The growing destructive capacities of humanity make this the prime problem of the twenty-first century.We can more powerfully incite violence, utilize more lethal weapons, and do much more damage than was ever imaginable before.We must urgently seek to understand and strengthen an array of institutions and organizations that have the capacity to use tools and strategies to prevent genocide.

The damage of hatred and violence needs to be much more widely understood by people everywhere as well as the techniques that may reduce it. One key place to begin such crucial education is with leaders – not only political but those in all the powerful sectors of human societies. Another, perhaps more fundamental in the long run, is work with children and youth to build a solid foundation through education so they can shape a peaceful life that embodies mutual understanding and cooperation among human groups throughout the world.

Human conflict and its resolution – above all, the prevention of genocide and other mass violence – are subjects that cry out for pervasive educational efforts from early childhood to elementary and secondary schools to universities, community organizations, religious institutions, business firms, and the media.

Fundamentally, the problem is learning how to live together – at all levels – from the family to our global relations among nations. This calls for very widespread understanding of human relations, sources of stress, and ways of coping at every level of organization from the intimate to the vast impersonal. How can we provide decent life chances in every country for a quality of life compatible with human dignity, and arrangements within each country to protect human rights, respect pluralism, avoid oppression, and give children and youth a decent start?

We must identify conditions that favor good results in child and adolescent development – ways in which children grow up healthy and vigorous, inquiring and problem solving, decent and constructive.We must emphasize preventing youth violence by fostering healthy, constructive development generically throughout childhood and adolescence, and also through targeted interventions aimed specifically to prevent youth violence.
During their years of growth and development, children need dependable attachment to parents or other adult caregivers; they need protection, guidance stimulation, nurturance, and skills to cope with adversity. This involves not only the family but also the schools, community organizations (including religious ones), health institutions, and child-oriented media. Taken together, these pivotal institutions can provide guidance, stimulation, protection, encouragement, and nonviolent problem solving.

There is a great potential of intergroup contact for helping to overcome the deadly obstacles of the past. There is a strong, positive effect of friendly contact in the context of equal status especially if such contact is supported by relevant authorities, is embedded in cooperative activity, and encouraged by a mutual aid ethic. Such contact is associated with improved attitudes between previously suspicious or hostile groups as well as constructive changes in patterns of interaction between them.

Superordinate goals have the potentially powerful effect of unifying disparate groups in the search for a vital benefit that can only be obtained by their cooperation. Overall, prejudice tends to be reduced when there is equal status contact between groups in the pursuit of common goals and shared efficacy in reaching those goals. School conflict resolution programs include: (1) cooperative learning, (2) conflict-resolution training, (3) constructive use of controversy in teaching, and (4) creation of dispute resolution centers. Students need a serious curriculum with repeated opportunities to learn and practice cooperative conflict-resolution skills.

Community service draws together major strands of development: (1) the growth of prosocial behavior; (2) enhancement of empathy; (3) learning in cooperative settings; (4) resolving conflict without violence; (5) reaching beyond the self in ways that overcome selfish, greedy orientations; and (6) creating a sense of belonging in a valued group that is characterized by a sense of fairness and mutual aid.

Learning prosocial behavior occurs in widening circles through the years of growth and development into adulthood. Such learning involves decent concern for others, readiness and ability to cooperate for mutual benefit, helping, sharing, and respecting others while maintaining integrity as an individual with basic self-respect and life- long inclinations to expand horizons from the nuclear family to the global family. Research in both experimental and naturalistic modes supports these possibilities. A fundamental challenge for education is to find ways of enhancing prosocial behavior across traditional and even adversarial barriers.

Peace education works toward giving children, adolescents, and young adults clear ideas about how to contribute to the creation of peaceful communities and equitable international relations.

International cooperation for democratic development, both political and economic, is central to the vision of world peace with justice. Pluralism is the heart of democracy. Here the attitudes of tolerance, mutual respect, and protection of human rights are valued and perpetuated. It is fundamentally important to educate specifically for democracy – ranging from the most fundamental principles to operational detail.

The time has come for schools and international educational organizations to work together to provide war and peace content based on the best of the world’s scholarship, not ethnocentric in intergroup relations or hateful in orientation, nor tending to glorify war. Such content can be adapted for different levels of child and adolescent development in keeping with their age and experience. All research-based knowledge of human conflict and the paths to mutual accommodation should be a part of education, conveying both the facts of human diversity and the common humanity we all share.

Education for peace is not limited to schools. Religious leaders have the capacity for teaching the ethical and pragmatic basis for tolerance in a pervasive way. They have not fulfilled this potential in many parts of the world. Their great investment in education of the young can be directed toward sympathetic understanding of other religions and nonviolent means of problem solving.

Another vital source of leadership in education for peace must come from the world’s universities.

In counteracting our ancient tendencies toward ethnocentrism and prejudice, we will need to foster reliable human attachments, positive reciprocity, friendly intergroup relations, a mutual-aid ethic, and an awareness of superordinate goals requiring cooperation that include economic well-being, environmental protection, personal security – and indeed human survival.

Education for leaders in the prevention of genocide would be an exceedingly valuable contribution. For example, each year the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the appropriate leadership of the European Union or the Prime Minister of Sweden could invite all the newly appointed foreign ministers, defense ministers, and development ministers to a one- to two-week convocation in New York, Paris or Stockholm to consider intensively the world’s knowledge and skill in preventing genocide. There are precedents for this sort of high-level education of political leaders.

Many policy options deserve serious consideration. One practical approach that potentially offers formidable strength would be to establish a dynamic Genocide Prevention Center in the government of Sweden or in the European Union – in cooperation with the United Nations. Much a center could usefully have educational functions.

1. Provide public education for early warning about dangerous situations that have genocidal potential.

2. Undertake ongoing training of diplomats, military officers, and other relevant professionals in the nature and scope of genocides in modern history, ways of recognizing the dangers early, ways of responding that are likely to prevent disaster.

3. Educate publics in participating countries – and to the extent possible on a worldwide basis – via the education ministries, the media, religious institutions, and NGOs.

4. Attach a high priority in development aid and trade to education for conflict resolution, preventing genocide, overcoming prejudice, and building peaceful conditions.

5. Stimulate an array of institutions and organizations that can use tools and strategies of preventing deadly conflict. This includes democratic governments and intergovernmental organizations, especially the UN but also regional organizations like the European Union. There is also a highly significant array of institutions of civil society in democracies: scientific and scholarly community, educational and religious institutions, as well as business, media, and non-governmental organizations that focus on preventing genocide and war.

6. Support education for conflict resolution and peace at every level of the educational system, from pre-school through university.