Can Jobs Programs Build Peace?

In the last decade, well over $10 billion has been spent on employment programs designed to contribute to peace and stability. Despite the outlay, whether these programs perform, and how they do so, remain open questions. This study conducts three reviews to derive the status quo of knowledge. First, it draws on academic literature on the microfoundations of instability to distill testable theories of how employment programs could affect stability at the micro level. Second, it analyses academic and grey literature that directly evaluates the impacts of employment programs on peace-related outcomes. Third, it conducts a systematic review of program-based learning from over 400 interventions. This study finds good theoretical reasons to believe that employment programs could contribute to peace. However, only very limited evidence exists on overall impacts on peace or on the pathways underlying the theories of change. At the program level, the review finds strong evidence that contributions to peace and stability are often simply assumed to have occurred. This provides a major challenge for the justification of continued spending on jobs for peace programs. Instead, systematic and rigorous learning on the impacts of jobs for peace programs needs to be scaled up urgently.

Pedagogical dilemmas among Bedouin-Palestinian peace educators in Israel

Purpose The purpose of this study is to learn how minority peace educators grapple with dilemmas related to their involvement in peace programs. Design/methodology/approach A total of 15 male teachers, members of the minority Bedouin community in Israel, all peace educators, provided their reactions to three dilemmas, addressing various facets of the strained relations of their community with the Jewish-Israeli majority, as influenced by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Findings The responses to these dilemmas suggest that when it comes to questions of the identity of these teachers as members of a marginalized community, their responses considerably diverge. This is not the case when it comes to their identity as peace educators. Originality/value This suggests that if the aim is to bring peace educators, members of minority groups in conflict zones, to harness their potential to bring about positive change, their peace activist identities must be strengthened.

Why Women Want to Play Sports: Identity, Culture, and Motivation

This paper is part of a series of research dedicated to specific issues uncovered in sports-for-peace programs. Other research has focused on cross-cultural issues, for example. In this research project, the authors were interested in how to encourage the inclusion and promotion of women in all sports around the world. The authors sought to discover who encouraged the women to play competitive sports, how long they had been playing sports, the barriers they encountered when playing competitive sports, and how they felt about identifying as sportswomen at the higher levels of competition. The authors used an on-line anonymous survey instrument and asked Division I college volleyball coaches to forward the link to their teams for voluntary participation in the study. While the authors review the literature as well as the recent history of many competitive sports for women, volleyball was chosen as the focus for the on-line survey because it is one of the most common sports women can play in college at the very competitive Division 1 level in the U.S. The survey questions were both demographic and open-ended in nature. The authors surveyed 149 women who played college-level sports. Narrative analysis was used to understand the themes presented in the open-ended question data. The authors propose that family dynamics, availability of sports programs, and gendered discourses have a combined effect on women’s orientation to particular sports, the women’s long term dedication to the sport, and at the competitive level at which they play. These findings should be considered before inviting women into sports-for-peace programs. The findings have global implications for inclusion and promotion of women in sporting activities. This research will be of interest to coaches, sportswomen, peace educators, gender educators, as well as practitioners who run international sports-for-peace programs.

Sport and Peace-Building in Divided Societies: A Case Study on Colombia and Northern Ireland

In recent years, sport has been acknowledged by a broad range of organisations as a viable tool to promote peace in highly volatile contexts. Acknowledging the complexity and myriad of issues that shape and define the Colombian and Northern Irish struggles, this article explores the use of sport to advance peace-building as seen through the lenses of the personnel involved in designing, supporting and implementing sport-based peace interventions (SDP officials) in both regions. This paper found points of commonality and divergence between Colombia and Northern Ireland showing that the unique conflict dynamics in both cases have played a major role in shaping the perceptions of SDP officials with regards to the peace-building dimension of sport, their role as drivers of change and the structure and content of sport for development and peace programs.