Practice and research of peace education has grown in the recent years as shown by a steadily increasing number of publications, programs, events, and funding mechanisms. The oft-cited point of departure for the peace education community is the belief in education as a valuable tool for decreasing the use of violence in conflict and for building cultures of positive peace hallmarked by just and equitable structures. Educators and organizations implementing peace education activities and programming, however, often lack the tools and capacities for evaluation and thus pay scant regard to this step in program management. Reasons for this inattention are related to the perceived urgency to prioritize new and more action in the context of scarce financial and human resources, notwithstanding violence or conflict; the lack of skills and time to indulge in a thorough evaluative strategy; and the absence of institutional incentives and support. Evaluation is often demand-driven by donors who emphasize accounting given the current context of international development assistance and budget cuts. Program evaluation is considered an added burden to already over-tasked programmers who are unaware of the incentives and of assessment techniques. Peace education practitioners are typically faced with forcing evaluation frameworks, techniques, and norms standardized for traditional education programs and venues. Together, these conditions create an unfavorable environment in which evaluation becomes under-valued, de-prioritized, and mythologized for its laboriousness. This volume serves three inter-related objectives. First, it offers a critical reflection on theoretical and methodological issues regarding evaluation applied to peace education interventions and programming. The overarching questions of the nature of peace and the principles guiding peace education, as well as governing theories and assumptions of change, transformation, and complexity are explored. Second, the volume investigates existing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods evaluation practices of peace educators in order to identify what needs related to evaluation persist among practitioners. Promising practices are presented from peace education programming in different settings (formal and non-formal education), within various groups (e.g. children, youth, police, journalists) and among diverse cultural contexts. Finally, the volume proposes ideas of evaluation, novel techniques for experimentation, and creative adaptation of tools from related fields, in order to offer pragmatic and philosophical substance to peace educators’ “next moves” and inspire the agenda for continued exploration and innovation. The authors come from variety of fields including education, peace and conflict studies, educational evaluation, development studies, comparative education, economics, and psychology.

This edited volume, authored by scholars, students, and activists, focuses on how peace educators at the collegiate level can more effectively address gender and sexuality. Chapters focus on the classroom and the campus at large, and emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary practice, thoughtful approaches that offer both challenges and safety, and solidarity and support. The volume includes entries on hot and important topics, including trigger warnings, using popular culture in the classroom, sex trafficking, campus sexual assault, and more. Contributors come from a variety of disciplinary areas, making the volume eclectic in nature. Further, most entries include student voices, providing much- needed agency for college youth. While the book does offer a critical perspective, importantly, chapters also offer hope and possibility.

This handbook encompasses a range of disciplines that underlie the field of peace education and provides the rationales for the ways it is actually carried out . The discipline is a composite of contributions from a variety of disciplines ranging from social psychology to philosophy and from communication to political science. That is, peace education is an applied subject which is practiced in differing ways, but must always be firmly based on a range of established empirical disciplines. The volume is structured around contributions from expert scholars in various fields that underpin peace education, plus contributions from experts in applying peace education in a range of settings, all complemented by chapters which deal with issues related to research and evaluation of peace education.

Nigeria, a country under a military regime for several years, transitioned to a civilian regime in May 1999. Since this change, violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims have continued to erupt. They constitute one of the gravest dangers facing Nigeria, a country with a population of 189 million people. What have Nigerian religious leaders done about this situation, especially in educational circles? Have they received formal educational training to understand the causes of this violence and especially how to provide alternatives for more peaceful relations within Nigeria? Does the current educational system in Nigeria provide the main ingredients for the promotion of a culture of peace? The absence and neglect of interreligious peace education as part of a peace education core program and the lack of an interreligious curriculum for peace education in the training of religious leaders are the two problems contributing towards the lack of effectiveness of religious leaders in promoting less violent and more peaceful living. The solution to the problem is proposed in this book entitled Interreligious Curriculum for Peace Education in Nigeria. The book develops a one-year curriculum, building on Yoruba, Islamic & Christian conceptions of peace, and teaches how to create safe, caring, spiritual, peaceful and successful interfaith relationships between all Nigerian religious communities. In the long term, the book helps to educate religious leaders to contribute, in themselves and with the help of their respective religious communities, to reducing the growing religious violence in Nigeria.

