Peace Education and Refugee Youth’ in: Jeff Crisp, Christopher Talbot and Daiana B. Cipollone (eds.), Learning for a Future: Refugee Education in Developing Countries
Education programmes can incorporate the skills, understanding and attitudes needed for peace and conflict prevention. But can peace education be justified when agencies are already stretched to provide basic education and needs? Is it possible to make initiatives socially and culturally relevant to people experiencing extreme stress? Research from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, examines peace education concepts, assumptions and programmes that are being conducted by international humanitarian agencies for refugee populations. It highlights the lives of refugee youth, a primary peace education target group. Findings center on a promising peace education programme run by UNHCR for refugees in Kenya and Uganda. The report considers how peace programmes meet the security challenges confronting refugee communities in general and refugee youth in particular. The author finds that the UNHCR programme: promotes refugee empowerment and self-sufficiency and helps bridge the cultural gaps between refugees; has a practical orientation and set of objectives that naturally and appropriately connects to the objectives and values inherent in refugee protection (and education is popular with refugees, refugees in the programme not only continued but also sometimes expanded the programme themselves); is cost-effective. The report also indicates a number of weaknesses relevant not just to UNHCR’s programme but the broader peace education field, including: a tendency to focus on training leaders to address serious violence. Leaders often lack credibility with and access to the primary perpetrators and victims of violence: marginalised youth; the limited participation of marginalised “drop-out” youths, young women and wider community members — this limits a programme’s potential to transfer problem-solving skills to refugees who are likely to benefit the most from experience; limited co-ordination between different development agencies. For example, skills and concepts taught in different workshops and courses offered by a range of agencies often overlap; the possibility of peace education becoming counter-productive when it is taught to children and not to their parents or guardians.