International Institute on Peace Education 2024: Nepal

The Institute is being organized by the IIPE Secretariat in partnership with a network of former IIPE participants in Nepal and various local NGOs, including ASER Nepal (Annual Status of Education Report) and Galli Galli.

IIPE 2024: Nepal will convene educators from around the globe for a week-long, residential, learning community experience in peace education. A rich exchange of peacebuilding research, academic theory, best practices, and actions will be shared by participants from around the world through IIPE’s evolving dialogical, cooperative, and intersubjective modes of reflective inquiry and experiential learning.

Overarching Theme: The Pedagogy and Peace Politics of Change: Navigating the Tensions Between Tradition and Modernity

Nepal today epitomizes a crossroads of transitions and an exchange of knowledge and culture as it did on the ancient Silk Road, a pathway of trade between East and West.  IIPE 2024 aims to be a crossroads of peacelearning for peace educator-activists and scholars where Nepalese participants will exchange perspectives with global participants on shared, diverse challenges and problems. IIPE Nepal invites questions that open new perspectives on global and local issues. All participants will offer their experience to the learning community that will build shared understandings towards adapting for the survival and well-being of peoples and Earth in this time of crises.  IIPE in Nepal offers a unique opportunity for incorporating ancient wisdom with present knowledge for peaceful futures: how can these ways of knowing be brought together to better educate and learn for peace?

Nepal: Themes & Issues

In the context of Nepal, we’ll explore political, economic, and ecological challenges that also exist globally. Nepal is diverse in landscape, languages, geographies, and ethnicities; strivings here offer a microcosm that mirrors global contexts. Nepal, a federated constitutional democracy since 2015, faces pressures of militarism, autocracy, displaced peoples, human rights violations, competition for resources, culture including gender, as well as pressures of global great power dynamics that exist in all present-day democracies.  These challenges, like those in the global peace community, raise questions of how to navigate the tensions between ancient cultures and spiritual traditions and the present economic and political pressures of the modern globalized world. (See the country profile for Nepal on “Mapping Peace Education” for additional context and an introduction to historical and present peace education efforts in the country.)

Global Commonalities

At IIPE 2024: Nepal, we will delve into the diverse perspectives of Nepalese and global participants on threats and challenges such as the climate catastrophes that are transforming our geographical landscapes as well as the pressures due to political shifts in great powers that transform the contexts of our realities. These shifts seem to render ordinary citizens helpless. Yet, educating for peace aims to empower citizens to open their minds to the potential of cross-contextual thinking together to generate collective understandings and creative alternative paths for actions.

Invitation to Apply

*The application deadline for IIPE 2024 is March 15.  

The IIPE invites formal and non-formal educators, students, practitioners, academics, researchers and activists from the fields of peacebuilding, human rights education, international/intercultural/global/global citizenship education, education for sustainable development, anti-racist education, decolonizing education, conflict transformation, community development, the arts, health and faith-based professions, and others with interest in peace education— with all levels of experience – to apply to join the weeklong co-learning community.

The IIPE only accommodates 60 participants.  While we would like to accept everyone who applies, the number of applicants usually exceeds the places at each IIPE.

All potential participants must complete an online application to be considered.  Acceptance for participation in the IIPE is based upon the applicant’s potential contribution to the goal of developing and strengthening peace education in their local context as well as the host region, and toward developing a more global perspective on peace education among all participants.  Additional acceptance criteria will be made available on our application page.

When applying, potential participants are requested to propose plenary or workshop topics related to the frameworks presented above.