Description
Sierra Leone has been regarded as one of the successful countries of peacebuilding mandates, having escaped from the reoccurrence of the civil war and having held four cycles of peaceful elections. Peace education as an essential component of peacebuilding focuses on the importance of self-development and building interpersonal relationships, installing positive peace-related ideas to the recipients. With the purpose to identify the role of peace education in building peace since the immediate aftermath of civil war, the research question of this study focused on:
The role of peace education in post-conflict Sierra Leone since the 2000s
Within this research question, particular attention was given to understand and evaluate the contribution of peace education in promoting and sustaining peace during the past two decades. Meanwhile, it is important to note that there was an absence of a perfect mandate around the world. To this point, this study also focused on the drawbacks, limitations, or pitfalls within peace education practices. Other research questions, such as the explanations across education, conflict, and international relation studies for the cause of the outbreak of the civil war has been discussed as the background information of the study.
Methodologically, with a purpose to explore the nature of peace education and the role of peace education from the perspectives of literature and informants through their experiences, a constructionist approach was adopted as the main approach to analyse and interpret findings generated from literature and interviews. In particular, the adoption of documentary analysis constructs the thesis through critical literature and documents ranging from academic textbooks and journal articles, reviews and documents provided by International Organisations, Non-Governmental Organisations, independent practitioners, and governmental documents. Meanwhile, semi-structured virtual interviews were conducted with three groups of informants with different responsibilities when peace education practices have been implemented in Sierra Leone. Four curriculum experts of peace education, four practitioners and four local officials were interviewed.
The findings revealed that peace education has responded to parts of the inequalities that could lead to grievances. The elitist nature of education was eliminated by introducing free access educational opportunities through formal and non-formal ways. However, this study also pointed out that the inequalities led by social structures such as underdevelopment in general infrastructure cannot be fully addressed by peace education.