Drawing from many disciplinary areas, this edited volume illustrates the many ways that popular culture can be used to teach peace and justice. Chapters address such topics as teaching about racism, domestic violence, structural violence, conflict analysis, decolonization, critiques of capitalism, and peacebuilding, showing how different forms of popular culture can be utilized to enhance student learning. Contributors provide both theoretical backgrounds and concrete lessons using TV, film, music, graphic novels, and more.

The intent of this playbook is to enable PK-12 teachers, teachers-in-training, counselors, and coaches to use character and peace education lessons to enrich their curriculum and help students expand their knowledge and understanding of themes and content in each of the book’s chapters. The lesson plans will help students discover, learn, reflect on, and make connections between and among each of the chapters in the book, such as Character Development, Peace Awareness, Special Skills, and Selfdiscipline, Respect, Responsibility, Relationships, and Conflict Resolution. This playbook is designed in such a way that you may take any one of the lessons and implement it at any time you find a teachable moment or want to focus on a particular topic or theme. The lessons have been designed to help you and your students "reflect” upon and make "connections" between the content and activities of each lesson. At the end of each chapter is a stop-sign symbol suggesting one “read/reflect/respond.” The playbook is rich in references, research, and resources.

The premise of this book is very simple. While acknowledging that much progress has been made since the end of World War II to improve life conditions for billions of people and reduce the likelihood of war, current global challenges threaten to undermine, undo, or even reverse much of the progress made. Growing political and social polarization, and the resultant increasing fear of each other, is on a trajectory that could cause unprecedented harm. The book illustrates how everyone can have an impact on peace and that many already do so in both constructive and negative ways, illustrated by many examples. The book offers an expansive view of peace, which includes promoting human rights, identifying and resolving situations of slow violence, working to promote fair and sustainable economic development, identifying and resolving injustices, and establishing institutions and practices for resolving conflicts by communicative means. The book especially focuses on the role universities can and should play in promoting peace. Universities, which have played a pivotal role in creating a more humane and just world through their research, teaching and scholarship, now face the challenge of thoughtfully examining how each discipline and vocation and the university as a whole can contribute to fostering peace. In general, universities help to prepare students actively to work for peace by cultivating their capacities at reasoning and reflecting, developing their skills in communicating and research, and fostering among them an active awareness of their responsibilities as citizens of the world. While not every discipline or vocation shares the same level of responsibility to advance peace, all have the potential to do so as they intentionally and thoughtfully look for avenues to do so.

This edited book is a new and valuable resource for students, teachers, and practitioners, providing a detailed exploration of how qualitative research can be applied in the field of peace and conflict studies. This book explores considerations and components of designing, conducting, and reporting qualitative research in this field, and also provide exemplars of recent empirical research in peace and conflict studies that employed qualitative methods. Scholars and researchers in peace and conflict studies and peace education face unique challenges in teaching, designing, and conducting qualitative research in these fields. This edited book discusses tips in designing qualitative studies in this area and for teaching emerging peace researchers best practices of qualitative inquiry. In addition, the book discusses some of the trends, challenges, and opportunities associated with research in peace and conflict studies and peace education. Written at a level appropriate for both graduate students and active researchers, the primary audience for this book is those teaching and learning about the application of qualitative methods to peace and conflict studies, as well as those conducting research in this field. There are currently approximately 230 graduate programs in peace and conflict studies. This book also provides a useful tool for researchers and students in other academic disciplines who are interested in qualitative research. Such disciplines might include education, sociology, criminology, gender studies, psychology, political science, and others.

This publication wants to stimulate the discussion on peace education in Europe and to open a debate on the European dimension of this goal. In the first part, various approaches to peace education are discussed. In the second part eight case studies from selected European countries are presented, from Eastern and Western Europe.

In 1999 the UN instituted the Program of Action on a Culture of Peace, leading to the Declaration of the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World 2001-2010. This represented a paradigm shift away from the prevailing conceptualization of peace as ‘the absence of war’ to one of ‘creating cultures of peace’, and indicated a significant opening for peace educators and the expansion of their mission and field in peace research and scholarship. This book seeks to address several questions about the emergence, present state, and future of the field of peace education, and to ground the definition of the discipline in its origins – origins deeply set in informal grassroots movements of concerned citizens, faith-based communities, and professional organizations who work for peace, as well as those working in formal institutions. These origins are vital in imparting identity, and in nurturing the current growing collective consciousness that combines the academic discipline and the worldwide peace movement – a collective that can unify, fuel, and inspire dialogue among scholars, researchers, activists, educators, government leaders, and the myriad of individuals committed to creating cultures of peace throughout the world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peace Education.