UPT Peace Assessment
Assessment Statement
Education already contains many of the conditions from which peace can emerge, but they are often distributed across separate subjects, programs, organisations and educational philosophies rather than understood as parts of one developmental peace architecture.
Schools increasingly teach social and emotional skills, global citizenship, collaboration, wellbeing, critical thinking and responsible participation. Peacebuilding organisations separately contribute expertise in emotional regulation, communication, mediation, youth leadership, service, dialogue, conflict transformation and community partnership. International education policy increasingly recognises that education must prepare young people not only academically but socially, emotionally and civically. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 2023 Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development explicitly calls for education to contribute to lasting peace and human development [1].
The fragmentation lies less in the absence of peacebuilding activity than in the lack of a shared framework for seeing how these different contributions interact, where capacities remain missing, and whether the educational system as a whole is actually becoming more capable of sustaining peace.
The central opportunity identified by this assessment is therefore peace literacy: developing young people’s capacity to recognise, understand, create and sustain the conditions through which peace emerges within themselves, relationships, communities and larger systems.
Overall assessment: Education contains substantial peace-building capacity, but its strongest elements remain insufficiently integrated, measured and understood as peace infrastructure.
Assessment Overview
This assessment began with a set of questions posed by Kurt Krueger during a Rotary E-Club of World Peace meeting featuring a presentation by Nancy Merritt on the history of the Department of Peacebuilding.
Kurt’s questions moved the conversation toward education: why purpose increases learner engagement; whether curiosity, empathy, appreciation, cooperation, systems thinking and service can be deliberately developed; what PeaceMaking education might measurably change; how positive psychology, inquiry-based learning and mastery learning might combine; and what happens when students are invited not simply to learn about society but to investigate how thriving societies are created and sustained.
Those questions are important because they move peace education beyond the conventional boundaries of conflict studies.
They ask whether education itself can become a developmental environment in which young people progressively acquire the capacities needed to sustain peaceful human systems.
Subsequent conversations and presentations within the Rotary E-Club of World Peace reinforced that possibility. Raymond C. Shields, MD, President of the Rotary E-Club of World Peace, raised the practical question of whether existing peacebuilding initiatives could complement one another rather than requiring schools to choose a single program. Rotary International itself invests in peace education, peacebuilding capacity, strategic relationships and initiatives addressing underlying drivers of conflict [14].
Discussions with Sheva Carr brought social and emotional learning, nervous-system regulation, education policy and concerns about the appropriate role of technology in children’s education into the inquiry. Presentations and discussions with Catherine Cooley brought Nonviolent Communication, empathic communication, mediation and conflict repair into focus. Conversations with Prabha Sankaranarayan, President and CEO of Mediators Beyond Borders International, brought international mediation and youth peacebuilding into the picture. A recent Rotary presentation by Dr. Estera Borcsa, Sustainable Development Goals Chair for Mediators Beyond Borders International, highlighted the systemic importance of Sustainable Development Goals 16 and 17 [11].
These organisations and individuals are used throughout this assessment as specific examples, not as an exhaustive representation of the peace education field. Many other organisations perform comparable or complementary functions.
What begins to emerge is less a single peace program than a possible peace ecosystem.
Context: Education Is Already Peace Infrastructure
The strongest contemporary education frameworks increasingly reject the idea that academic knowledge alone is sufficient preparation for life.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organisation that conducts international policy and education research, places student agency, wellbeing, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values within its Future of Education and Skills framework [4].
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations agency responsible for education, science and culture, similarly places empathy, critical thinking, intercultural understanding and environmental responsibility within its contemporary peace-education framework [1].
This matters because many of the capabilities required for peace literacy are already entering mainstream educational thinking.
The gap is integration.
A school may teach emotional regulation in one program, civic responsibility in another, collaboration during project work, critical thinking in academic subjects and conflict resolution only after an incident occurs. Each intervention may be useful. Yet students may never encounter a coherent understanding of how these capacities fit together to support peaceful individuals, relationships and societies.
That is the opening this assessment examines.
An Emerging Peace Ecosystem
One useful way to understand the landscape is through three accessible domains: Peace Within, Peace in Action and Peace Together.
These are not rigid organisational categories. Many organisations cross between them. Their usefulness is that they reveal different but potentially complementary peace-building functions.
Peace Within
Peace Within concerns internal regulation, emotional awareness, dignity, resilience, self-understanding and the capacity to remain sufficiently regulated for curiosity, empathy and flexible thinking to remain available.
