HE can do more to transform conflict and build peace

Conflict and violence take many forms in the world today. There has been a sharp upturn in recent years. As of 2019, war and conflict had uprooted 79.5 million men, women and children around the world, representing the highest number in recorded history, with an estimated two billion people currently living in conflict-affected and fragile states.

Conflict and fragility are also the main factors preventing the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals in 82% of affected countries.

According to the World Bank, “the resurgence of violent conflict in recent years has caused immense human suffering, at enormous social and economic cost. Violent conflicts today have become complex and protracted, involving more non-state groups and regional and international actors, often linked to global challenges from climate change to transnational organised crime.”

Global reports have also clearly established links between education, conflict and peace. Higher education is not exempt. While universities are critical actors in the promotion of peace and conflict studies and often contribute to peace dialogues, universities can also be enablers of social inequalities, ethnic divisions and a culture of violence. So what role can or should universities play in anticipating and responding to these challenges?


Universities’ role in peacebuilding

Higher education institutions should be reflecting on how they can contribute proactively to the reduction of inequalities, frustration, radicalisation and violence in society, beginning with how they can better tailor the education and training they provide to contribute to individual and societal resilience, conflict transformation, sustainable development and socially just peace.

Educational leaders should ask themselves and their colleagues: “What more can our institution do to demonstrate leadership in the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation at home and abroad?”

First, more can be done in terms of integrating peacebuilding values and aims into education policies and curricula across disciplines.

Higher education institutions still tend to regard peace and conflict studies as a niche topic within the social and political sciences. Yet the realities of global conflict and fragility now demonstrate without any doubt that all disciplines, industries and levels of education play a part in conflict, either directly or indirectly, and all have a role to play in its mitigation and prevention.

Second, more can also be done to align governance of educational institutions with the values and vision of a peaceful, inclusive and just society. Change requires leadership, supported by policies emerging from inclusive consultations and shared ownership.

Thirdly, creating partnerships between educational institutions and their surrounding communities can further achieve peacebuilding gains by undertaking diverse forms of transformative practice oriented towards the common good.

Nothing, however, can be achieved without educational leaders and professionals who are willing to adopt a conflict-sensitive analytical lens and prioritise a social impact-oriented peacebuilding approach when deciding upon institutional and discipline-specific aims and strategies.

What is peacebuilding?

Peacebuilding begins with an analysis of the dynamics and drivers of conflict in society and the effects of decisions, interventions and resource allocations on those dynamics.

Peacebuilding then involves a strategic approach to preventing, mitigating and transforming those conflicts and reinforcing the foundations of sustainable peace through the promotion of inclusive, equitable and sustainable development.

Each of these processes require a combination of visionary leaders and skilled professionals who are committed to working in partnership with communities to raise awareness, set peacebuilding agendas and develop capacities for societal change. Higher education is key to enabling the necessary vision, leadership and skills that peacebuilding requires.

While there are a range of approaches in the higher education field of peacebuilding, including ‘peace and conflict studies’, ‘democracy and human rights studies’, and ‘security, peace and development studies’, the main distinction in the field of education research is between ‘peace education’, which refers to the study of basic peace knowledge, values and skills, and ‘peacebuilding through education’, which refers to systemic approaches to peace-oriented educational policy-making, governance, teaching, learning and civic engagement in favour of an inclusive, equitable and just society.

This distinction is important as what traditionally passes as ‘quality’ education does not necessarily equate with either ‘peace education’ or ‘peacebuilding through education’.

The failures of democracy in divided societies like Bosnia and Herzegovina and the United States demonstrate that education is both a short-term and long-term security concern, as well as a pillar of development.

Yet education is often not included in peace negotiations, despite the fact that educational politics feed directly into conflict and peace dynamics (peace defined here in terms of both the cessation and prevention of direct violence and the transformation of the indirect structural and cultural violence that is necessary for holistic human and societal development to occur).

Peacebuilding and education research

Research on the role of education in peacebuilding examines a broad range of issues, including but not limited to:

• The role of education policy in fuelling conflicts through unequal access and provision, exclusionary language use for instruction and other barriers that prevent minorities and girls from deriving the full benefits of education;

• The role of curricula and textbooks fuelling conflict through promotion of conflict narratives and ideologies, biased and exclusionary histories and negative representations of ‘others’;

• The role of peace education interventions in primary, secondary and tertiary education settings and their efficacy in nurturing competences of inclusive and democratic citizenship, critical thinking, intercultural communication, human rights, global stewardship and others that serve the common good.

• The role of teacher education in building professional competences, including peacebuilding awareness and pedagogical strategies needed to strengthen peace learning;

• The role of teacher identities – particularly in contexts directly affected by conflict, violence, injustice, war and-or genocide – in shaping classroom practices that reinforce or reduce conflict narratives;

• The impacts of education and community-institutional partnerships on the peacebuilding agency of younger generations, their families and communities.

• The overall role of education systems in responding to significant societal change and crises, including the social function of educational institutions in identifying and disseminating solutions to pressing societal challenges.

While research has an important role to play in peacebuilding, it should not be overlooked that researchers working in conflict-affected and fragile contexts have been criticised for advancing their careers by extracting data from vulnerable and disadvantaged populations (who receive no return benefit) and, worse, for sometimes stirring up conflict dynamics in the process.

Thus, while peacebuilding scholars and practitioners are supposed to ensure a minimal “do no harm” approach, there is increasingly recognition of the need to ensure that their research does more to give back to communities by leaving a positive “peacebuilding footprint”.

