CIES 2026: Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World
March 28 – April 1, 2026 | San Francisco, California
The 70th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), held in San Francisco from March 28 to April 1, 2026, brought together approximately 2,000 scholars, educators, and policymakers under the theme Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World. Arriving from Japan, I came both as a presenter and as a researcher looking for conversation partners – people working on questions close enough to my own that the hallway exchanges and dinner table arguments would be as generative as anything on the formal program. That expectation was more than met. What follows is a record of the week: the research I presented, the sessions that shaped my thinking, the conversations that extended it, and a gathering with fellow students of Professor Kazuo Kuroda that became the most productive few hours of the entire trip.
The Presentation: Everyday Reconciliation
My paper, Everyday Reconciliation: Vietnamese Students’ Experiences in Former Adversary Nations, examines what happens when students from formerly colonized or war-affected countries arrive to study in the nations that once occupied or bombed them. For Vietnamese students in Japan or the United States, everyday encounters carry historical weight that no orientation program has adequately addressed. Existing study abroad research tends to celebrate outcomes – intercultural competence, academic growth – while the messier question of reconciliation potential goes largely unexamined (Maharaja, 2018; Davis et al., 2023; Mac Ginty, 2014).
The study followed five participants across nine months (October 2024 – June 2025), using semi-structured focus groups conducted in Vietnamese, supplemented by self-reflection writings. Analysis drew on postcolonial theory, social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), and critical peace studies. Three phases emerged, though “phases” is already misleading – the central contribution of the research is a reconciliation spiral model that challenges linear frameworks (Fisher & Keashly, 1991). Students did not progress from conflict to resolution; they moved recursively through core issues of identity, history, and power dynamics, returning at deeper levels of understanding with each pass.
Phase 1 brought the burden of representation – Vietnam reduced to war stereotypes and pho, students simultaneously invisible as historical subjects and hypervisible as cultural ambassadors. Phase 2 produced what Ahmed (2004) would call the labor of “affect aliens”: managing host-country peers’ comfort while suppressing their own anger and hurt, navigating a third space (Bhabha, 1994) between assimilation, mediation, and resistance at considerable personal cost. Phase 3, shaped by Vietnam’s 50th Reunification anniversary, enabled what the data terms critical patriotism – simultaneous pride in Vietnamese achievements and lucid awareness of structural inequalities that personal growth cannot dissolve. As Linh put it: “My confidence has grown, but the structural relationship hasn’t changed.” The study also documented counter-narratives – strategic retreat into Vietnamese community spaces as necessary recovery, and reactive nationalism triggered by dismissive encounters with host-country peers.
The spiral model has three practical implications: it normalizes “backward” movement as the natural path of growth rather than failure; it replaces the injunction to “get over” historical pain with recognition that students will revisit it throughout life, each time better equipped; and it argues against program designs that expect or measure linear progress.
Professor Bajaj’s Keynote: Peace Education in Precarious Times
The most intellectually anchoring event of the week was the keynote by Professor Monisha Bajaj of the University of San Francisco, titled Peace Education in Precarious Times.
What struck me most was Bajaj’s willingness to name the present moment with precision. With rising authoritarianism and the systematic dismantling of international human rights frameworks, she argued, conventional liberal peace – the assumption that more education, more dialogue, more exchange will produce less violence – is facing a serious empirical challenge. The concept of polycrisis ran through the address: the idea that the current convergence of armed conflict, democratic backsliding, climate crisis, and economic polarization cannot be addressed by any single framework or any incremental reform of existing institutions. Peace education, Bajaj argued, needs to ask harder questions about its own assumptions, particularly its tendency to locate the problem of violence in individual attitudes rather than in structural arrangements.
This challenge resonated directly with the findings of my own research. The reconciliation spiral model is partly an answer to exactly this problem: a framework that takes seriously the personal and affective dimensions of reconciliation while refusing to let that attention to the personal obscure the structural. When one of the participants in my research asks why it is her burden to gently correct a professor’s ignorance about the Japanese occupation of Vietnam, she is naming a structural arrangement – who holds authority in the classroom, whose knowledge is assumed to require correction – that no amount of individual goodwill will resolve. Bajaj’s keynote gave me language for why my participants’ reconciliation fatigue is not a failure of attitude but a rational response to structural conditions.
Conversations at the Conference
Beyond the formal program, CIES offered the kind of extended, unscheduled conversation that is often more intellectually productive than any panel. I made a point of seeking out researchers working on adjacent questions – people studying international student experience, historical memory in education, and identity formation across national contexts – and found the exchanges consistently generative.
Several conversations circled back to a question that my own research raises but does not resolve: the relationship between interpersonal reconciliation and structural change. A researcher working on South Korean students in Japan described a pattern almost identical to what my participants reported – genuine friendships forming across a historically charged divide, alongside a persistent sense that the friendship did not touch the underlying asymmetry, that it was real and insufficient at the same time. Another scholar, working on postcolonial frameworks in curriculum design in Southeast Asia, pushed back productively on the spiral model, asking whether “spiral” still implies upward movement, still assumes that each recursion is progress. It was a fair challenge, and one I intend to address more carefully in the written paper.
