Peace Literacy and Peace Education

We understand much more than we once did about aggression, trauma, propaganda, and hostility between groups. We have international frameworks for human rights, the culture of peace, nonviolence, and conflict prevention. We have educational programs and practices in mediation, nonviolent communication, restorative justice, intercultural dialogue, and critical media literacy. Thousands of books have examined why human beings cause one another suffering and how some of that suffering might be prevented.

Yet every new crisis reveals the same gap. Knowledge exists, but it rarely becomes a shared habit or practical ability. Much of it remains confined to universities, professional circles, a small number of schools, specialist organizations, and publications that few people encounter. A society may understand the instruments of destruction in extraordinary detail while lacking even a basic language for recognizing dehumanization, interrupting escalation, protecting people without glorifying annihilation, or disagreeing without treating an opponent as less than human.

To understand what is missing, it helps to distinguish three related ideas: public-facing peace education, peace education, and peace literacy.

At first they may appear almost interchangeable. All three concern a culture of peace, nonviolence, dignity, and responsibility. But each performs a different function.

Public-facing peace education asks: how do the knowledge, language, and images of peace become part of public life?

Peace education asks: how can learning for peace be organized in a coherent and sustained way?

Peace literacy asks: what can people and societies actually understand and do as a result?

In its most concise form, the distinction is this:

Public-facing peace education brings peace into public life. Peace education provides sustained learning. Peace literacy shows whether that learning can guide judgment and action.

There is no need to choose one idea and discard the others. They describe different dimensions of the same work. For Peaceful World, however, the distinction matters because it helps us explain honestly what we do and which term most accurately expresses our goal.

We often assume that accurate information will naturally produce better behavior. Explain the harm caused by violence, show the consequences of war, teach human rights — and people will become less cruel. History, unfortunately, does not support such a simple chain of cause and effect.

People may know the destructive consequences of hatred and still help to spread it. They may condemn propaganda while repeating its formulas when those formulas affirm their own view of the world. They may regard themselves as humane while supporting the dehumanization of people they have judged dangerous, guilty, or unworthy of compassion. Between knowledge and action lie fear, group loyalty, trauma, status, language, habit, the information environment, and institutions.

Education for peace therefore cannot be reduced to the transmission of facts. UNESCO's 2023 Recommendation presents education as a transformative process that should develop the knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and behaviors required for peaceful, just, and sustainable coexistence. Within this framework, peace is understood not merely as the absence of war but as an inclusive, democratic, and participatory social process [1].

This is an important shift. If peace is only a desired political outcome, it becomes the concern of diplomats after everything has already broken down. If it is also a human capacity for living together, it must be developed long before a crisis: in language, schools, families, media, technology, urban culture, workplaces, and everyday habits.

No one learns peace once and receives a lifetime certificate of virtue. These abilities develop, are tested by circumstances, sometimes weaken, and require renewed practice. In a calm room, almost anyone can appear humane. The real test begins when humiliation, fear, injustice, danger, or pressure from one's own group enters the scene.

It is therefore not enough to speak of knowledge and values. We must ask what a person is actually able to do.

The Russian word prosveshchenie, used in the original version of this article, does not map neatly onto a single English word. It refers not only to the sharing of information but also to accessible learning, public intellectual work, and the cultivation of independent thought beyond formal institutions. In this English version, we use public-facing peace education as a practical umbrella term for that wider social function. It is not a universally standardized term; we use it here as a clear descriptive phrase for educational work addressed to society at large rather than only to enrolled students or specialists.

Public-facing peace education includes articles, books, podcasts, translations, lectures, exhibitions, public campaigns, documentary films, cartoons, public discussions, audio lessons, glossaries, and short-form media that help society take peace seriously as a field of knowledge and practice.

Its first task is to provide language where previously there were only slogans or silence. A person may sense that political speech is becoming dangerous but lack words such as dehumanization, moral exclusion, structural violence, or escalatory language. Once concepts become available, patterns become easier to notice — and easier to name before they harden into accepted reality.

Anyone can open an article or watch a short video without prior preparation. No one needs to enroll in a course or obtain permission from an institution. That accessibility is also its limit. It can awaken interest, offer new language, and shift a person's perspective, but it rarely replaces sustained practice, feedback, and structured learning.

