Peace and Citizenship Education in Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia)

Social movements are today open-air venues where streets, gardens, beaches, neighbourhoods, squares, villages, and communities are learning sites of political conscientization and awareness of the real needs and hopes of society as well as training fields for further developments. To ignore this is to put aside one of the main goals of education which is the liberation of individuals in order to think and act in an autonomous way and towards the common good of themselves and the society as a whole.

The educational task of integrating citizenship and peace education in non-democratic societies may have to leave the classroom and move to resistance in non-formal and informal venues (examples of which are many). Our project proposes the topic of peace to those informal and non-formal venues that can secure dialogue and politicization in learning. This might imply that formal education – even the academy – has to leave citizenship and peace education to informal and non-formal venues to avoid state indoctrination of the younger generation.