Taking Conflict Transformation Education Seriously

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.