Children and adolescents can build peace. They can draw from their life experiences, natural resiliency, capacities, talents and personal, familial and cultural assets to embrace peace and introduce peaceful behaviours to their community. This report attempts to empower and equip children to assume a peacebuilding role in their schools, communities, and countries by teaching key peacebuilding competencies and then providing children with opportunities to apply them. Adolescents and youth, due to their unique developmental characteristics, have much to offer peacebuilding. They bring more advanced cognitive capabilities to conflict analysis and skill-building, are capable of greater responsibility and leadership roles, and seek deeper social connections outside their family networks.
This report proposes a set of key competencies for child peacebuilders. Competencies refer to the blend of knowledge, attitudes, and skills associated with behaviour change and promotion. Rather than seeking ‘peaceful children’ the end goal becomes ‘children as peacebuilders’ – children as active participants in the rebuilding of their societies and at various levels of peacebuilding processes. The report thus re-frames peace education competencies in that light, emphasizing how children can apply emerging peacebuilding competencies to further broader social processes. The lens used to review those competencies should be informed by a deepening knowledge base on education in emergencies, conflict sensitivity, child participation, civic engagement, adolescent development, and psycho-social protection.
Several recommendations for ways forward emerged over the course of this desk review. This report includes a draft outline of competencies reflecting the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that children need to become peacebuilders. These competencies use simple, concrete language and first person statements (‘I’ or ‘We’) to illustrate peacebuilding behaviours and emphasize the role of the child. They are adaptable to different levels of knowledge, skill, and attitude acquisition depending on children’s age, developmental capacity, literacy, and psycho-social needs and could be sequenced to reflect those capacities (e.g. ‘I speak up for myself’ proceeds ‘I speak up for myself and others.’) Each competency can then be grounded in play-based, social, art, or project-based activities that could be implemented by a range of educational professionals (formal and non-formal) in diverse settings, keeping paramount the psycho-social needs of children. Competencies would undergo cultural adaptation and vetting as needed to make them as relevant (and feasible) as possible to different conflict situations. This process of validating competencies, matching them to appropriate activities, and field-testing both competencies and activities is the first recommended step in this proposed ‘children as peacebuilders’ approach to peace and conflict resolution education. The outline of this report could be used to spark dialogue and begin the validation process.
