A report on attending the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference 2026: Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World
Three approaches are common in the framing and understanding of phenomena in the field of comparative and international education: world culture, postcolonial and culturist (Spring, 2015).
World culture theorists view global education as worldwide convergence upon a single world culture by educational stakeholders at different levels (Boli & Thomas, 1997). The convergence is voluntarily pursued by educational actors, including nations, that seek legitimacy from the international community through subscribing to the single world culture. The culture itself is often developed and promoted by international organizations such as UNESCO or the World Bank, setting a common ideal for nations and the educational systems and institutions within them to aspire to.
Postcolonial scholars instead view phenomena in the educational world as being driven by power, including power structures remnant from colonial pasts (Carney, Rappleye & Silova, 2012). World culture is not everyone’s ideal but the ideal put forth by the global powers that be, while less powerful nations and other actors have no choice but to toe the line or be outside of the international community.
Culturist scholars emphasize the agency of localized actors who make educational decisions that are simultaneously influenced by the global stream of ideas and by contextual factors of the locality (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). These actors use borrowing and adaptation as tools to curate a specialized set of ideas to fit their locality.
In this reflection on attending the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference 2026: Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World, I use these three approaches to consider the potential contributions of comparative and international education to the development of international reconciliation studies.
Reconciling global ideas in local contexts
Global ideas and their manifestations in national and local policy and practice are core phenomena of interest in comparative and international education.
As a discussant for the panel, “Rethinking Education for Sustainable Development in Southeast Asia: Towards Peace, Justice and Decolonial Practices,” I had the opportunity to reflect upon and synthesize ideas on how the relationship between global discourse and local practice can inform reconciliation processes.
The four panelists shared data from Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, painting a picture that blurred the lines between the three approaches and pointed toward a culturist understanding of global governance narratives and local practices. While the panel recognized ESD as having its conceptual roots in the Global North and as being promoted by global governance organizations, they maintained it has been embraced rather than rejected by national governments and local stakeholders in the four Southeast Asian contexts, signaling a world culture approach in which ESD is pursued as a shared ideal and recognition of inherent value. On the other hand, in the implementation of ESD in local contexts, local actors exercise agency when interpreting and practicing ESD, for example university student-led action in waste management in Thailand or use of local resources in sustainable pedagogies in Indonesia. This culturist approach emphasizes the importance of both global narratives and the contextualized local agency for reconciliation of the global with the local.
Reconciliation processes likewise unfold at different levels, from individual to group to national to spiritual, overlapping and interacting, influencing and being influenced by ideas at every level. In discussions of global collective memory, scholars have theorized that global narratives of past atrocity, such as the Holocaust, are developed from context-specific conflicts yet have become symbols of shared global understanding of what humanity is and should never do again (Levy & Sznaider, 2002).
Global ideas and reconciliation processes
Can global ideas influence national reconciliation processes? As part of the panel, “Reconciliation through meaning-making in international education: individual, interpersonal and institutional perspectives,” I examined global governance narratives on peace and reconciliation in flagship UNESCO texts juxtaposed against the trajectory of Japan-US reconciliation using Chun’s 2015 stages of reconciliation framework (procedural, material and ideational) from 1945 to present.
The research found that there has been little explicit discussion of reconciliation in UNESCO’s major global education governance documents since 1945, although two publications have emerged with explicit treatment of reconciliation since 2019. Even prior to this, however, concepts such as “learning to live together,” first introduced in the Delors Report in 1996, address the essence of reconciliation as a return to good or normalized relations. In terms of peace, while peace is a guiding value of UNESCO, major educational reports have done little to define peace or link it to specific recommendations in educational policy or practice.
In the absence of a strong world narrative surrounding reconciliation, the US-Japan reconciliation timeline yielded no evidence that reconciliation efforts were influenced by ideas promoted at the global governance level. While further analysis is necessary, motivations for educational initiatives toward reconciliation appear to be driven by the same factors that drive other areas of reconciliation, including domestic political concerns and the geopolitical context.
A “world culture” of reconciliation may not yet exist, however it is gaining attention at the global education governance level. As conceptualization of education for reconciliation progresses, the world culture, postcolonial and culturist approaches can help to guide the discussion.
References
Boli, J. & Thomas, G.M. (1997). World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization. American Sociological Review, 62(2) 171-190.
Carney, S., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (2012). Between Faith and Science: World Culture Theory and Comparative Education. Comparative Education Review, 56(3), 366–393. https://doi.org/10.1086/665708
Chun, J.-H. (2015). Have Korea and Japan Reconciled? A Focus on the Three Stages of Reconciliation. Japanese Journal of Political Science, 16(3), 315–331. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109915000213
Levi, D. & Sznaider, N. (2002). Memory unbound: the Holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory. European Journal of Social Theory 5(1), 87-106.
Spring, J. (2015). Globalization of Education: An Introduction. Routledge.
Steiner-Khamsi, G. 2012. “Understanding Policy Borrowing and Lending.” In World Yearbook of Education. Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education, edited by G. Steiner-Khamsi and F. Waldow, 3–17. London: Routledge.