Final Remarks

Barakat and Chard (2002: 819) stand behind the views that in social sciences, the word

‘institution’ has two different meanings (institution as organization and as rule or convention), but both share common characteristics, that regardless of their formal or nonformal statue, institutions have legitimacy and are perceived to meet social needs. Considering higher education institutions in the theoretical and conceptual context in this thesis, one sees that they do not necessarily meet social needs, even when the social needs are expressed by population.

Very often, efforts to make education a permanent feature of humanitarian aid and intervention programmes are influenced by contexts, which in turn creates a varying effect on how institutions are perceived and their missions are defined.

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The Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE 2010) worked on a number of policies, programmes, community-building projects, under the auspices of NGOs, UN agencies, ministries etc., since it was established in 2000. The purpose of the agency was to work on recommendation papers, reports, and education policy papers, and in general, to increase awareness on the role of education in fragile context, since it was established as a direct result of the birth of the new field of education in emergencies. A report commissioned one decade after the agency was founded, looked specifically at the complexity of education in conflict-affected areas and fragile context (INEE 2010). One of the important features, analysed for this thesis, is that it brought forward how important contextualisation is, especially since interventions in conflict-affected areas can start on different premises, depending on the interpretation of fragility and emergencies (INEE 2010: 4-5). The authors of the report identified various factors which are characteristics of conflict and state fragility and underlined that “social conditions associated with conflict and fragility further affect the delivery of education services in nuanced ways” (INEE 2010: 5). The way education is perceived has important effects on the relationship between providers of education and the recipients. The case that in Afghanistan girls are not sent to school because there are no female teachers, or that parents fear their children will learn ‘foreign’ values and forget their own, are examples that speak for the previous statement. Furthermore, that “(...) education systems have the symbolic value of (re)establishing state legitimacy in the eyes of the population” (INEE 2010: 9) can be an important factor of how people in fragile situations perceive education.

It was also found that data analysed for this thesis does not answer conclusively to the research questions. Nevertheless, a prominent finding is that while primary education has already emerged as an important pillar of humanitarian action (UNESCO 2011, Milton and Barakat 2016), higher education still does not hold an important position in either research, policy making, programme design or programme implementation. Sansom Milton and Sultan Barakat (2016) provided amongst the most recent analyses of higher education’s role in recovery in conflict-affected societies and identified a gap in the field. Namely that how higher education can be employed in post-war recovery has not been exploited in the past, compared to the attention which has been given to how to protect or rebuild education systems affected by conflicts (2016: 403-404). Evidence on how higher education can influence peacebuilding through “promoting messages of violence or peacebuilding, addressing inequalities and through identity politics” (2016: 413-415) is not widely considered, and this is consistent with the findings in this thesis.

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There are not sufficient higher education and peacebuilding initiatives to assess how the local contexts are being considered in rebuilding higher education infrastructure. However, the one recurring aspect in the academic, programming and grey literatures is that higher education as a field needs to be addressed and taken into consideration in the early stages of post-war recovery, to prevent undermining post-war transition and reconstruction (Milton and Barakat 2016).

Implementing higher education initiatives into peacebuilding strategies is, as it was already established, a scarce approach. However, the high influx of refugees in the past years, both towards Europe and other parts of the world have triggered increased interest in higher education opportunities for refugees. The leitmotiv of the thesis is role higher education plays in peacebuilding, therefore the connection between higher education and refugees was not prioritized. Notwithstanding, some of the few higher education initiatives in peacebuilding do refer to refugees and as such are briefly presented here. Rasheed and Munoz (2016), Coffie (2014), Waters and LeBlanc (2005), see the potential in higher education institutions offering education to refugees, both to “develop human capital necessary for peacebuilding” (Coffie 2014), or to bridge communities (Rasheed and Munoz 2016). The backdrop of this type of programmes is, as Waters and LeBlanc noted, that a functioning education system, and functioning higher education institutions contribute to state legitimacy and are signs of a state’s capacity to meet its citizens’ rights. In terms of citizenship, refugees are in essence persons without a state, therefore a paradox between the scope of the institutionalised higher education and the realities of employing higher education for refugees emerged and represents a good topic for research, with a focus on peacebuilding ‘outside’ (Waters and LeBlanc 2005).

Overall, this chapter aimed to present the findings from the research and discuss their relation to the research questions. Following the pattern established in the case studies, it first explored what role do global norms have in education and peacebuilding and then looked for connections between the local contexts. The last chapter of the thesis summarizes the research and provides concluding notes on the information discovered so far, as well as describing how the thesis contributes to the field of higher education and peacebuilding.

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