Does Peace Education Really Make a Difference?

An inconsistency is pointed out between formidable and thus discouraging hurdles facing peace education in the context of intractable conflicts and actual, encouraging research findings of such programs. It is suggested that the hurdles pertain to the most deep-seated and thus unchangeable convictions constituting the backbone of a group’s collective narrative. On the other hand, the change-objects affected by peace education programs pertain to more peripheral attitudes and beliefs, which are more easily changeable, more weakly associated with behaviors, and thus less consequen-tial. This hypothetical possibility is briefly examined from both a theoretical and practical perspective, leading to three clusters of research questions: (a) Is the pro-posed distinction between central and peripheral attitudes and beliefs applicable to peace education programs?, (b) How stable are changes of peripheral attitudes in the absence of changes of the more central ones?, and (c) To what extent can only long-term, socialization-like programs affect core beliefs and attitudes? Peace education in contexts of intractable conflict faces formidable challenges that are unique to such contexts (Bar-Tal, 2004; Salomon, 2004a) and thus raise ques-tions about its possible effectiveness. In this article I wish to discuss one such ques-tion and formulate researchable hypotheses that might provide explanations for some of the perplexing issues facing peace education. The kinds of peace educa-tion programs referred to here are the ones deliberately designed as relatively structured in-school or out-of-school programs with specific goals, such as changed attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices, and increased tolerance and under-standing of the “other side ” (e.g., Burns & Aspeslagh, 1996). The context of intractable conflicts was described by Azar (1990) as conflicts based on “ethnic hostilities crossed with developmental inequalities that have