Building social capital through encounter-based peace education: how Pakistani youth sustain motivation for peacebuilding and social cohesion

ABSTRACT

Encounter-based peace education programmes promote social cohesion and motivate youth to become peacebuilders. However, participants struggle to sustain these transformations in conflict contexts. This article draws from interviews and focus groups with alumni from four programmes that brought Pakistani youth to the US and other sources to examine these participants’ long-term transformations. It argues that the programmes’ emphasis on service-oriented activities led to participants’ motivation to improve their communities because of the social capital built through these programmes. Connecting with strangers across conflict differences also resulted in participants’ increased openness towards opposing groups. Consequently, alumni implemented projects to benefit their communities in Pakistan but were often unable to explicitly promote social cohesion because of sociopolitical constraints. Despite these challenges, the programmes emphasising community action in the US and in Pakistan increased participants’ peacebuilding motivation and helped youth to maintain it as their projects reinforced their attitudinal transformations promoting social cohesion.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace education
• social capital
• youth peacebuilding
• Pakistan
• intergroup contact
• reentry

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Susan Hirsch, Arthur Romano, Raj Kumar, Gena Robinson, Hajar Tazi, Sivahn Sapirstein, Nam Lam, and two anonymous reviewers for their important contributions to this article. Susan Hirsch provided critical guidance in revising the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).