Treating Peace as Knowledge: UNHCR's Peace Education as a Controlling Process

This article reads the manual used by facilitators of the United Nation's High Commissioner for Refugees’ Community Peace Education Programme (PEP) to explore the controlling process of which this programme is a part. It argues that the manual encapsulates the many tensions and difficulties related to the protection of refugees’ safety in camps. It finds that PEP is not merely a peace education programme, but a reflection of both the problem of refugee protection and UNHCR's effort to contend with it by deflecting responsibility for security in camps to the refugees and making refugees accept their conditions by attributing conflicts both in the home country and in camps to their personal attitudes.