A good publication opens a door. It should not pretend that it has already guided a person through the whole house.

Peace education is an established international field. The term covers learning in schools and universities, non-formal programs, and self-directed study concerned with a culture of peace, human rights, violence prevention, conflict resolution, global citizenship, and justice.

In UNESCO's Russian-language documents, the official formulation is closer to education in the spirit of peace. It is more formal than the simpler phrase peace education, but it avoids a possible ambiguity in Russian: the term refers not to a calm or gentle style of teaching, but to education intended to cultivate a culture of peace [1].

Peace education requires purpose, sequence, content, method, practice, and some form of evaluation. It may take the form of a school module, a university course, teacher training, a community program, a series of youth workshops, or an open online course.

It is useful to distinguish three dimensions:

1.Education about peace — knowledge of violence, war, nonviolent movements, human rights, propaganda, trauma, memory, mediation, and peacebuilding.

2.Education for peace — the development of capacities that help people strengthen peace, prevent escalation, and act responsibly.

3.Education through peaceful means — the organization of learning itself without humiliation, fear, silencing, or the normalization of violence.

The third dimension is often neglected. It is entirely possible to teach an excellent lesson on human dignity in a way that leaves the learner humiliated. Nonviolence can be taught through fear and coercion. Dialogue can be praised while difficult questions are forbidden. In such cases, the right words remain only words.

Peace education cannot be a museum of noble phrases. It must embody the relationships it claims to teach.

Peace literacy changes the question. What matters is no longer only what a person has been told or which course they have completed, but what they can actually do when a situation becomes difficult.

Peaceful World uses the following working definition:

Peace literacy does not prove moral purity, nor does it divide humanity into people who are peaceful and people who are not. No one develops every aspect equally. Someone may be highly alert to propaganda yet lose their bearings in a personal conflict; behave thoughtfully at home while carelessly sharing hateful language online; have strong dialogue skills while remaining blind to injustice embedded in institutions.

Peace literacy is made up of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits of attention. It appears in the way a person reads the news, argues, responds to danger, interprets aggression, uses power, protects someone vulnerable, evaluates collective revenge, and imagines the future.

Peace literacy cannot be defined without first clarifying what we mean by peace.

The simplest definition is the absence of war or direct violence. It is necessary, but insufficient. A society may not be at war and still be organized around humiliation, exclusion, chronic poverty, racial or gender discrimination, political fear, and the cultural normalization of cruelty.

Johan Galtung distinguished negative peace — the absence of direct violence — from positive peace, in which social conditions do not systematically deprive people of security, dignity, and opportunity [2]. The concept of structural violence helped make visible a crucial fact: harm is caused not only by a blow or a weapon, but also by institutions and social arrangements that reproduce suffering again and again.

This does not mean that every inequality should automatically be labeled violence. A concept loses its usefulness if it comes to mean everything that is undesirable. Yet without a structural dimension, we are left with an overly convenient picture in which violence arises only from the malicious intentions of individuals while social systems are treated as mere background.

Contemporary peace education therefore includes not only peaceful communication but also human rights, social justice, participation, historical memory, sustainable development, media literacy, and the capacity to examine power critically.

Peace does not mean permanent gentleness, nor does it mean the absence of conflict. Conflict is natural wherever people have different interests, values, and experiences. A culture of peace does not abolish conflict; it prevents conflict from automatically becoming the destruction of another person's dignity, rights, or humanity.

At times, peace requires resistance rather than compliance. It may require precise speech rather than silence, and protection of a victim rather than neutrality. A version of nonviolence that asks the vulnerable to endure humiliation quietly for the comfort of the powerful is not peace. It is a discipline of submission.

Peace literacy must therefore include the ability to distinguish between:

• peace and passivity;

• conflict and violence;

• protection and revenge;

• accountability and collective punishment;

• empathy and the justification of harm;

• reconciliation and enforced forgetting;

• ·nonviolence and the refusal to protect the vulnerable.

Peace education was not invented by one person and does not belong to a single school of thought. It grew from pedagogy, peace research, human rights, psychology, international law, critical theory, and the experience of social movements.

