This book aims to create a space at the intersection of multiple discussions on emotion, conflict, and critical peace education. It draws on academic literature that attempts to highlight the possibilities and the pitfalls of considering the role of peace education in healing and reconciliation. Drawing from psychoanalytic and sociopolitical perspectives of trauma and emotion, the book highlight the pedagogical practices with which emotions can be engaged as critical and transformative forces in peace education. While the emotions of trauma are a very real, and a very devastating feature of li ... More

This book aims to create a space at the intersection of multiple discussions on emotion, conflict, and critical peace education. It draws on academic literature that attempts to highlight the possibilities and the pitfalls of considering the role of peace education in healing and reconciliation. Drawing from psychoanalytic and sociopolitical perspectives of trauma and emotion, the book highlight the pedagogical practices with which emotions can be engaged as critical and transformative forces in peace education. While the emotions of trauma are a very real, and a very devastating feature of life in conflict and post-conflict societies, the book argues that educators can work toward peacebuilding, healing, and reconciliation through devising critical pedagogies that do not remain stuck in trauma or stay too firmly grounded in such binary pairings as oppressor/oppressed, master/slave, and power/freedom. An overarching concept for the book's theory is the notion of critical emotional praxis. The challenges and prospects of critical emotional praxis as a theoretical and practical “tool” in critical peace education are shown through detailed evidence from ethnographic research in Cyprus between 2007 and 2011. The analysis does not simply show the political appropriation of emotions of traumatic conflict in schools and its consequences within a particular setting (Cyprus), but also suggests how critical emotional praxis and its related theorization may provide an informed insight into efforts that deal constructively with emotional tensions, dilemmas, and difficulties and formulate critical responses to peace education efforts.