Building peace in Bangladesh: The role of peace education

Abstract

Peace building is a continuous process. Peace building is not only a process of reducing or eliminating the risk of war or violence but also a process of establishing sustainable development in forms of ensuring human rights, democratic political system, potential human resources, and environmental security. Peace building through peace education is a new dimension in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, peace education has not been practiced formally but in the textbooks there are more or less materials of peace education such as democratic education, human rights education, moral education, etc. which can be used to build a culture of peace and can contribute to building peace. NGOs have a significant contribution in development of Bangladesh. Concerning peace education, NGOs intervene in peace building through advocacy in the field of human rights education, democratic education, environmental preservation education, etc. The objective of this study is to analyze the contents of text books to understand the scope of peace education and to analyze the advocacy works of NGOs in building peace. Qualitative method has been used in this study. However, it is found that although there are a few contents of peace education in text books of national curriculum, especially in Bangladesh and Global Studies, there is a scope of modification in content and pedagogy. NGOs are playing a significant role in peace building through advocacy i.e. awareness raising and behavioral change.