Hope amid violence: youths’ agency and learning experiences to transform social conflicts in non-democratic settings

Understanding and addressing conflicts underlying direct and indirect violence is necessary to build a just and sustainable peace. This study foregrounds youths’ voices and lived experiences of social conflicts in Iran, an understudied (semi-)authoritarian context in the Middle East. It examines selected youths’ socially constructed understandings of the conflicts and violence affecting their lives, their perceptions of their roles and agency in non-violently addressing those conflicts, and the learning experiences and social pedagogies (inside and outside school) available to them that might have contributed to forming their understandings and agency. The study’s intersectional gender- and social-class-sensitive design enables an understanding of how social-structural, cultural and political dynamics interacted with participating youths’ experiences of social conflicts and their peacebuilding citizenship agency. Findings show that social conflicts that the participating youths were concerned about varied in their differing gender and social class locations. In addition, despite the disconnections between the participating students’ lived experiences of conflicts and their learning opportunities at school, the findings point to spaces of feasibility for schools to enhance students’ opportunities to develop key aspects of peacebuilding agency, even in (semi-)authoritarian settings where citizenship and peace education are absent from the explicit curriculum. Moreover, the research expands the international conceptualisation of peacebuilding agency by showing that young people’s frequent responses to the social conflicts in their lives in (semi-)authoritarian contexts (avoidance, conformity, withdrawal and despair) cannot be simply interpreted as apathy or lack of awareness of the larger structural issues.