Abstract
Overcoming a widespread misunderstanding of what is needed to build peaceful societies stands as one of the greatest global challenges of our time. Governments typically overinvest in military approaches to state security while much-smaller investments in development programs meant to improve human security and resilience to conflict are much too short-term and apolitical. Education often is overlooked as a possible peacebuilding mechanism, and when it is not, is treated, quite literally, as a children’s matter. This chapter argues that building a global constituency that understands, supports, and engages effectively in peacebuilding will require a radical shift toward a new form of education for youth separate from the mostly failed enterprise known as peace education. Conflict Transformation Education (CTE)—characterized by its explicit political nature, a commitment to thoughtful deliberation and dialogue, efforts to develop cross-communal peacebuilding constituencies, a renewed focus on interdisciplinarity, and an emphasis on creativity—stands as higher education’s answer to over-securitization. Recent experiences of higher education actors in Iraq, Colombia, and Kuwait offer helpful examples of how scholars and students based in those contexts already have been using CTE methods to counteract dominant narratives about the inevitability of violence and instead to create and reinforce notions of shared fate that are prerequisites to building and sustaining peace.
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Further Reading
Hill, Thomas. 2018. Could Conflict Transformation Education Serve as a Mechanism for Increasing Peacefulness in Colombia? Administración & Desarrollo 48 (1): 32–59.
Hill, Thomas, Alexander Munoz, and Katerina Siira, Katerina. 2019. University to University Partnership: Building a Network of Effective Peacebuilders in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In Locally led peacebuilding: Global Case Studies, eds. Jessica Berns and Stacey Connaughton. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lederach, John Paul. 2003. The Little Book of Conflict Transformation: Clear Articulations of the Guiding Principles by a Pioneer in the Field. New York: Good Books.
Millican, Juliet, ed. 2018. Universities and Conflict: The Role of Higher Education in Peacebuilding and Resistance. New York: Routledge.
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Hill, T. (2021). Taking Conflict Transformation Education Seriously. In: Ankersen, C., Sidhu, W.P.S. (eds) The Future of Global Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56470-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56470-4_8
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