Maria Montessori did not treat education for peace as an optional subject, but as something inherent in the educational environment itself. If children are constantly humiliated, compared, suppressed, and governed by fear, a few celebratory lessons about friendship will not repair the damage. Pedagogy teaches relationships not only through content but through the way daily life is organized [3].

John Dewey understood education as the process through which a society transmits ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Democracy, for him, was not only a form of government but a way of sharing experience and communicating [4]. A simple conclusion follows: a culture of peace does not emerge from one correct paragraph in a textbook. A society reproduces its ways of dealing with difference every day — in schools, families, workplaces, and public speech.

Paulo Freire brought power into the discussion. Education can help people interpret and transform reality, or it can train them to regard the existing order as natural [5]. Without this perspective, peace literacy can easily become a course in politeness for those expected to adapt patiently to injustice. A person is taught to manage anger, while no one asks why humiliation became normal in the first place. Peace is not the absence of uncomfortable questions.

Johan Galtung provided a language for direct and structural violence. His work makes it possible to see not only isolated acts of harm but also institutions and cultural assumptions that repeatedly create vulnerability or make cruelty appear acceptable [2]. Peace literacy must therefore look both at human behavior and at the organization of society.

Betty Reardon helped establish comprehensive peace education as an academic and pedagogical field in its own right. She connected human rights and global responsibility with people's capacity to participate in political life and transform educational systems [6]. Her work helped move peace education decisively beyond lessons on how not to quarrel.

At the institutional level, UNESCO played a central role. Its 1974 Recommendation linked education with international understanding, cooperation, peace, and human rights. The revised 2023 Recommendation expanded the framework to include global citizenship, sustainable development, multilingualism, culture and arts education, media and information literacy, the digital environment, and the evaluation of outcomes [1].

An international document cannot transform a school by itself, and it cannot stop a war. But it records an important conclusion: education for peace can no longer be treated as a narrow pacifist concern. It is one of the basic educational tasks of the twenty-first century.

Schools matter, but many of today's lessons in violence are taught without a curriculum.

People learn the language of the enemy from the news feed. They learn what kinds of revenge are considered acceptable from films, political rhetoric, and memes. Their image of strength is shaped by mass culture, advertising, and widely circulated images of success. They learn techniques of humiliation in comment sections. They acquire the habit of issuing immediate moral verdicts through systems that reward anger, fear, and certainty.

Public-facing peace education is therefore not a secondary supplement to "real" education. It works precisely where the habits and reactions of millions of people are now being shaped — including people who will never attend a course in conflict studies.

It serves several distinct functions.

First, it introduces concepts. Until a society can name a mechanism, it is difficult to discuss it and even more difficult to resist it.

Second, it changes cultural expectations. What appears repeatedly in language, art, and public discussion stops seeming marginal or naïve. Peace ceases to be ceremonial decoration and begins to be treated as a serious field of knowledge.

Third, it opens a path toward deeper learning. A short publication will not create a skill by itself, but it may lead someone to a book, a course, a practice, or a community.

Fourth, it expands the imagination. Our culture is extraordinarily rich in stories about destroying an enemy and much poorer in stories about repairing what has been damaged, de-escalating a crisis, seeking reconciliation without sacrificing justice, or protecting people without violence. Imagination is not entertainment that begins after politics ends. It is the laboratory in which civilizations build prototypes of what may become possible.

The word literacy carries an obvious risk: it can become a fashionable label attached to almost any subject. Digital literacy, financial literacy, ecological literacy, legal literacy, media literacy, AI literacy — the list is growing faster than the patience of some researchers.

A degree of skepticism is useful. Not every body of knowledge automatically deserves to be called a distinct literacy. The term is justified only when we can identify:

• a domain in which people need to make informed judgments;

• a body of relevant knowledge and skills;

• levels of development;

• observable signs of competence;

• methods of teaching and assessment.

Contemporary understandings of literacy have long moved beyond a narrow view of reading and writing. UNESCO describes literacy as more than reading, writing, and numeracy: it is also a means of identifying, understanding, interpreting, creating, and communicating in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich world, and it develops throughout life [7]. Media and information literacy describes the capacity to engage with information critically and responsibly [8]. Digital competence encompasses the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to participate in digital life safely and meaningfully [9].

