Education, urban violence, and youth: exploring pathways or roadblocks for ‘peace’ in the city

Although (violent) conflict and education still co-exist to a large extent in separate academic and practitioner silos, the linkages between them have begun to emerge as a central concern for a variety of stakeholders working on sustainable development and peacebuilding. Critically examining this relationship is important, especially in view of a range of societal changes taking place around the world: a growing younger population, rampant urbanization and spatial fragmentation, rising social inequalities, and high rates of (lethal) violence. This paper explores whether and in what ways education can play a role in mitigating or preventing urban violence that mainly affects youth. The paper also recognises the possible negative effects of education. Specifically, in combination with uneven urbanization, education – whether available or not – can lead to an increased sense of social exclusion among the urban youth, which, in turn, can foster violence in the city (i.e. civic conflict). This paper explores these positive and negative interactions between education, youth and urban violence, and develops an emerging research agenda in this specific subfield. We argue how an expansive rather than narrow methodological ‘post-disciplinary’
framing is essential to explore the relationships between formal and non formal educational processes, various forms of urban violence and youth agency in relation to peace.