Learning to Become Smart Radicals: A Regenerative Lens on the Potential for Peace and Reconciliation through Youth and Education Systems

Abstract

Media coverage and (foreign) policy around the globe seem to spread messages of fear about the possible radicalization of the world’s growing youth population. More nuance was brought into these debates in 2015 with UN Security Council Resolution 2250 and the following Global Study on Youth, Peace and Security (Simpson 2018), while specific attention was directed at the potential of education in relation to young people’s agency for peacebuilding. In this reflective piece, I aim to bring a fresh perspective to current education in emergencies thinking and offer insight into how a regenerative approach to education can help reshape education to prepare the younger generations to respond more effectively to peacebuilding and related “wicked challenges.” In this article, I bring together two existing conceptual frameworks—the 4Rs (Novelli, Lopes Cardozo, and Smith 2017) and Tomaševski’s 4As (2005; see also Shah and Lopes Cardozo 2019)—that are directly relevant to the education in emergencies field. Building on this conceptual exercise, I adopt a regenerative lens on reconciliation and engage the law of three framework in order to encourage a deeper understanding of education’s transgressive potential to be an activating force and the root causes of conflict as restraining forces at work – towards imagining alternative, reconciliatory paths towards peacebuilding. The aim of this conceptual exploration is to inspire the development of smartly radical questions; to support research, policy, and practice design that is more critically informed and consciousness driven; and to advance the potential of education systems and stakeholders to regenerate younger generations and enable them to respond to “glocal” challenges in ways that are mindful, conscious, and effective.