Publications
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Papers delivered at the Aurora International Peace Conference: The role of higher education in peacebuilding, Innsbruck, Austria, 17-21 February 2025.
Waging peace: The urgent how of teaching peace
Teaching peace transforms crisis into opportunity. Higher education tends to approach Peace and Conflict studies by means of courses about war, national security, terrorism, violence and conflict. If one of the responsibilities of higher education is to help students flourish and teach them how to contribute to and lead their societies, then learning how to wage peace should be an even higher priority than learning how to wage war. In this paper universities are called upon to take their responsibility and design curricula that teach peacebuilding skills to students, framing young people as agents of change who can potentially prevent conflict.
This paper explores how voice enables youth to claim agency within divided societies, and asks what are the implications of this in terms of conflict and peacebuilding? The goal of this paper is to motivate universities to prioritize Peace Studies programs that teach the skills present youth leaders need to take back to polarized societies and help heal
post-conflict communities. It also provides illustrations of experiential learning that move students from passive recipients to active participants in both raising awareness about and learning peacebuilding skills.
Peace by Peace: Educational impact
This paper highlights the peace education impact of Peace by Peace, an online, free-access youth peacebuilding manual which interviews over 100 youth peacebuilders around the world (see here). The paper describes the necessary steps to plan, execute and sustain such a project, as well as practical aspects such as “selling” peacebuilding initiatives to senior management. Explanations of experiential learning, threshold learning and service learning provide pedagogical and motivational foundations for initiatives such as Peace by Peace. Processes are described such as trust building, co-creation and solution-oriented dialogue, all of which provided students and faculty with opportunities for exercising the very peacebuilding skills being researched.
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Topics such as youth participation are explored as a new typology is introduced that links voice and violence, demonstrating how participation may prevent conflict. This paper illustrates the connection between young people learning from projects such as Peace by Peace and becoming peacebuilders themselves. In doing so, they may more fully realize their potential as agents of change in their own deeply divided societies. Pedagogical justification is provided for Peace Studies programs at institutes of higher education, and a roadmap is drawn that inspires both students, faculty and senior
management with the educational basis for sustaining similar projects. The paper outlines the potential of participatory peace education when youth voice and agency are prioritized.
Into the nevernight
From the diamond mines of Namibia to the refugee camps in Tanzania, she fights to regain her freedom, her faith, and her family. Only when the voices of the refugee children point her toward Nevernight, the place of peace where it is never dark and there is no fear, does Miriam find what she has lost.
Nimmernacht
When the family of a peace negotiator is kidnapped in Africa, the son is conscripted as a child soldier.
