Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are struggling with ongoing armed conflicts, or recovering from past conflicts. Haiti is grappling with gangs controlling 90% of neighborhoods in the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince. In Colombia, despite the peace agreement signed in 2016 between the government and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), violence continues to this day involving FARC dissidents and other armed groups. Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (1960–1996) left over 200,000 people dead or missing, many of them Indigenous civilians, and the country continues to struggle with inequality and gang violence.
From November 12 to 14, a group of experts debated proposals and actions for implementing peace education in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic, organized the Regional Meeting on the Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development. The meeting was held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and attendees included representatives from ministries of education, teachers, researchers, and civil society organizations.
The proposals and actions debated are meant to improve educational policies and practices in line with the UNESCO recommendation. The recommendation, adopted in 2023, defines what needs to evolve in education in order to achieve the goals of building more peaceful and just societies. This entails addressing inequalities, as well as the rise in discrimination, hate speech, violence, and conflict.
Participants discussed the need to integrate topics such as environmental education, civic ethics, and the arts into curricula. UNESCO member states shared several peace education projects including: programs against racism and hate speech, school coexistence plans based on a culture of peace, curricula integrating global citizenship and sustainable development, and strategies for the ethical use of technology and artificial intelligence.
They also discussed the need for curricula integrating different areas of study including environmental education, civic ethics, and the arts. The meeting launched innovative approaches including a board game teaching Afro-Caribbean history, an ‘Education in Colors’ methodology which aims to apply actions inspired by the recommendation, and a teacher’s manual on preventing hate speech. These innovations intend to support countries in the process of implementing UNESCO’s recommendation.
In relation to tackling racism, voices from Brazil’s Paulo Freire Institute stressed South-South dialogue between Latin America and Africa. Meanwhile, UNESCO introduced resources on integrating African history into education systems.
Participants also noted the important role of a territorial approach to peace involving local actors and knowledge.
Ancell Scheker, Vice Minister of Education of the Dominican Republic, stressed that education “cannot remain neutral in the face of today’s challenges; it must be a conscious act of building citizenship and peace,” as quoted in a report by UNESCO.
Anne Lemaistre, the director of UNESCO’s Regional Office in Havana, described the meeting as “a starting point for a roadmap, what we are creating is a community of practice where UNESCO Member States can support each other in an ongoing conversation.”
Still, there are obstacles to making peace education effective in Latin America and the caribbean. In October 2025, Peace News Network (PNN) published an article by Gabriel Velez on what Colombian youth made of the country’s peace education curriculum. In 2016 and 2017, Velez interviewed hundreds of youth aged 15 to 18, seeking to understand how they felt about the peace education they were receiving, and their role in peacebuilding.
Velez found that many youth from lower resourced communities rejected the idea that they could contribute to national peace, often pointing towards its distance from their everyday lives. Some discussed the challenges even in the their schools, discussing gangs and drugs as motivators of violence that they could not address.
Velez noted that a decade after the peace agreement, broader peace efforts have all but collapsed, and there had been targeting killings of human rights and peace activists, and remobilization of armed combatants. The energy of peace education and youth, he said, had faded noticeably.
“We can give young people ‘tools’ but we also have to work with them on seeing these tools as able to be implemented and able to create change. There must be interactive possibilities, openness to structural hurdles, and recognition of their own experiences,” Velez wrote.