In each case, the point is not whether someone values the subject, but whether they can act competently within it. A person is not media-literate merely because they value truth. They need to be able to check a source, distinguish fact from interpretation, recognize manipulation, and understand the structure of the information environment.

By the same logic, peace literacy is not simply a fondness for peace or agreement with admirable values. It is the ability to navigate the realities of human conflict, power, fear, trauma, group belonging, and information-driven escalation.

A person may sincerely support peace while lacking important peace-literacy skills. They may demand that a victim forgive immediately in the name of harmony. They may treat every act of resistance as violence while calling every act of violence "defense" when it is committed by their own side. They may condemn hate speech in an opponent and fail to recognize it within their own group.

The language of literacy is useful precisely because it strips peace of decorative sentiment. It asks us to judge not by admirable convictions but by what people are actually able to understand and do.

One of the most fully developed contemporary approaches to peace as a form of literacy comes from Paul K. Chappell and the Peace Literacy Institute. Their approach treats peace as a practical set of capacities that should be taught with the same seriousness as reading and writing [10].

Chappell begins with an obvious asymmetry: modern societies devote enormous resources to preparation for war, the management of force, technological competition, and professional training, yet rarely create anything comparable for learning peace.

At the center of the model are human capacities, practical skills, and a more accurate understanding of the world. The Peace Literacy Institute describes nine "muscles of our humanity": realistic hope, empathy, conscience, appreciation, reason, discipline, curiosity, language, and imagination. It also gives particular attention to non-physical human needs, trauma, alienation, aggression as a response to distress, respect, and rehumanization — the restoration of our ability to see another person as fully human [10].

The model has several clear strengths.

First, it restores rigor to peace. Peace is not a mood or a wish; it is a subject of disciplined practice.

Second, it does not demonize aggression. Understanding aggression as a response to severe distress does not excuse harmful behavior. It opens the possibility of a more effective response than punishment or moral condemnation alone.

Third, the approach can be translated into actual teaching. It includes resources for different age groups, curricular materials, and support for educators.

Fourth, the first empirical evidence is beginning to appear. A pilot study involving adolescents found that after a short Peace Literacy intervention, participants offered more complex and empathetic explanations of aggression [11]. This is not yet a large evidence base, and it does not justify claims of universal effectiveness. But it is an important step from a philosophical proposal toward outcomes that can be examined.

The approach also has limitations. Its emphasis on needs, trauma, and interpersonal aggression can be read too narrowly as a psychological model. Without analysis of structural violence, institutions, political economy, propaganda, and digital platforms, peace literacy risks becoming a form of individual emotional self-regulation.

A person may learn to understand their anger more clearly while remaining unaware of who produces images of the enemy for them, and why. They may cultivate empathy while failing to see how an administrative system makes some groups more vulnerable than others. They may become calmer in conversation while remaining powerless in the face of organized dehumanization.

Chappell's framework is therefore most useful not as a closed canon but as a valuable foundation that can be developed further.

Peace literacy does not turn a person into a decorative angel who never becomes angry, never argues, and smiles at everyone. Such an ideal is not only unrealistic but dangerous: it substitutes comfort for peace.

Peace literacy begins not with the absence of strong emotion, but with the ability to prevent emotion from taking complete control of perception and action.

In practical terms, it includes at least eight connected capacities.

1. Recognizing Violence at Different Levels

A person can distinguish direct, structural, cultural, verbal, and digital forms of violence. They do not label every unpleasant act as violence, but neither do they reduce violence to physical assault.

They understand the difference between a conflict of interests and a situation in which one side is systematically deprived of rights, safety, or opportunity. They can notice when a system produces predictable harm even in the absence of deliberate malice.

2. Noticing Dehumanization

Dehumanization rarely begins with an explicit call for destruction. It begins by turning a person into a category: a mass, a threat, a disease, raw material, a statistic, an obstacle, or a "typical representative" of a group.

Peace literacy teaches us to notice these shifts in language. The purpose is not to prohibit every harsh expression, but to recognize the point at which speech stops describing behavior and begins to deny a person's full humanity.

3. Understanding Aggression Without Excusing It

Aggression may be connected with fear, shame, humiliation, trauma, loss of control, or a threat to belonging. Understanding these causes makes a more precise response possible. Explaining a cause, however, does not remove responsibility.