The HeartMath Institute, a nonprofit research and education organisation working with self-regulation and psychophysiological coherence, provides one example. Its educational work includes self-regulation practices and heart-rate-variability-based approaches intended to support emotional regulation, focus, resilience and stress management [6].
The Choose Love Movement, a nonprofit social-emotional and character education initiative, provides another example through educational approaches centred on courage, gratitude, forgiveness and compassion-in-action [7].
These approaches differ, but both contribute substantially to the internal conditions from which later relational peace may become more possible.
Peace As A Science places similar importance on regulation. It proposes that under threat the behavioural range narrows, while greater regulation restores executive function, flexibility and optionality [24]. The text also treats secure relational development as learning that rupture can be followed by reconnection and repair [24].
The significance is not that emotional regulation equals peace.
It is that a dysregulated learner has fewer peaceful options available.
Peace in Action
Peace in Action concerns the transition from inner capability into behaviour: communication, leadership, cooperation, service, conflict navigation, responsibility and participation.
The PeaceJam Foundation, an international youth peace education organisation, offers curricula using the experiences and work of Nobel Peace Prize laureates to engage young people in peace education, leadership and action [8].
The Center for Nonviolent Communication, the international organisation supporting the Nonviolent Communication approach developed by Marshall Rosenberg, provides another relational pathway. Its educational materials apply Nonviolent Communication to reducing conflict and strengthening relationships in schools [9].
Catherine Cooley’s work through Peaceabl provides a specific applied example of mediation, empathic communication, conflict coaching and the practical development of relational skills [10].
The educational importance is straightforward.
Cooperation is not acquired merely by assigning group work.
Empathy is not reliably developed by telling children to be kind.
Conflict competence does not automatically appear because a school has a behaviour policy.
These capabilities require practice under real relational conditions: listening while irritated, communicating disagreement, recovering after misunderstanding, negotiating needs, taking responsibility and discovering that rupture does not have to end relationship.
That is where peace moves from value to skill.
Peace Together
Peace Together concerns collective systems: institutions, community networks, international relationships, governance, social narratives and the capacity to cooperate across difference at scale.
Mediators Beyond Borders International is an international peacebuilding organisation focused on mediation, dialogue and conflict transformation. Its leadership includes Prabha Sankaranarayan as President and CEO and Dr. Estera Borcsa as Sustainable Development Goals Chair [11].
Its developing International Peace Camp for Teenagers provides a useful example of peace literacy becoming experiential: young people from different countries can encounter cultural difference while practising communication, mediation, emotional literacy, dialogue and collaborative problem-solving [12].
That matters because peace literacy cannot be developed entirely in environments where everyone already shares the same assumptions.
Young people require opportunities to encounter difference without losing relationship.
Tales of Turning, a South African peacebuilding initiative, provides another systems-level example through work involving digital listening, narrative analysis, dialogue and approaches to reducing polarisation and inflammatory communication [13].
Its relevance to education extends beyond the classroom. Young people now learn continuously within social-media environments, online communities, recommendation systems and AI-mediated information landscapes. Those systems influence narratives, belonging, identity and interpretations of other groups.
Rotary International, a worldwide service organisation connecting local clubs and global networks, performs a different kind of peacebuilding function. Rotary invests in peace education, peacebuilding capacity, partnerships and conflict-prevention initiatives [14].
Its potential contribution to a peace ecosystem may therefore be less about creating another curriculum and more about connecting schools, community organisations, peace practitioners, researchers, funders and international networks.
This distinction is important.
Integration does not require organisational merger.
It requires complementary functions to become visible.
Scientific Edutainment: Translating Peace Science Into Experience
A peace curriculum can be scientifically rigorous and still fail if students experience it as abstract, moralising or disconnected from their lives.
Scientific Edutainment offers one possible translation mechanism.
Research and educational initiatives have experimented with combining science, psychology, multimedia and interactive experiences to engage young people with social issues such as bullying [20].
The principle is useful beyond any single program.
Science, psychology, storytelling, music, games, dialogue, visualisation, projects, technology and community experience can become translation channels through which peace-related knowledge becomes memorable and practicable.
The purpose is not entertainment for its own sake.
It is to reduce the distance between knowing a concept and being able to recognise and use it.
This also gives the UPT AI Companion an appropriately bounded place within the ecosystem. Unified Peace Theory is the framework. The AI Companion is one possible interface for exploring the framework alongside books, discussion, music, storytelling, visual resources and experiential learning.
