agendas and interests, including security, anti-migration and economic interests and agendas.

This proposal seeks to build on this collaboration by creating a network of education and peace actors to share learning and experiences across different geographical, cultural, conflict or fragile contexts. The framework will provide a basis for engagement, asking regional peace actors in Latin America and the Middle East to engage with, and critique, the identified injustices in relation to their own work. Drawing on this feedback, a revised framework will be developed and widely shared, alongside online tools (blogs, videos, webinars, etc.) that captures the ways in which practitioners around the world are overcoming, resisting or transforming these injustices and therefore building peace and trust through education.