A peace-literate person can hold two thoughts at once: "I understand why this happened" and "That does not make the harm acceptable."

4. Navigating Conflict

A person can distinguish the positions, interests, needs, and values of the parties involved. They can notice rising tension, help lower it, ask clarifying questions, and express disagreement without destroying another person's dignity.

This does not guarantee agreement. Sometimes the honest outcome is to acknowledge a deep difference and establish boundaries. A peaceful approach does not require pretending that harmony exists when it does not.

5. Preserving an Inner Pause

Between irritation and reaction, between a piece of news and hatred, between fear and the search for someone to blame, there is a small interval. A culture of violence tries to shrink it. Peace literacy tries to widen it.

An inner pause does not mean hesitation in the presence of immediate danger. It means refusing to let the first impulse become an automatic moral or political judgment.

6. Recognizing Information That Fuels Conflict

A person checks sources, distinguishes firsthand reports from interpretation, notices emotionally loaded framing, and does not share unverified material simply because it confirms the position of their group.

They understand that falsehood is not the only instrument of manipulation. Even true information can be selected and repeated in ways designed to produce hatred, fear, or the illusion that one side is entirely innocent.

7. Seeing Systems, Not Just Individuals

Peace literacy does not explain social violence solely through the existence of bad people. It pays attention to incentives, institutions, norms, power relations, economic interests, and the design of technologies.

Otherwise, we keep replacing villains while preserving the machinery that produces them.

8. Imagining Nonviolent Alternatives

Criticism without imagination quickly becomes helplessness. A person with strong peace literacy can ask not only, "Who is to blame?" but also, "What could be changed to reduce harm, protect vulnerable people, and avoid repeating the same logic?"

This is realistic hope: not waiting for a miracle, but looking for the next possible step.

One of the central dangers is reducing peace literacy to individual psychology. When this happens, society declares peace to be the duty of the individual and removes responsibility from institutions.

Citizens are told to become more empathetic while platforms profit from their outrage. Teachers are told to regulate children's emotions while educational systems reproduce humiliation and fear. Victims are urged to forgive while the machinery of impunity remains untouched.

Every literacy depends on an environment. Reading requires language, schools, libraries, texts, and a shared conviction that reading matters. Digital literacy requires access, tools, and intelligible rules. Peace literacy also needs supportive conditions, including:

• accessible educational materials;

• trained educators and facilitators;

• language that does not equate peace with weakness;

• media capable of presenting complexity rather than only the spectacle of conflict;

• clear and just ways of addressing harm;

• cultural examples of nonviolent strength;

• technologies that do not reward escalation by default.

Peace literacy therefore depends both on the person and on the environment around them. An individual cannot reasonably be expected to repair, on their own, a system that teaches the opposite lesson every day.

There is, however, an equal and opposite error: dissolving personal responsibility into structural explanations. Algorithms may amplify anger. Propaganda may shape how events are framed. Trauma may influence a reaction. None of this erases personal agency. Structural analysis must not become another language of excuse.

A mature approach holds both truths together: people are responsible for their choices, and societies are responsible for the conditions in which those choices are formed.

In the twenty-first century, peace literacy inevitably intersects with media literacy and AI literacy.

The digital environment does not simply transmit existing conflicts. It changes their speed and form. Outrage, fear, and contempt capture attention easily, while platforms often amplify whatever keeps users engaged. Calm, complex explanations are at a structural disadvantage in such an environment.

Generative AI has raised the stakes. Convincing text, images, voices, and video can now be produced cheaply and at scale. This creates enormous opportunities for education, translation, and intercultural dialogue, but it also lowers the cost of fabricating evidence, personalizing propaganda, and mass-producing hatred. UNESCO therefore explicitly connects the development of AI with the protection of human rights and human dignity [14].

At a minimum, people now need to understand that:

• the emotional force of a message does not prove that it is true;

• an image or a voice is no longer sufficient evidence of authenticity;

• algorithmic popularity is not the same as public importance;

• AI systems can reproduce biases found in training data and user prompts;

• personalization can create different realities for different groups;

• speed of response often works against accuracy and dignity.