AI does not need to become the foundation of peace education, particularly for younger children.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Peace and Partnership as Connective Infrastructure
The significance of Sustainable Development Goals 16 and 17 emerged strongly during a recent Rotary presentation by Dr. Estera Borcsa, Sustainable Development Goals Chair for Mediators Beyond Borders International.
In that presentation, Dr. Borcsa highlighted Goals 16 and 17 as particularly important because the conditions they represent — peace, justice, strong institutions and effective partnership — support the ability to advance the other Sustainable Development Goals.
This is presented here as an insight from that Rotary discussion, rather than as an official United Nations formulation.
The official United Nations definition of Goal 16 is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, provide access to justice and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. Goal 17 concerns strengthening the means of implementation and revitalising global partnership for sustainable development [16][17].
Dr. Borcsa’s framing provides a particularly useful systems lens for education.
Rather than seeing the 17 Goals as independent problems, students can investigate the supporting conditions that allow progress to hold.
What happens to poverty reduction when institutions are corrupt or unstable?
What happens to health systems during violent conflict?
What happens to climate action when nations cannot cooperate?
What happens to education when communities do not have functioning institutions or social trust?
And what becomes possible when knowledge, funding, expertise, lived experience and institutional capacity are connected through partnership?
From this perspective, Goals 16 and 17 can be explored as supporting architecture across the wider sustainable-development system.
That creates a strong educational proposition:
Students should not merely memorise the Sustainable Development Goals. They can investigate how the goals interact, how peace and partnership support progress across them, where progress in one area strengthens another, and where interventions create unintended trade-offs.
That is peace literacy expressed through systems thinking.
UPT Peace Scan
3D — Physical Conditions
The physical educational environment already contains many measurable conditions that influence peace: classroom safety, attendance, disciplinary incidents, bullying, teacher workload, access to resources, class organisation, device use, opportunities for collaboration, curriculum time and the availability of supportive adults.
The peace implication is that schools cannot rely only on curriculum content.
The physical and behavioural organisation of learning teaches students continuously.
A lesson on cooperation delivered inside a humiliating classroom is internally contradictory.
A lesson on agency delivered in an environment where students never make meaningful choices is weakened by the surrounding structure.
A wellbeing lesson delivered while teachers themselves operate under chronic overload may not be able to stabilise the wider school system.
Peace education therefore begins partly with what the educational environment materially and behaviourally makes possible.
4D — Historical Trajectory
Education systems were not originally designed around peace literacy.
Modern schooling has historically prioritised literacy, numeracy, disciplinary knowledge, credentials and preparation for economic participation. Over time, educational expectations have expanded to include wellbeing, social-emotional learning, citizenship, inclusion, digital literacy, sustainability and global competencies.
That trajectory is continuing. UNESCO’s contemporary global peace-education framework explicitly connects education with peace, human rights, sustainable development, critical thinking, empathy and intercultural understanding [1]. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development similarly gives student agency and wellbeing a significant place alongside knowledge and competencies [4].
The transition creates a structural risk: schools can accumulate new responsibilities without integrating them.
Wellbeing becomes another program.
Citizenship becomes another unit.
AI literacy becomes another competency.
Peace education becomes another special event.
Service becomes extracurricular.
The result can be curriculum expansion without conceptual coherence.
The historical opportunity is therefore not simply to add more peace content. It is to recognise that regulation, relationship, inquiry, responsibility, critical thought, service and systems awareness may be different developmental expressions of the larger capability required to participate coherently in human systems.
5D — Sovereignty, Identity and Relationships
Education is fundamentally relational.
Students develop not only knowledge but beliefs about whether their voice matters, whether mistakes threaten belonging, whether authority can be trusted, whether disagreement is dangerous and whether they are capable of influencing the world around them.
This makes sovereignty particularly important.
Purpose-connected learning changes the learner’s relationship to knowledge. Rather than merely complying with an assigned task, students can begin to connect learning with their own questions, identity, contribution and future possibilities. Contemporary educational frameworks similarly place student agency among the important capabilities learners need for the future [4].
Yet sovereignty must remain developmentally balanced with structure.
Students still require boundaries, expertise, adult responsibility and progressive scaffolding.
Peace does not mean transferring adult responsibility onto children or treating every preference as equally informed.
The coherent educational relationship is therefore neither domination nor abandonment.
