Involvement in social action and community service can promote the construction of prosocial identities and enduring patterns of civic behavior. This article explores this important process for youth that participate in the PeaceJam Ambassadors program. High school-aged "PeaceJammers" study the lives of Nobel Peace laureates while…

Effective peace education helps to create a transformation in the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and relationships of its students. Drawing on their experiences training teachers as part of "Juegos de Paz," an education for peace program that received support from the Colombian National Program for Citizenship Competencies, the authors…

War memorials and related exhibition spaces are commonplace in Australian cities and towns. As critically reflected upon in this paper, there is much "hidden" or alternative history that tends to get ignored when it comes to official memorials and conventional places of remembrance. The particular focus of our paper is the exploration of…

As noted in the literature reporting on the impact of climate change, it does not only bring about environmental degradation, i.e. ecological violence, but it may also provoke increased intercommunity and interstate violence. This article examines the implications of this relationship between climate change and increased violence for environmental…

Throughout history there has been no lack of evidence attesting to the inequitable distribution of wealth, power, and resources among individuals and groups, conditions which continue to characterize this second decade of the twenty-first millennium despite the many UN-based initiatives to deal with their consequences. Not included among the…

One of the obstacles to dealing with the social and ecological crises that obstruct the achievement of a culture of peace is silo thinking in global governance. A unidimensional mode of planning, silo thinking leads to decisions based on the area of expertise of a particular agency or intergovernmental organization and fails to recognize linkages…

Climate change and militarism pose existential threats to human existence, and are linked through a number of related processes including access to resources, patterns of consumption, and the workings of the global economy. As nations increasingly militarize their domestic affairs and international postures alike, such patterns can feed back into…

From the perspective that we live amidst an ecology of violence, we contend that educators should not circumscribe their ethical roles by endorsing the dominant individualistic goals and practices of moral education. To counter a pervading worldview of violence and tolerance for violence, we propose instead that teachers embrace the multifaceted…

This article introduces a pedagogical tool for raising critical consciousness and nurturing resistance to discrimination. "Autoethnographic mapping," integrating guided cognitive mapping and autoethnographies, has been implemented for a decade now within the framework of a college course occasioning dialogue between Palestinian Arab and…

In this article, the authors introduce and explicate Daisaku Ikeda's contributions to peace education. Ikeda is a Buddhist leader, peacebuilder, school founder, and prolific author whose six decades of contributions to peace education have had a global impact in practice but have remained unexamined in the extant, particularly Anglophone,…

In this paper, we argue that two key trends--an unfolding ecological crisis and a reduction in the amount of (cheap) energy available to society--bring into question both the relevance and the resilience of existing educational systems, requiring us to rethink both the content and the form of education in general, and peace education in…

The Culture of Peace News Network, an internet news service, is analyzed in the framework of a general approach to education for a culture of peace. Its format reflects the eight program areas for a culture of peace as adopted by the UN General Assembly. Among its other operating principles are universality of news with all cultures and regions of…

This article proposes the need for peace education as a field to embrace critical power analysis of place in efforts toward social and environmental sustainability. Rather than status quo reproduction, a critical peace education for sustainability should both elucidate and transform the power dynamics inherent in structural violence and cultural…

"To Obey or Disobey" should be a life question for all free people, but for the Israelis, who are in intractable war with their neighbors while facing constant rifts among themselves, it is a concrete problem they have to face every day. Therefore, the research question posed by this article is: How is obedience of laws or military orders…

This paper investigates the interference of local politics with a peace education initiative in Greek-Cypriot education and the consequent impact on teachers' perceptions and responses. Focusing on a recent educational attempt to promote "peaceful coexistence", the authors explain how this attempt was seen by many teachers as being a part of a…