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Admin / 16 June 2021 / Central Asian Institute

Education For Peace: Top 10 Ways Education Promotes Peace

Over the holidays, we often see images of doves, that well known symbol of peace and tranquility, and we hear mentions of good will towards others and peace on earth. It’s as if hearts around the world soften during this time of year, and family, friends, and gratitude come to the forefront. It’s therefore a time to reinforce the power of education for peace.
Central Asia Institute works towards providing education for girls and women for a number of reasons. Girls’ education has proven to significantly impact a woman’s future, and also the future of her family and her entire community. The reasons to promote education range from a reduction in infant and maternal mortality and child marriage to a reduction in malnutrition and domestic and sexual violence (for more on this, read The Top 10 Reasons to Support Girls’ Education). But there’s one important reason that seems to be extremely pertinent during the holiday season.
Education promotes peace.
Education has been touted as one of the most powerful tools we can implement in our global efforts to promote world peace. Here’s a look at the top 10 ways education promotes world peace.

Admin / 28 August 2020 / The Global Observatory

Half The Peace: The Fear Challenge And The Case For Promoting Peace

In January, Secretary-General António Guterres released his new report “Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace.” This report was called for in the twin resolutions of the General Assembly and Security Council, to reflect on the progress of their implementation and offer recommendations on how to take them forward. It is an update on the latest attempt at reorienting the United Nations toward building peace, inspired initially by Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 “Agenda for Peace” and called for again in the 2015 Advisory Group of Experts Report, “The Challenge of Sustaining Peace.” The new report outlines different initiatives taken over the past two years in implementing the resolutions, drawing on a variety of country examples of joint analysis and planning, effective partnerships, and innovative approaches to financing.
Despite the progress detailed in the report on the implementation of the sustaining peace resolutions, there are obstacles in the road ahead. I am an outsider to the UN: an academic who leads a multidisciplinary research team at Columbia University studying and modeling the dynamics of sustainably peaceful societies. Our review of the UN’s approach to sustaining peace has identified a few major challenges to its success—a central one being what may be called the “fear challenge.” An appreciation of this challenge can strengthen the capacity of the UN to support member states in sustaining peace.

Admin / 31 January 2020 / Taylor and Francis Online

Theorising Youth And Everyday Peace (Building)

While peacebuilding is supposed to heal the social wounds of war, fix the systems that create destructive conflict, and keep people safe, critical studies have exposed the limitations of statist, liberal peacebuilding projects in this regard. Despite this increased critical attention, youth voices and experiences are still far from integrated or understood in critical security or other scholarly deliberations about peace praxis. In response to this absence, this special issue brings together established and early career scholars whose empirical research on children and youth contributes to more grounded and inclusive theorisations of and engagements with peacebuilding. Recent critical international relations (IR) literature theorises the child as an actor in international political economy and international security1 and recognises the ‘everyday’ and ‘the local’ as important spaces of war/peace politics, knowledge-production, and potential emancipation.2 The special issue further demonstrates the importance of the ‘everyday’ and the ‘local’ in international relations. It builds on this work by offering both theoretical insights and empirical findings for improving both the practice and policies of peacebuilding.
This introductory essay presents a local, grounded theoretical framework for studying youth and everyday peace(building). In doing this, we recognise the complex and diverse ways in which young people are engaged in their everyday worlds, how their existence in processes of post-conflict and peacebuilding practices are multi-faceted and how their symbolic construction influences the ways in which they are read by other young people, adults, and the structures within which they exist. We ask how we can engage this recognition within knowledges and practices of everyday peace(building)?