It is guided agency.
The same principle applies to peer relationships. Communication training, mediation, youth leadership, service and international exchange provide different environments in which students can learn to remain connected while navigating difference.
Within Peace As A Science, secure relational development is understood not as the absence of rupture, but as learning that rupture can be survived and followed by repair [24].
That may be one of the most consequential things education can teach.
6D — Competing Interpretations
One of the largest unresolved questions in education is deceptively simple:
What is education for?
Families may emphasise opportunity and security.
Employers may prioritise employable skills.
Universities may emphasise knowledge and scholarship.
Governments may focus on productivity and social participation.
Teachers may emphasise understanding and development.
Students may seek belonging, competence, identity and purpose.
Peace educators may emphasise empathy, justice, cooperation and conflict transformation.
These aims are not automatically incompatible.
Fragmentation occurs when one becomes so dominant that other legitimate developmental needs become invisible.
Peace education itself also carries interpretive risk. If it becomes a prescribed ideology, students may learn approved conclusions rather than develop the capacity to investigate complexity.
A stronger approach treats peace as an inquiry.
Older students can examine competing explanations of conflict, compare interventions, test evidence, question assumptions and determine whether apparently beneficial outcomes remain coherent across time and across affected groups.
UPT’s dimensional architecture supports this distinction: 6D concerns interpretation, meaning, assumptions and competing narratives rather than simply factual events or relationships [24].
The educational objective is therefore not uniform agreement.
It is capacity for complexity without collapse.
7D — Whole-System Behaviour
The strongest weakness visible across contemporary peace education is fragmentation between otherwise valuable initiatives.
A school can have excellent wellbeing programs while students remain civically passive.
It can teach activism while neglecting emotional regulation.
It can emphasise academic mastery while undermining curiosity through fear of error.
It can teach collaboration while rewarding individual competition almost exclusively.
It can provide sophisticated digital technology while weakening independent reasoning or relational attention.
It can teach peace while its organisational culture operates through chronic stress.
The whole-system test asks whether the parts reinforce one another.
This is where the peace ecosystem becomes valuable.
HeartMath Institute, Choose Love Movement, PeaceJam Foundation, Nonviolent Communication, Mediators Beyond Borders International, Tales of Turning, Rotary and other organisations do not need to be combined into one branded curriculum.
They can be understood as examples of different stabilising functions within a larger educational ecology.
UPT’s contribution is therefore not organisational ownership.
It is pattern recognition and integration.
Which capacities are already strong?
Which remain weak?
Which organisations or approaches already possess expertise in the missing areas?
Where could collaboration create additional capacity?
And how would we know whether peace actually increased?
AI, Children and Developmental Sovereignty
Artificial intelligence deserves specific attention because it introduces both educational capability and developmental questions.
The central issue is not simply whether AI can improve a learning task.
A peace-literate assessment asks:
What is AI doing to the developmental system around the task?
An AI tool may increase speed while reducing productive struggle.
It may improve access while increasing dependency.
It may provide personalised explanation while displacing teacher-student interaction.
It may strengthen inquiry when students use it to compare possibilities, while weakening inquiry when it produces conclusions students have not developed the capacity to evaluate.
It may increase informational access while also making honesty, provenance and critical interpretation more difficult.
This connects directly with UPT Peace Lab Issue #8: How Do We Identify and Build Peace Into AI? That assessment identified peace literacy as a developing need alongside risk, ethics and responsibility literacy [23].
For education, this distinction becomes especially important because the learner is still developing.
International guidance from UNESCO and UNICEF has increasingly emphasised human-centred, age-appropriate and child-rights-based approaches to artificial intelligence in education [21][22].
For younger children, peace literacy begins in embodied and relational experience: safety, play, rhythm, emotional language, boundaries, curiosity, belonging and repair.
As learners mature, technology may increasingly become one tool for inquiry, comparison, systems mapping, research and reflection.
The technology should serve the developmental objective rather than become the developmental objective.
UPT itself does not depend upon AI.
The UPT AI Companion is one optional tool for educators, leaders and learners to explore systems and Peace Assessments. Peace literacy can equally be developed through human dialogue, projects, books, storytelling, music, community experience and direct relational practice.
Assessment of the 12 Peace Stabilisers
The Peace Stabiliser diagnosis suggests that education already contains many peace-building resources but distributes them unevenly. The UPT Peace Lab editorial standards define the stabilisers as the diagnostic phase of the Peace Assessment rather than another descriptive framework [25].
