Conference Program

Peace education serves as important instrument in seeking to establish and maintain peace in the turbulent geopolitical context exacerbated by the wars: hybrid and real, cold and hot. The value of peace education is explored and promoted by many distinguished educators and education policy makers, recognizing fundamental role of education in facilitating internalisation of the peace values, as well as provision of knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for the peaceful co-existence of people and nations (Riccardi 2023, 2025; Cesari, 2023; Affinati, 2025; Vanner, 2022). Peace education faces particular challenges and difficulties in the regions experiencing military conflicts and geopolitical tensions (Zebich-Knos et al., 2020).

This paper seeks to explore the reflection of peace values in the education policy of Lithuania, as country located in the Central and Eastern Europe - region besieged by the geopolitical tensions and the Russo-Ukrainian war. There are explored the following research questions: 1) How are the ideas of peace value and peace education accepted in the design of curricula of general education in the conditions of geopolitical tensions and Russo-Ukrainian war? 2) How are the peace values intregrated with or expulsed by the trends of strengthening the discourses of national and civil security and defense in the general education curricula? 3) What are the specificities of the attitudes of education policy making and curriculum design to peace education in Lithuania in comparison to the treatment of peace education in the education policies and general education curriculum design in the most peaceful countries of the world?

The research will be guided by Galtung’s theory of peace (1996), as well as Harris (2007) approach to peace education.

The primary research method is qualitative document analysis, complemented by reflexive thematic analysis, which will help to disclose the patterns of treating the peace value in the education policy and practices. The discourse of peace value in the education policy and practice in Lithuania is analysed in comparison to the peace values ranking in the education policies of world's most peaceful countries (Iceland, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, and Singapore). The research involves content analysis of the education policy douments, including national education strategies, curricula, governmental guidelines. These findings are complemented with the interviews with the reprentatives of the responsible ministries, governmental agencies responsible for the general education curriculum policy, and general education teachers. The identified themes are interpreted to reveal the representation of peace values in the educational curricula.