Conflict as ‘ethnocide’ a denial of education.  Links between masculinity and conflict.  Conflict maintained by education reproducing the status quo.  Gender parity playing a role in state stability.

For education to have transformatory value it has to clean up its act and stop reinforcing causes of conflict e.g ethnic and gender stereotypes, acceptance of unequal opportunity.

Useful for validation or challenge of some assumptions re the intentions vs outcomes of development education.

Development education as a reflection of donor politics and a mechanism for social control.  Winner politics (e.g. USA in post cold war world) – no need to listen.  Local education authorities reduced to marketers of opportunities in such terms as to attract conditional funding.  Connected world does not democratise information since most of it is sourced within the prejudices of the North.  Little evidence of attempts to develop critical faculty or citizenship or other nationally valuable skills.  Tendency to reinforce established formal structures which perpetuate elites.

Generally destructive of established assumptions and challenging rather than offering an alternate point of view.

An extended discussion on the interaction of conflict and education and the contribution of education to causes of conflict.  A useful discussion of 3 theories of the causes of conflict in the developing world – clash of civilizations (Huntingdon), structural inequalities and insecurity (Duffield) and rational choice/greed based motivations (Collier). Examples of education contributing to or causing violence as well as suffering from it Differentiation between an internal ‘education politics’ agenda and a more external ‘politics of education’ point of view.

Useful but very theoretical and contextual in the broadest sense.