Honesty — Moderately strong, increasingly challenged
Education has strong traditions of evidence, inquiry, academic integrity and critical thinking.
Yet social media, AI-generated content, misinformation and performance pressures increasingly complicate the student’s relationship with truth.
Peace literacy therefore requires more than access to information.
It requires epistemic honesty:
What do I know?
What do I not know?
What evidence supports this?
What assumptions am I carrying?
Could this information be inaccurate even though it sounds convincing?
Honesty becomes increasingly foundational in an AI-mediated information environment. Within the Peace Stabilisers, honesty functions by improving signal quality and reducing distortion [24].
Open-mindedness — Strong potential, uneven practice
Inquiry-based learning and dialogue create strong opportunities for students to encounter alternative perspectives.
Yet open-mindedness can quickly weaken when young people learn that particular questions lead to humiliation, social exclusion or predetermined answers.
Peace-literate education requires the capacity to hold a viewpoint without becoming trapped by it.
It should expand the learner’s possible interpretations rather than dictate a single acceptable interpretation of every complex issue.
Willingness — Highly dependent on purpose and safety
Learners are more capable of engaging difficulty when they experience relevance, agency, supportive relationships and the possibility of progress.
Willingness declines when learning becomes primarily coercive, humiliating or disconnected from meaning.
Kurt Krueger’s original question about purpose therefore reaches beyond motivation.
Purpose can help convert education from an imposed activity into participation in something the learner understands as meaningful.
Forgiveness — Underdeveloped but highly important
Schools are environments of continual error.
Students answer incorrectly, misunderstand one another, fail assignments, breach rules, lose emotional regulation and sometimes hurt relationships.
An educational system incapable of repair can turn temporary behaviour into permanent identity.
Forgiveness does not mean removing consequence.
It means allowing error to become information rather than destiny.
Within UPT, forgiveness reduces the residual effects of conflict and helps prevent systems from repeatedly reproducing the past [24].
In education, that has implications for restorative practice, reintegration and the psychological freedom to try again.
Unity — Present but vulnerable
Schools create powerful structures of belonging.
They can also reproduce exclusion, status hierarchies, cultural division and peer fragmentation.
Unity is strongest when students can experience belonging without requiring sameness.
International youth encounters, collaborative projects, mediation and global citizenship education provide opportunities to practise connection across difference.
The objective is not homogeneity.
It is learning that difference does not automatically require disconnection.
Discipline — Structurally strong, but sometimes misapplied
Education already understands repetition, practice, routine, feedback and progressive competence.
Mastery-oriented learning is relevant because unresolved learning gaps can compound over time, while structured practice and revision can increase competence and future choice.
The peace question is whether discipline creates capability or merely compliance.
Good discipline expands future freedom.
Poor discipline can narrow it.
Faith — Quiet but developmentally important
Young people repeatedly undertake tasks whose outcomes they cannot know.
They learn to read before reading becomes fluent.
They develop relationships without knowing whether those relationships will last.
They study subjects before knowing their future relevance.
Faith here does not require religious belief.
Its stabilising function is the ability to remain engaged with possibility under uncertainty.
Education weakens this stabiliser when difficulty becomes proof of incapacity.
It strengthens it when students learn that uncertainty and temporary failure can coexist with future possibility.
Responsibility — Strong potential
Service learning, student leadership, collaborative projects and civic participation allow students to experience themselves as consequential actors rather than passive recipients.
PeaceJam’s youth leadership and community-action approach provides one example [8]. Rotary’s service architecture provides another example of contribution linked to community and global networks [14].
Responsibility is strongest when paired with genuine agency.
Students cannot fully learn responsibility if adults retain every meaningful decision while simultaneously asking them to “take ownership.”
UPT defines responsibility as stewardship of agency and the ability to close feedback loops between action and consequence [24].
Love — Present culturally, rarely operationalised
Educational language more commonly refers to care, dignity, inclusion and belonging than to love.
Yet the stabilising function is clear.
Students learn within relationships.
A peace-literate school does not abandon standards or boundaries. It ensures that standards are not enforced through humiliation or withdrawal of dignity.
Love, in this context, protects the human being while allowing behaviour, decisions and performance to be challenged.
Within UPT, love functions as a condition that makes connection and repair easier rather than as sentiment alone [24].
Wholeness — The principal systemic weakness
Education remains divided into academic, emotional, social, behavioural, civic and technological domains that are frequently taught and measured separately.
