Historical Memory-Oriented Peace Education and the Sustaining Peace Agenda

Abstract

The sustaining peace agenda, fielded by the UN in the mid-2010s, offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways in which we approach our applied, everyday work on and/or for peace in the classroom and beyond. Regarding the field of peace education, there is merit in adopting the less prescriptive, value-laden and universalising and, at the same time, more indeterminate, normatively restrained and humble elements that set the discourse on sustaining peace apart from that of conventional international peacebuilding as we have known it. In this respect, incorporating a focus on historical memory can enhance the strength and value of education on and/or for peace in a world riven with crises, disunity and violent conflict. Rather than upholding notions of universal values, independent of local culture and historically formed power relationships, and the idea that peace can be achieved by righting the individual mind; or seeking to bring about far-reaching social transformation to alleviate the plight of the oppressed and marginalised by empowering them to resist and fight, such an approach strives to enable learners (and teachers) to work towards healing past trauma and recognising the “other” as a moral agent.