Journal on Education in Emergencies: Volume 4, Number 1

We are delighted to present the fourth issue of the Journal on Education in Emergencies (JEiE). The five research articles and one field note featured in this issue coalesce around two main themes: refugee education and education administration in postconflict societies.

The five research articles and one field note featured in this issue coalesce around two main themes: refugee education and education administration in postconflict societies.

Across the world, education is tasked with rebuilding societies torn apart by violent conflict and riven by economic injustice. In this article, we focus on kindergarten education in the vulnerable, conflict-ridden Lebanese context.

This qualitative study, which examines the experiences of Syrian refugee children who are attending a non-formal education center in Lebanon, seeks to understand the role education plays in fostering pathways to resilience in the children’s lives. Half of the students in the study had chosen to drop out of the Lebanese formal schools they attended.

To what extent does the adoption of consociational power-sharing affect the design and implementation of education reforms? This article maps this territory through rich and detailed interviews collected in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2012-2013.

In this article, we consider an example of policy transfer for another purpose: to promote social cohesion through schools, specifically in societies that have experienced ethnic division and conflict. Focusing on the model of shared education, we explore a process of policy transfer between Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The Iraqi Disputed Territories consist of 15 districts stretching across four northern governorates from the Syrian to Iranian borders. The oil-rich Iraqi governorate of Kirkuk lies at the heart of this dispute and reflects the country’s ethnic and religious diversity. This paper explores the influence of these conflicts and contests on education in the city of Kirkuk.

This field note examines some of the challenges experienced by students living in and near the Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya who were making the transition from secondary school to university programs.

(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict, edited by Michelle J. Bellino and James H. Williams, offers insight into the dynamic field of history education and its relationship to the state and to collective memory in conflict-affected countries

Noting that this trend is likely to continue, that the issue of child migration is complex, and that children migrate for multiple reasons, Jacqueline Bhabha’s insightful and sobering reflection on this much-neglected issue in the global discourse goes far in shedding light on a “largely untold and unanalysed story”

In Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace, editors Clara Ramírez-Barat and Roger Duthie explore what it means to address transitional justice and legacies of the past from an education perspective and how this relates to a broader peacebuilding agenda.

In Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition, Michelle J. Bellino draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork to examine the complexities that the historical memory of armed conflict offers for the consolidation of democracy and the expansion of citizenship among youth.