Wholeness asks whether those domains reinforce one another.
A high-achieving school with chronically exhausted teachers is not fully coherent.
A wellbeing program that discourages legitimate anger is incomplete.
A service project that encourages rescue rather than reciprocal community partnership can reproduce unequal power.
An AI tool that improves task completion while weakening independent reasoning represents a mixed outcome.
Wholeness is therefore one of the most important stabilisers for this assessment because it reveals when local success masks wider fragmentation.
UPT describes wholeness as the reduction of fragmentation through integration [24].
Joy — Important and often underestimated
Joy supports curiosity, play, creativity, engagement and social connection.
It is not the absence of rigour.
Scientific Edutainment illustrates the broader principle that rigorous material can be translated into engaging experiences rather than requiring learning to become solemn in order to be serious [20].
Within UPT, joy acts as feedback that a coherent state is viable and worth sustaining; peace becomes something people are willing to return to rather than merely a form of restraint [24].
Education that loses joy may still produce compliance.
It becomes less certain that it produces flourishing.
Peace — Present as an educational aspiration, insufficiently operationalised
Peace already appears explicitly within international education architecture. UNESCO now treats education for peace, human rights, global citizenship and sustainable development as interconnected educational priorities [1].
Yet peace is still commonly treated as a topic, value or desired social outcome rather than as a developmental condition that can be investigated, practised and strengthened.
This is the central diagnostic finding.
Education has many peace-building components. It does not yet consistently possess a coherent peace literacy architecture connecting them.
Students as Peace Researchers
The most distinctive educational opportunity identified by this assessment is to move students from recipients of peace messages toward investigators of peace.
A young learner can first experience peace through safety, rhythm, bonding, play and repair.
Later, the learner can recognise emotions, boundaries, conflict and relationship.
Later still, students can investigate systems.
Why do some groups cooperate while others polarise?
What makes people trust institutions?
Why does exclusion increase conflict?
How does environmental stress influence communities?
How do poverty, education, health and justice interact?
How does misinformation alter relationships?
What happens when an intervention improves one outcome while worsening another?
Students can gather evidence, conduct interviews, map systems, compare perspectives, design community projects and test conclusions.
Positive psychology can contribute attention to strengths, meaning, hope and wellbeing.
Inquiry-based learning can provide the questioning architecture.
Mastery learning can ensure that curiosity develops into genuine competence rather than remaining superficial exploration.
Service can then provide real-world application.
Together these approaches can create a reinforcing learning cycle:
meaning → inquiry → competence → contribution → reflection → deeper inquiry.
That is education functioning as a peace laboratory.
Measuring PeaceMaking Education
Kurt Krueger’s question about measurement is crucial because peace education cannot rely only on good intention.
A credible model should test whether meaningful change occurs.
Possible domains include student engagement and purpose; attendance and persistence; emotional regulation and psychological safety; belonging and peer trust; conflict frequency and successful repair; teacher wellbeing; collaboration; critical and systems thinking; service and civic participation; academic achievement; equity and inclusion; and the strength of relationships across otherwise separated groups.
But the most important UPT contribution may not be another isolated peace score.
It is a measurement principle:
Measure the intended benefit — and then look for what changed elsewhere in the system.
If academic achievement rises while anxiety rises sharply, the outcome is mixed.
If disciplinary incidents fall because students become frightened to speak, apparent stability may conceal fragmentation.
If collaboration improves only among already connected groups, average results may conceal exclusion.
If technology increases output while weakening independent reasoning, speed should not be confused with educational coherence.
Peace assessment therefore requires multidimensional feedback.
What UPT Can Contribute to Existing Organisations
This assessment does not support creating a UPT umbrella under which other peacebuilding organisations lose their identity.
The stronger role is shared discovery and mapping.
A UPT Peace Assessment could help a school or network identify where its existing strengths sit across Peace Within, Peace in Action and Peace Together; investigate the relevant physical, historical, relational, interpretive and whole-system conditions; diagnose which Peace Stabilisers are strong or under pressure; and identify complementary forms of expertise that may strengthen existing gaps.
A school with strong academic performance but high anxiety may need different support from a school with strong wellbeing but persistent relational conflict.
A community with excellent mediation capacity may need stronger youth leadership.
A youth program with a strong service orientation may benefit from deeper systems literacy.
A technologically sophisticated school may require stronger developmental safeguards and peace literacy around AI.
