Women comprised less than a quarter of the Afghan religious peacebuilders network examined, and most of them were engaged in peacebuilding work focused on education, including teaching peace and conflict resolution from an Islamic perspective or raising awareness in their spheres of influence about what Islamic sacred texts say about peace.
Photo-monologues and photo-dialogues were a useful educational tool to help Israeli and Palestinian students empathize with each other over shared familial trauma associated with migration to or from Israel.
Organizations that bring together people from multiple sides of a conflict can play an important role in motivating participants to become activists for social change.
Inside this issue, we start with an article that addresses the rationale for the existence of the Digest: the growing communication gap between practitioner and academic communities, and how addressing this gap can lead to more informed and useful research. Next, we look at research on Gender Advisors in militaries and their role in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The third analysis gives us a look into a new course that uses podcasts to help teach complex topics on peace and war, and how emerging technologies can be a useful tool in peace education. We then turn to a case study analysis on the 2013/14 “Kerry Initiative” in Palestine and Israel, exploring the important and delicate role of third parties during conflict negotiation processes. The last analysis addresses the European Union’s efforts to incorporate inclusive peacebuilding projects in Georgia and Yemen and highlights the important “Whole-of-Society” approach that works to include marginalized communities into the peacebuilding process.
Developing podcasts helps students humanize the study of war and peace, as they contend with the concrete ways in which conflicts manifest themselves in the lives of real human beings.
Inside this issue, we examine research analyzing hundreds of civil war peace agreements that concludes that “complex” agreements are not necessarily better at keeping the peace than simpler ones. Next, we take a critical look at research on public support for military interventions and the motivations behind support for interventions conducted for “humanitarian” reasons. Third, through examining civics textbooks in Sri Lanka in the context of global peace education efforts, we consider how specific omissions and emphases in these textbooks have served the government’s goals, while failing to address the injustice and inequality still plaguing post-war Sri Lanka. Next, we discuss research finding that the primary peacekeeping tasks associated with preventing violence and protecting civilians can be effectively undertaken by unarmed peacekeepers, who are, furthermore, often able to address some of the shortcomings of their armed counterparts. Finally, the last analysis reflects on possible reasons for why past attempts at peace in South Sudan have failed, calling for more psycho-sociologically informed conflict interventions in the future.
While Sri Lankan civics textbooks affirm global norms around peace and citizenship education in the abstract, they also simultaneously contradict and/or undermine these in various ways in service of the government’s agenda.
New research from Mercy Corps and the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice finds that access to secondary education reduces support and for violent extremist groups.
One of the valuable ways peace educators can use history as a tool to problematize war is to highlight the common “war-centered” narratives used to frame historical events.
By omitting successful nonviolent movements from history, we encourage students to accept the view that violence is required to ensure a nation’s security.