Description
From 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone experienced a devastating civil conflict as a result of political instability, financial corruption, ethnic divisions, and social marginalisation. The ending of the civil war and the promotion of peace and reconciliation through the method of peace education provided a backdrop for this paper to analyse the role of external stakeholders in promoting peace education. Through the evaluation of educational programmes, this paper presents the changing norms of international order from Westphalianism to post-Westphalianism, provoking the wide engagement of organisations of different levels to achieve a self-sustainable peace. By using evidence from documentary sources and interview data from the author’s PhD, the methodology of International Relations Theories will be adopted for further investigation to address the following question: what is the role of external stakeholders in promoting peace education in Sierra Leone? Analysis of the engagement between internal and external actors indicated that peace education was adopted as a combination of external-led top-down and bottom-up approaches in post-conflict Sierra Leone. This study suggested that although education intervention in Sierra Leone can be treated as a good example of post-conflict reconstruction, external-led peace education and the appearance of peace can hardly be maintained without solid self-sustained high-capacity public institutions. Moreover, there is little evidence to indicate whether the engagement of multiple external stakeholders may threaten Sierra Leone’s autonomy or undermine its national authority.
