Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific: Becoming Enemy-Friends

Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, this book examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands.

Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ’sides’. This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.

David Oakeshott is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University.