In this sense, UPT changes the question from:
“Which peace program is best?”
to:
“What does this particular system need for peace to become more stable?”
That creates room for many organisations.
It also creates a potentially important role for connector institutions such as Rotary: not determining which methodology wins, but helping complementary capabilities find one another.
Future Outlook
If current educational trends continue without stronger integration, schools are likely to accumulate increasingly sophisticated programs in wellbeing, technology, citizenship, social-emotional learning, inclusion and peace while continuing to struggle to connect them into one developmental architecture.
The likely result is improvement in many local outcomes alongside continuing fragmentation at system level.
Students may develop emotional regulation without systems thinking.
Systems thinking without conflict competence.
Citizenship without agency.
AI literacy without peace literacy.
Service without critical reflection.
Academic competence without purpose.
The alternative trajectory is already visible.
International education frameworks increasingly recognise student agency, empathy, critical thinking, wellbeing, global citizenship and peace [1][4]. Peacebuilding organisations already possess specialised expertise in regulation, communication, mediation, leadership, service, dialogue, cross-cultural encounters and partnership.
If those capacities become more deliberately connected, education could move from peace programs toward peace infrastructure.
The distinction is significant.
A program is something students attend.
Infrastructure is something that continuously shapes what becomes possible.
Peace Assessment
The contemporary education landscape demonstrates significant peace-building capacity but incomplete systemic integration.
Its strength is diversity.
Different organisations, schools, educators and educational frameworks already know how to strengthen particular conditions associated with peace: emotional regulation, compassion, communication, leadership, mediation, service, inquiry, global citizenship, institutional cooperation and community partnership.
Its weakness is that these capabilities are often organised as separate interventions.
Peace Within can become disconnected from Peace in Action.
Peace in Action can become disconnected from Peace Together.
Personal wellbeing can become separated from civic responsibility.
Academic education can become separated from social development.
Technology can become separated from developmental consequences.
Peace education can become separated from the ordinary structures of school life.
The assessment therefore finds that the most important opportunity is not necessarily another peace curriculum.
It is peace literacy and ecosystem coherence.
Young people need the capacity to recognise what strengthens and fragments peaceful systems.
Educators need ways to recognise which peace-building conditions their schools already support and which remain weak.
Organisations need ways to see how their specialised strengths complement other approaches.
And networks such as Rotary may be able to help connect those complementary capabilities.
Peace education becomes more powerful when the question changes from “How do we teach children peace?” to:
“How do we help young people discover how peace works — within themselves, between people and across the systems they will one day inherit and shape?”
UPT Summary
The educational landscape contains substantial peace-building capability, but this capability remains fragmented across curricula, social-emotional learning, wellbeing programs, communication training, youth leadership, service, mediation, global citizenship, community organisations and emerging technologies. The principal weakness is therefore not a lack of activity but insufficient integration.
Strong coherence indicators are already visible. International education frameworks increasingly recognise student agency, empathy, critical thinking, social and emotional development, global citizenship and peace. Organisations such as HeartMath Institute, Choose Love Movement, PeaceJam Foundation, the Center for Nonviolent Communication, Mediators Beyond Borders International, Tales of Turning and Rotary provide specific examples of complementary strengths across internal regulation, relationships, civic action and larger social systems. They are illustrative rather than exhaustive.
The overall peace assessment is promising but structurally incomplete. Honesty, open-mindedness, discipline and responsibility have substantial educational foundations. Forgiveness, unity, love and joy are present but inconsistently operationalised. Wholeness remains the major system-level challenge because academic, emotional, relational, technological and civic development are still too often treated separately.
The highest-leverage opportunity is peace literacy: enabling learners to recognise, investigate, create and sustain the conditions through which peace emerges within themselves, relationships and societies.
If current patterns remain unchanged, peace-related competencies will continue expanding but may remain fragmented across programs. If stronger integration, partnership, developmental design and multidimensional measurement emerge, schools could become environments where young people do not merely learn about peace but progressively learn how to recognise it, test it, repair it and participate in building it.
From a peace science perspective, the significance is substantial: education may be one of humanity’s most powerful forms of preventative peace infrastructure because it shapes the capacities people bring into every future relationship, institution and system.
About the UPT Peace Assessment
This assessment follows the UPT Peace Lab editorial methodology. The 3D–7D Peace Scan investigates physical conditions, historical trajectory, sovereignty and relationships, competing interpretations and whole-system behaviour. The 12 Peace Stabilisers then provide the diagnostic phase [25].
