Education and support for a culture of peace: a critical comparative analysis using survey data

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss the relationship between formal education and public support for a culture of peace, defined here as values and attitudes related to key aspects of peace, such as tolerance, respect and non-violence. For that, we analyzed individual and country-level data from the World Values Survey (WVS) arguing that such data provides relevant evidence to the field of peace studies, and can contribute to explore complex relationships between education and outcomes that are difficult to measure cross-culturally, such as attitudes towards peace. We constructed an index to measure attitudes towards positive peace using WVS items, which reveals significant disparities between countries. We then explored the relationship between this variable and levels of formal education at individual and national levels. We found considerable differences in countries’ levels of tolerance and respect as well as aversion to violence, which is related to education attainment in almost all countries analyzed.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture of peace
• education
• attitudes
• comparative education
• violence
• world values survey

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful for the invaluable contribution made by Julia Paulson to this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Capistrano is currently a postdoc researcher at the University College of Dublin (UCD) School of Education. Before joining UCD, he was a research fellow at the University of Bristol and, prior to that, worked as the coordinator for international statistics at the Ministry of Education in Brazil.

Notes

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