Education at the intersection of conflict and peace: the inclusion and framing of education provisions in African peace agreements from 1975-2017

ABSTRACT

International actors have called for greater inclusion of education provisions in peace agreements given the important symbolic and practical roles peace agreements play post-conflict. Yet, the inclusion, framing, and roles of education in peace agreements remain understudied. This paper investigates the trends in education’s inclusion in African peace agreements from 1975–2017. We provide a descriptive quantitative analysis of education trends over time, test several hypotheses that may explain these trends, and apply these findings to a qualitative case study in Burundi to illustrate key factors in implementation. We find that education is present in 46% of agreements, that the presence of international actors and disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration provisions increases the likelihood of inclusion, and that educational structure and content clauses are equally likely to be included. These findings have implications for international education practise and forward a research agenda for further study by international education and conflict scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Burundi
• peace agreements
• Africa
• conflict
• peace

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to all who helped with this research and drafting. We would like to thank the following: Kendra Dupuy and Susan Shepler for their insights on the manuscript; Giuditta Fontana for providing guidance on framing and confirming education inclusion rates; Brittney Lewer for reading many earlier versions of the manuscript; and Sebastian Cherng for comments on the statistics and their presentation. In addition, we would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions which strengthened the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We also acknowledge follow-up questions related to effects of inclusion on peace, although these remain beyond the scope of this paper.

2. We did not include framework agreements, ceasefires, or peace process agreements in the coding.

3. We obtained the agreements from the United States Institute of Peace (www.usip.org) and United Nations Peacemaker (unpeacemaker.org), and broader internet searches, where necessary. All 12 agreements that are not publicly available are from Chad’s intrastate conflict. Of these, three are from 1978/1979, eight are from the 1989–2005 period (as per coding in Dupuy 2008a) and one is from 2006.

4. Our overall findings also align with Fontana (2018), who finds education is included in 52% of the agreements from 1989–2008, worldwide.

5. Note: given that the UCDP Peace Agreements only goes until 2011, the statistics reported here are from 1975–2011.

6. For brevity, the clauses listed here are in the format (Protocol, Chapter, Article).

7. Similarly, a forthcoming study on political agreements and internal conflict finds that education provisions rank above territorial self-governance (including decentralisation, federalism, and autonomy), but below political and military provisions, international involvement, and transitional justice (Fontana et al. forthcoming).

8. Zasloff, Shapiro, and Heather Coyne (2009) note that including education in the peace process might not only provide an entryway to other, more difficult, issues, but also create more effective mediation and increase success overall.