Human Rights Education and Peacebuilding ― A Comparative Study

This book seeks to assess the role of human rights education (HRE) both for policy-makers and practitioners in the peacebuilding field and for academics seeking to contribute to the growing scholarship in human rights education.

Each chapter of this book (a) identifies the short and medium term impacts of seven different HRE programs on their respective target groups, and (a) provides an analysis of the peculiar local contextual factors that influenced each program’s rationale for human rights education. More specifically, each chapter addresses these critical questions:

- How are communities around the world using HRE to help rebuild their lives in the aftermath of an armed conflict?

- How does HRE respond local problems and needs? How similar are the human rights impacts in the different projects?

- How can we understand the promise and challenges associated with HRE as a component of community peace-building?

Today, most governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations now recognize the importance of human rights in peace- and democracy-building activities in post-conflict regions. However, compared with other components of peacebuilding, little attention and funding have been given to the cultivation of human rights knowledge and skills within these populations. Almost nothing has been committed to understanding how HRE is best accomplished in such difficult circumstances. The chapters in this book demonstrate the promise of HRE programs to help bring about peace within challenging post-conflict contexts.

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, human rights, education studies and IR in general.

Tracey Holland is Visiting Assistant Professor, Education Department, Vassar College, NY. She has a PhD in International Education from New York University.

J. Paul Martin is Director and Adjunct Professor, Human Rights Studies, Barnard College, NY, and Senior Scholar, Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, NY, USA. He has a PhD in Comparative Education from Columbia University.