UNESCO already treats media and information literacy as an important response to disinformation, hate speech, and online harassment [8]. For Peaceful World, this is not an optional additional module. The digital environment has become one of the main arenas in which conflicts are intensified and spread.

In the past, people had to learn how to live in a city, a family, and a state. Now they must also learn how to live in a feed.

A useful concept should be open to some form of assessment. Measuring peace literacy, however, requires care.

The effectiveness of a course cannot be judged by asking, "Did peace break out afterwards?" An educational program does not control politics, economics, war, family history, or the learner's information environment. On the other hand, a self-report such as "The lesson made me kinder" is not enough.

It is more useful to examine several dimensions.

Understanding

Can a person distinguish conflict from violence? Can they recognize dehumanization, structural violence, and manipulative framing? Can they analyze the causes of escalation without dividing the world into wholly good and wholly evil camps?

Language

How does a person express disagreement? Can they criticize an action without denying the dignity of the person responsible for it? Do they notice generalizations, collective guilt, and exclusionary language?

Emotional Understanding

Do their explanations of aggression become more complex? Can they sustain empathy while maintaining boundaries and accountability? How well can they tolerate uncertainty without immediately turning it into a story about an enemy?

Behavior

What does a person choose to do in a conflict? Has their range of de-escalation strategies expanded? Do they check information before sharing it? Can they challenge their own group when it humiliates others?

Transfer Beyond the Course

Do the changes persist several months later? Does the person apply these capacities outside an educational setting — in family life, at work, online, or in a local community?

Environment

Does the surrounding environment change as well: feedback practices, procedures for addressing conflict, perceptions of safety, learner participation, and the language used by teachers and leaders?

The Peace Literacy pilot study examined changes in the way adolescents explained aggression [11]. Media-literacy programs assess whether students become better at recognizing manipulation and whether their media habits change [15]. International peace-education projects use surveys, observation, interviews, and analysis of the school environment [12].

No single indicator provides a complete answer. Taken together, however, several indicators make it possible to track development without reducing peace to a bureaucratic score.

The most honest approach is to assess peace literacy not as a permanent status awarded once and for all, but as changes in specific capacities over time.

The relationship between these ideas is best understood as a movement from public conversation toward the capacity to act.

Public-facing peace education brings peace into public life. It offers language, stories, images, and accessible points of entry. Its immediate result is not mastery, but visibility, interest, and the possibility of beginning a conversation.

Peace education turns that interest into sustained learning. It offers structure, practice, reflection, feedback, and an environment in which knowledge can become a lasting ability.

Peace literacy becomes visible in what people and communities can actually do: recognize violence and dehumanization, reduce tension, disagree without humiliation, and choose more responsible forms of action.

This is not a rigid staircase. A strong article may itself become an educational experience. Someone developing peace literacy may begin to educate others. The language of a good program may travel far beyond the classroom.

The distinctions nevertheless remain useful. A publication does not automatically create a skill. Completing a course does not guarantee a change in behavior. And without accessible materials and supportive environments, peace literacy will remain available only to a minority.

Peaceful World's work belongs to the broad international field of peace education. We draw on traditions of peace education, human-rights education, nonviolent communication, social and emotional learning, mediation, critical pedagogy, and research on trauma, dehumanization, and structural violence [16].

But describing all our work simply as peace education would be incomplete.

First, Peaceful World creates not only courses but also articles, translations, audio lessons, podcasts, a manifesto, visual materials, and research for a general audience [17, 18]. A substantial part of this work is public-facing peace education.

Second, our goal extends beyond the transmission of content. We want people to acquire a practical vocabulary and the ability to respond to violence, propaganda, conflict, and dehumanization. Peace literacy describes that outcome more precisely.

Third, the project is built around open access, multilingualism, and distribution across platforms. It is not a single program but a network of resources that people can explore independently.

For Peaceful World, the relationship between the terms can therefore be stated as follows:

Peace literacy is the goal.

Peace education is the path toward it.

Public-facing peace education is how that path reaches the wider public.

Or in one sentence:

Peaceful World works within the field of peace education, brings it into public life, and seeks to make peace literacy accessible to everybody.

This formulation preserves the internationally recognizable language of peace education while explaining our specific purpose more accurately.