From research to active peacebuilding

In this respect, traditional distinctions between research and practice are giving way to more research-practice partnerships, such as the “Somaliland North-South higher education partnership for academic development and peacebuilding”, led by the UCL Institute of Education in the United Kingdom.

Universities are also increasingly collaborating with non-governmental organisations to bring research-based insights and best practices into real-world peacebuilding processes. A related development in the peacebuilding field is the push for greater interdisciplinary collaboration and policy-relevant research.

The ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding has also seen researchers and local populations taking a more collaborative approach to defining the research problems, gathering and analysing data and devising applied solutions of local relevance, thereby making research itself a vehicle for transformative community engagement.

Recent examples include collaboration with youth in Syria, Somalia and Myanmar as part of the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s TRANSFORM project; the creation of Peace Education Hubs at universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Rwanda and the UK which foster collaboration between scholars, professional educators and communities; as well as the partnership between Manchester and Durham universities and the NGO In Place of War on a project to create and research the peacebuilding impacts of community arts in Syria, Colombia, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

COVID-19 and (online) higher education for peace

Degrees in conflict and peace studies are currently available at universities around the world, mostly in North America and northern Europe, but increasingly on other continents as well.

Universities at the forefront of peacebuilding are not only formalising peace studies programmes and research agendas, but also adopting service-learning community partnerships in addition to extending diversity policies to reduce discrimination and exclusion from educational opportunities.

However, tertiary education remains an elite activity, ever more so now that the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existing conflicts and inequalities. Open access provision of online courses by major universities can help to universalise educational access, particularly important for economically marginalised individuals and organisations that live and work on the frontlines of conflict.

While some universities have been leading the way in online learning for more than a decade, the COVID-19 global pandemic has pushed teaching and training online in unprecedented ways.

Some peacebuilding practice organisations were initially worried that the forced shift to online training formats would compromise the quality of transformative trust-building exercises that face-to-face non-formal education encounters can foster. However, experiences this past year have proven otherwise.

Universities that are now forced to move a greater share of teaching online have a similar opportunity to reduce the peacebuilding access gap by putting courses and workshops related to this field online in unrestricted formats. The challenge remains for communities that have limited or poor-quality access to the internet and internet-based devices.

Educating leaders of peacebuilding

Leadership is needed to strengthen the peacebuilding role of higher education. Research demonstrates that, if peacebuilding is not integrated explicitly into an institution’s mandate, efforts by individual champions will not likely be coherent or sustained and therefore their impact will be significantly limited.

For this reason, international cooperation agencies like GIZ are leading institutional capacity-building in this area and recognise universities’ key role in peacebuilding, but more engagement is needed.

To summarise, some avenues for greater higher education engagement in peacebuilding include:

• Peacebuilding governance and leadership: Developing the university’s peacebuilding mission; conducting in-house conflict analysis by taking stock of practices of inequality, discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion; monitoring conflict narratives within and about the institution and channelling these voices into institutional dialogues; enabling university community participation in devising peacebuilding priorities (training, dialogue and research); and adopting policies and strategies that promote and reward inclusion, collaboration and non-violent social change.

• Research on and for conflict prevention, transformation, peacebuilding and reconciliation: Prioritising applied and policy-relevant research with the potential to transform the drivers of conflict and strengthen peacebuilding in innovative and effective ways can have a far-reaching effect at the level of social violence prevention; and adopting open access dissemination strategies to enable the widest possible range of stakeholders to benefit from peacebuilding research and practice insights and methods.

• Peace-oriented curriculum and instruction: Increasing the range and scope of peace and conflict courses on offer at the university; promoting interdisciplinary engagement, recognising that each discipline can contribute to conflict or peace and ought to aim at producing real-world peacebuilding applications; and enabling and supporting educators to integrate peacebuilding values and skills into higher education teaching through an orientation to peace pedagogies.

• Inclusive dialogue, capacity-building and collaboration: Initiating partnerships with state and local leaders, community and international organisations, students and the general public – participating in multisectoral dialogue platforms and enabling the wider society to benefit from the university’s presence and resources, especially on themes of peacebuilding.

But several hurdles remain. The urgency of peace for equitable, sustainable and just societal development and well-being has yet to be fully grasped despite repeated appeals by norm-setting institutions like the United Nations, non-governmental organisations and think tanks.

Appeals need to be heeded and funded to enable more substantive cross-disciplinary engagement with peacebuilding in higher education.

Moreover, peacebuilding is a complex field that must be integrated across all disciplines, sectors and industries. Universities can play a greater role by moving the field from its niche in social and political sciences into the mainstream and integrating conflict and peace topics into foundation courses for students in all disciplines.

Finally, universities are uniquely positioned to exploit and devise new ICT applications for peacebuilding research, teaching and practice. From mobile tracking of displaced populations and provision of humanitarian supplies, to monitoring of conflict narratives and radicalisation in cyberspace, to promoting access to transformative online opportunities for learning and dialogue, higher education experts should be looking for ways to make greater use of ICT for peacebuilding.

With social unrest and conflict spreading around the world like wildfire, the need for greater attention to the social function of education in general and of higher education in particular is urgent.

Dr Sara Clarke-Habibi has worked in the field of peacebuilding through education for 20 years. She earned her PhD in education from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her work focuses on educational intersections with violent conflict, displacement, transitional justice, social healing, post-conflict reconstruction and intergroup reconciliation. She is the 2021 Georg Arnhold Senior Fellow on Education for Sustainable Peace at the Georg Eckert Institute in Germany and a consultant for the United Nations in the Western Balkans.