Educating for a Culture of Peace is a tool for meaningful and lasting social change toward a genuine culture of peace.

This volume on "Education towards a Culture of Peace" is a timely undertaking, since the United Nations has proclaimed the years 2001-2010 as the "International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World." A culture of peace as defined by the UN is "a set of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups and nations". (UN Resolutions A/RES/52/13 1998: Culture of Peace and A/RES/53/243, 1999: Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace). Most of the chapters in this book are based on lectures that were presented at the International Conference, "Education towards a Culture of Peace". This conference was convened on 1-3 December 2003, by the The Josef Burg Chair in Education for Human Values, Tolerance and Peace - UNESCO Chair on Human Rights, Democracy, Peace and Tolerance School of Education, at Bar Ilan University, Israel. This conference was held under the auspices of Israel National Commission for UNESCO and supported also by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem, The office of Public Affairs of the US Embassy Tel Aviv, Fulbright – United States – Israel Educational Foundation.

Examines the overlapping aims, values, and concepts in peace and environmental education.

The UN Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1999, and has, as one of its eight pillars, the aim of fostering an international peace culture through education. This book approaches the issues of social justice and peace studies from the perspective of gender equality. The book is designed as a training resource for pre-service and in-service teacher training at upper secondary school level, but can also be used at other educational levels as well as in non-formal education. Its aim is to help students develop the skills and capacities to promote the values and attitudes consistent with a culture of peace. The book also contains suggested reading and internet sites for further study.

This open access book brings together discourse on children and peace from the 15th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, covering issues pertinent to children and peace and approaches to making their world safer, fairer and more sustainable. The book is divided into nine sections that examine traditional themes (social construction and deconstruction of diversity, intergenerational transitions and memories of war, and multiculturalism), as well as contemporary issues such as Europe’s “migration crisis”, radicalization and violent extremism, and violence in families, schools and communities. Chapters contextualize each issue within specific social ecological frameworks in order to reflect on the multiplicity of influences that affect different outcomes and to discuss how the findings can be applied in different contexts. The volume also provides solutions and hope through its focus on youth empowerment and peacebuilding programs for children and families. This forward-thinking volume offers a multitude of views, approaches, and strategies for research and activism drawn from peace psychology scholars and United Nations researchers and practitioners. This book's multi-layered emphasis on context, structural determinants of peace and conflict, and use of research for action towards social cohesion for children and youth has not been brought together in other peace psychology literature to the same extent. Children and Peace: From Research to Action will be a useful resource for peace psychology academics and students, as well as social and developmental psychology academics and students, peace and development practitioners and activists, policy makers who need to make decisions about the matters covered in the book, child rights advocates and members of multilateral organizations such as the UN.

In Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education: Re-Engaging the Heart of Peace Studies, scholar-teachers across a variety of humanities fields explore the content, methods, and pedagogies that are unique to their respective disciplines in contributing to the study of peace and justice. In recent decades, even as peace scholarship has burgeoned, many peace studies texts—including those that purport to be interdisciplinary in nature—have emphasized social science perspectives and, in some cases, have foregone exploration of the role of the humanities altogether in comprehensive peace education. While humanities scholars continue to stake out space for peace scholarship within their fields, no volume has attempted to collect the wisdom of multiple humanities disciplines in order to make the case for their critical role in authentic peace education. Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education addresses that shortcoming in the field of peace studies by exploring the ways in which the humanities are uniquely situated to contribute particular content, knowledge, skills, and values required of comprehensive peace education, scholarship, and activism. These include the development of empathy and understanding, creative vision and imagination, personal and communal transformation toward “the good” in society (such as the pursuit of justice, nonviolence, freedom, and human thriving), and field-specific analytical lenses of their own, among other contributions. Both teachers and students of peace will find value in this interdisciplinary humanities volume. Each chapter of Humanities Perspectives in Peace Education offers a deep-dive into a particular humanities field—including philosophy, literature, language and culture studies, rhetoric, religion, history, and music—to mine the field’s unique contributions to peace and justice studies. Scholars ask: “What are we missing in peace education if we fail to include this academic discipline?” Chapters include suggestions for peace pedagogies within the humanities field as well as bibliographies and suggestions for further reading.

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.