For Peaceful World's Russian-language positioning, peace literacy is the strongest central concept. The same concept also deserves a prominent place in our English-language work, although peace education remains the more established name of the wider field.

It Describes What a Person Can Do

Education names a process. Literacy describes an acquired capacity. The focus shifts from the organization and its program to what changes in a person's understanding and actions.

It Is Meant for Everybody

Literacy is not treated as a luxury for specialists. It should be widely available. This matches Peaceful World's premise: learning peace should not be reserved for diplomats, mediators, psychologists, or people living through conflict.

It Connects the Personal and the Social

The term allows us to discuss an inner pause, communication in conflict, and empathy, while also addressing propaganda, institutions, digital platforms, and structural violence.

It Suits Open and Multilingual Learning

Peace literacy can be developed through many routes: short resources, audio lessons, courses, practices, discussions, glossaries, and self-assessment. It is not confined to one school or institution.

It Changes the Question We Ask About Peace

When peace is treated only as a virtue, it can easily be dismissed as a private choice or a naïve dream. When it is treated as a literacy, different questions become unavoidable: Where is it taught? Is learning available to everybody? Does it produce observable change?

Using this term does not mean claiming to have invented it. The phrase peace literacy has a history, and Paul Chappell and the Peace Literacy Institute have developed it systematically [10, 13].

Our contribution is more specific: Peaceful World is developing an open and multilingual model of peace literacy that connects personal capacities with language, culture, media, technology, and the organization of society.

The originality of the project does not lie in owning two words. It lies in the substance and the system of resources being built around them.

Peaceful World does not need to claim that peace education began with us. Such a claim would be historically false and intellectually unconvincing.

The problem is different. Peace education exists, but too often it remains:

• scattered across different disciplines;

• dependent on institutions and trained specialists;

• unavailable in many languages;

• focused on particular age groups or professional communities;

• weakly represented in everyday digital environments;

• insufficiently connected with AI, platforms, and mass culture;

• difficult to pursue through independent learning.

This is the gap Peaceful World can help fill.

Open Access

Core resources should be available free of charge and without being tied to a particular institution. A person should not need to enroll at a university to acquire a basic vocabulary for peace.

Multilingual Access

The ability to learn about peace in a language one understands is not a minor technical convenience. If complex ideas remain available only in a few dominant languages, inequality begins at the point of entry.

Different Points of Entry

People should be able to enter the subject in different ways: through a short text, an audio lesson, a long-form essay, a course, a practice, a glossary, or a research paper. There is nothing wrong with beginning somewhere other than an academic monograph.

Open Educational Work as Learning in Its Own Right

Open resources should not function merely as advertisements for a course. A strong article, podcast, or visual work can itself introduce concepts, raise questions, and help people develop a few meaningful skills they can put into practice.

The Personal and the Structural

Peace literacy should include not only empathy and communication, but also the analysis of institutions, the language of war, the political economy of violence, media, technology, historical memory, and cultural imagination.

Evaluating What Changes

Peaceful World should gradually develop its own approach to evaluation — not in pursuit of impressive percentages, but to understand what genuinely changes and where it falls short.

Public-facing peace education, peace education, and peace literacy address the same human task in different ways.

Public-facing peace education gives society a language for peace and makes ideas accessible. Peace education brings knowledge, practice, and reflection into a sustained process. Peace literacy asks whether people have learned to recognize violence, understand its causes, and act with greater responsibility.

Setting these concepts against one another would be pointless. Without public-facing peace education, peace education can remain confined to a narrow circle. Without sustained learning, public-facing peace education may never deepen into practice. Without peace literacy as the intended outcome, both can mistake activity for change.

The clearest way to describe Peaceful World’s position is this:

We work within the international field of peace education and bring it into public life through open educational work. Our central goal is peace literacy: the ability of people and societies to live together, think critically, disagree, protect others, and act without denying anyone’s humanity.

This definition does not promise the impossible. Peace literacy will not eliminate conflict, guarantee moral perfection, or turn education into a universal cure for war. It changes the starting point: peace is no longer treated as a virtue expected to arise spontaneously in good people.

Peace has to be learned.

Not only after catastrophe. Not only by specialists. Not only at school. Not only in one language.

By all of us.