Speaker
Description
Peace education faces profound challenges amid accelerating geopolitical instability, economic inequality, environmental crises, and growing critiques of its intellectual foundations. These developments raise urgent questions about the aims, justifications, epistemologies, and methodologies of the field. This presentation examines these challenges through emerging scholarship on affective, critical, decolonial, and posthumanist approaches to peace and peace education. It explores the contributions and limitations of each perspective and their potential to advance more pluralistic forms of peacebuilding education. Affective approaches foreground the emotional and relational dimensions of peace; critical approaches emphasize political inquiry, social critique, and activism; decolonial perspectives challenge enduring structures of coloniality and modernity; and posthumanist perspectives expose the limits of anthropocentric thinking. In response, the presentation proposes a postcritical approach to peace education that integrates these traditions and moves beyond exclusively rational orientations to peacebuilding. It concludes by drawing on empirical studies from China/Taiwan, Cyprus, Korea, Pakistan, and Somalia/Somaliland.
Kevin Kester is Associate Professor of Comparative International Education and Peace/Development Studies and Director of the Education, Conflict and Peace Lab at Seoul National University.