Achieving a culture of peace requires developing peaceful people. Peace education, broadly defined, includes all efforts to facilitate development of peaceful people. Peace education often takes place in schools, churches, families, community learning centers, counseling centers, clinics, prisons, and the workplace. Of course, it may occur anywhere, and the learners may be anyone--including young children, graduate students, United Nations peacekeepers, and police officers.
Global peace education includes international studies, holocaust studies, and nuclear education. Conflict resolution programs teach about mediation, negotiation, and communication skills. Violence prevention programs emphasize domestic violence, drug abuse, anger management, and teaching tolerance. Development education includes human rights education, environmental studies, and an emphasis on power and resource inequities and structural violence. Nonviolence education is based on the ideas of Gandhi, King, and other great peacemakers.
PsySR's Peace Education Action Committee works to promote peace education in a variety of settings, with a particular focus on the psychological aspects of peace and conflict. Read More »
Join PsySR's Peace Education Action Committee Today!
Interested PsySR members are encouraged to join the Peace Education Action Committee. For more information about the committee’s projects, recent actions and how to join, please email Action Committee co-chairs Linden Nelson (llnelson@calpoly.edu) and Richard Wagner (rwagner@bates.edu). You can join the committee’s listserv by sending an e-mail message to psysr-pe-owner@yahoogroups.com (include "Request to Join Listserv" in the subject line).
Graduate Programs in Peace Psychology
The Peace Education Action Committee often receives inquiries from students about the possibility of graduate training in peace psychology. Information about such graduate programs is available HERE.
"Us & Them": PsySR's Presenter's Manual for Moderating Group Conflict
Written by Stephen Fabick and based on a project of the Michigan Chapter of PsySR, this Presenter's Manual provides tools for intervention before intergroup prejudice and tensions erupt into violence. The program it describes is applicable to an array of problems including religious intolerance, racial tension, ethnic turmoil, and community divisiveness.
Two Important PsySR Manuals: "Dismantling the Mask of Enmity" and "Enemy Images"
These two manuals were prepared by PsySR a decade and a half apart. Both the Cold War era Dismantling the Mask of Enmity and the Gulf War era Enemy Images remain timely in describing how to dismantle images that limit our thinking about security and that fuel tensions and wars.
A Graduate Level Curriculum For Trauma Intervention and Conflict Resolution
This Graduate Level Curriculum for trauma intervention and conflict resolution in ethnopolitical warfare was prepared by a joint task force of the American and Canadian Psychological Associations. PsySR served as the secretariat for this important project.