I also traveled to UC Berkeley and Stanford on the margins of the conference week. At Berkeley, the conversations with Vietnamese students I met at the conference reinforced several of the study’s central findings. One student described the same representational burden that my participants had articulated – the exhaustion of being the person who “explains Vietnam” in every seminar. Another spoke of forming close friendships with American peers while feeling that the structural fact of studying on scholarship in a country whose foreign policy had shaped her family’s province was never quite speakable, never quite a thing one could say out loud. The friendships were real. The historical silence around them was equally real. At Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies, conversations oriented more toward policy and historical scholarship offered a useful contrast: at the level of formal analysis, Vietnam-US normalization appears largely achieved. At the level of student experience on American campuses, it looks considerably more incomplete.
Peace Activity: Folding Cranes at the Conference
On the sidelines of the conference, I joined a peace activity that had nothing to do with panels or papers – and turned out to be one of the most quietly meaningful parts of the week. At a small booth in the conference space, I spent time teaching other participants how to fold paper cranes. The cranes would be sent to Hiroshima.
Most people who stopped by had never folded one before. Some picked it up quickly; others needed several tries before the wings came out right. What struck me was how the act of folding slowed people down. In a conference where everyone is moving between sessions, checking their phones, rehearsing what they will say next, sitting at a table and working through the folds – crease by crease, step by step – created a different kind of attention. People talked differently while folding. More slowly. More openly.
Someone asked me why cranes. I told them about Sadako Sasaki, about the thousand cranes, about Hiroshima. The conversation that followed was not an academic one – no theoretical frameworks, no citations – but it was one of the more honest conversations I had all week about what peace actually means, and what it costs, and who carries that cost.
The connection to the research felt real without being forced. Folding a crane is deliberate. You cannot rush it without ruining it. Each fold depends on the one before. The process asks you to stay present – to be mindful of where you are in the sequence, to resist the urge to skip ahead. The reconciliation journey my participants described has the same quality: it cannot be rushed, it does not allow shortcuts, and every step is shaped by everything that came before it. The crane is not a metaphor I would put in an academic paper. But standing at that booth, watching someone hold up their first finished crane with a kind of quiet surprise, it felt like the most honest image of what the research is actually about.
A Gathering with Professor Kuroda’s Students
One of the most memorable moments of the trip was not a session or a keynote but a meal. Several of us connected to Professor Kazuo Kuroda – seniors, juniors, and those of us somewhere in the middle – found time to sit down together during the conference. Kuroda-sensei was serving as President-elect this year, a responsibility that kept him occupied with the organizational demands of the conference, but the gathering of his students and former students happened naturally, as these things sometimes do when people who share an intellectual lineage end up in the same city.
The conversation turned quickly to the conference theme and stayed there for most of the evening. Several of us were presenting work that touched on education and reconciliation from different angles – different regional contexts, different methodological commitments, different disciplinary homes – and the discussion that followed was the kind that is difficult to have in a formal session: discursive, argumentative, willing to leave questions unresolved.
One thread that ran through the evening was the tension between the field’s normative aspirations and its analytical honesty. International education presents itself as a force for peace and mutual understanding, and there is genuine evidence that it can be – but there is also evidence that it reproduces global hierarchies, that it can deepen resentment as easily as it dissolves it, that the conditions under which it produces positive outcomes are quite specific and often absent. Several of us had data that showed this ambivalence from the inside: not as a theoretical critique but as the lived experience of the students we study. Reconciliation, the group seemed to agree by the end of the evening, is too important to be left to optimistic assumptions. It requires the kind of unflinching attention to power and structure that the conference theme, at its best, was inviting.
Being part of this conversation – as the most junior person at the table on some counts, and as someone whose research is precisely about what happens in the space between personal connection and structural change – was a reminder of why the questions matter and why they are hard. I left the table with more unresolved threads than I arrived with, which is usually the sign of a good intellectual evening.
Conclusion
CIES 2026 was a conference that took its own theme seriously, in the best and most uncomfortable ways. Bajaj’s keynote made clear that peace education cannot rest on liberal optimism in the current moment; it needs harder analytical tools and a greater willingness to name structural violence as the condition within which any reconciliatory practice operates. My own research, and the conversations it generated across the week, confirmed that the students I study are already doing this work – carrying histories across borders, managing the emotional labor of representation, forming genuine connections that do not resolve the underlying asymmetries. The spiral model is my attempt to take that experience seriously as theory, not just as testimony.
Reconciliation is not a problem to be solved. It is a practice to be sustained – messy, imperfect, sometimes failing, and, as this conference made clear once again, essential.
References
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Bajaj, M. (2026, March 28–April 1). Peace education in precarious times [Keynote address]. 70th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, San Francisco, CA, United States.
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