The term 'peace education' typically refers to particular curricula, pedagogies, and practices aimed at cultivating in students knowledge, values, attitudes, skills and behaviours that are conducive to peaceful, violence-free communities. 'Peacebuilding through education' and ‘conflict-sensitive education’ refer to engagement with the wider educational system within which peace and conflict dynamics are shaped, and in which peace education may be present.
In conflict-affected and post-conflict societies, the values espoused by peace education programmes can appear at odds with prevailing policies and practices in the school, wider education system, and society. As a result, the credibility and practical value of such ideals can be questioned and their adoption short-lived. A peacebuilding approach therefore strives to cultivate systemic change in order to strengthen peace processes (including peace education) and render their positive impacts more sustainable. Peacebuilding through education thus takes a systemic view and a multi-levelled approach to engaging with education policies, modes of management and decision-making, access to resources and opportunities, curricular reform and pedagogy, so that they work in a more concerted fashion to support peace.
Peacebuilding through education is highly contextual, and can involve many different types of engagement, from rebuilding educational infrastructure after violent conflict, to providing psychosocial recovery support to schools affected by violence, to reformulating curricula in alignment with peace principles, to reforming teacher education practices, to building community-based and institutional networks, to advocating for new education policies and standards that are conducive to social justice, integration and cohesion, to growing teachers' capacity for agency, to building new learning partnerships through community participation, and more. It begins with understanding the interaction between a given education system and the dynamics of conflict and peace in the wider society. In other words, peacebuilding through education involves an examination not only peace education curriculum and practice, but interactions between educational professionals, classrooms, schools and communities as situated within historical and cultural contexts, policy landscapes, educational structures and power dynamics that may, if overlooked, impede or undermine peacebuilding processes.
The literature on conflict-sensitive education (CSE) intentionally distinguishes itself from peacebuilding. Whereas the latter seeks to actively promote peacebuilding measures within and through educational structures and settings, a conflict-sensitive approach focusses simply on doing no harm. Drawing on Mary Andersen’s book Do No Harm (1999), the INEE's CSE guidance note reveals how education can contribute to tensions or connections in the conflict-affected societies in numerous ways:
- Distribution of education resources (tangible or intangible) affects intergroup relationships;
- Distribution of education resources affects markets and supply chains;
- Distribution of education resources legitimizes actors and agendas;
- Distribution of education resources incentivizes continuation of the conflict context in which it is produced;
- Teaching and curriculum affect knowledge, attitudes and values.
Like peacebuilding, conflict-sensitive education begins with understanding the interaction between a given education system and the dynamics of conflict and peace in a particular society. It then focuses on ensuring that educational planning and provision is, as much as possible, inclusive and equitable, free from bias and partisan profiteering, and free of conflict-producing content, methods, or modes of educational access, financing and management. It does not concern itself much with the particulars of curricula or pedagogy, nor does it aim at particular peacebuilding gains. What it offers is a framework of principles for educational planners and providers to audit their operations and interventions in conflict-affected settings. In general, it is regarded as a foundation upon which more explicit peacebuilding engagement can be built. However, there are instances in which the two approaches can contradict one another. This subject is treated in one of my forthcoming articles.