The Peace Stabilisers used in the diagnosis are Honesty, Open-mindedness, Willingness, Forgiveness, Unity, Discipline, Faith, Responsibility, Love, Wholeness, Joy and Peace. Peace As A Science presents them as structural operators supporting clearer signal, greater optionality, adaptation, connection, agency, integration and sustained stability [24].
Endnotes and References
[1] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights, International Understanding, Cooperation, Fundamental Freedoms, Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development. Global standard-setting framework on education’s role in peace and human development.
Read the UNESCO Recommendation
[2] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Global Citizenship and Peace Education.International education work relating to peace, global citizenship, human rights and intercultural understanding.
Explore UNESCO’s work
[3] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Social and Emotional Learning in Education. Resources relating to cognitive, social, emotional and relational learning.
Explore the resources
[4] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — Future of Education and Skills 2030/2040 and Learning Compass. International framework addressing student agency, wellbeing, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.
Explore the OECD framework
[5] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — Social and Emotional Skills. International research examining students’ social and emotional competencies and educational environments.
Explore OECD education research
[6] HeartMath Institute — Education. Educational work using self-regulation approaches and heart-rate-variability biofeedback with children, adolescents and educators.
Explore HeartMath Education
[7] Choose Love Movement — Education. Social-emotional and character education based around courage, gratitude, forgiveness and compassion-in-action.
Explore Choose Love Education
[8] PeaceJam Foundation — Programs. Youth peace education connecting Nobel Peace Prize laureates, leadership development and community action.
Explore PeaceJam Programs
[9] Center for Nonviolent Communication. International organisation supporting Nonviolent Communication training, including educational applications for schools and children.
Explore the Center for Nonviolent Communication
[10] Peaceabl — Catherine Cooley. Applied work in mediation, conflict and communication coaching and empathic communication.
Explore Peaceabl
[11] Mediators Beyond Borders International — Leadership. International peacebuilding organisation working in mediation, dialogue and conflict transformation. Its leadership includes Prabha Sankaranarayan, President and CEO, and Dr. Estera Borcsa, Sustainable Development Goals Chair.
View the leadership team
[12] Mediators Beyond Borders International — International Peace Camp for Teenagers. Youth peacebuilding initiative involving intercultural engagement, mediation, emotional literacy and collaborative problem-solving.
Read the program document
[13] Tales of Turning. Peacebuilding initiative working with digital listening, narratives, dialogue and technology within communities and online environments.
Explore Tales of Turning
[14] Rotary International — Promoting Peace. Rotary’s international work in peace education, capacity building, partnership, fellowships and addressing underlying causes of conflict.
Explore Rotary’s peace work
[15] Rotary E-Club of World Peace. Rotary club focused specifically on peacebuilding, connection and peace-related projects.
Visit the Rotary E-Club of World Peace
[16] United Nations — Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Goal 16 concerns peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice and effective, accountable and inclusive institutions.
Explore SDG 16
[17] United Nations — Sustainable Development Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals. Goal 17 concerns strengthening means of implementation and global partnership for sustainable development.
Explore SDG 17
[18] United Nations — The 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Official overview of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Explore all 17 Goals
[19] United Nations — Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Global framework linking people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership.
Read the 2030 Agenda
[20] Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — Scientific Edutainment and Bullying Prevention. Example of translating scientific and psychological research into engaging educational experiences for young people.
Read the case study
[21] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Artificial Intelligence and Education.International work concerning opportunities, governance and human-centred use of AI in education.
Explore UNESCO’s AI and education work
[22] United Nations Children’s Fund — Guidance on AI and Children. Child-centred AI guidance addressing children’s rights, development, privacy, safety, fairness and accountability.
Read UNICEF’s guidance
[23] UPT Peace Lab — Issue #8: How Do We Identify and Build Peace Into AI? Previous Peace Assessment examining peace literacy, AI design and whole-system coherence.
Read Issue #8
[24] Michelle Lightworker — Peace As A Science: Towards a Unified Peace Theory. Primary source for Unified Peace Theory, developmental peace literacy, nervous-system regulation, dimensional analysis and the 12 Peace Stabilisers.
[25] UPT Peace Lab Assessment Editorial Standards v2.0. Editorial and methodological standards governing the 3D–7D Peace Scan, Peace Stabiliser diagnosis, Future Outlook and presentation of UPT Peace Assessments.