In the context of a global polycrisis characterised by armed conflicts, democratic crises, structural inequalities, and profound digital transformations, educational scholarship is increasingly called upon to critically interrogate its epistemic conditions and its public role. From this perspective, the present contribution argues that peace education constitutes a privileged field for examining the tension between the production of knowledge and the possibility of responsible educational action.

Peace is understood here not as a negative state defined by the absence of war, but as a positive, relational, and political process, oriented towards the transformation of forms of structural and cultural violence that permeate educational and social contexts (Galtung, 1969; 2014). This perspective is rooted in the tradition of critical and democratic pedagogy, which conceives education as a dialogical and cooperative practice (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1970), and finds its normative foundation in the nexus between rights, democracy, and peace, as theorised by Kant and further developed by Bobbio. Without the recognition and protection of fundamental rights there can be no democracy, and without democracy the minimal conditions for the peaceful resolution of conflicts are undermined (Kant, 1795/2013; Bobbio, 1990).

Within this framework, peace is not merely a curricular content, but an orienting horizon for educational action, directly addressing the public responsibility of pedagogical knowledge. Arendt’s reflections on action, speech, and plurality allow educational contexts to be understood as public spaces in which peace is constructed through practices of mutual recognition, initiative, and nonviolent conflict management, thereby resisting a purely technical or procedural reduction of educational experience (Arendt, 1958/2002). Peace education thus becomes a space in which knowing and acting cannot be separated: educational knowledge is always situated, normative, and intrinsically action-oriented, as it takes shape within relationships among subjects who share a common world and are publicly accountable for it.

It is precisely from this inseparability between knowledge and action that peace education enables a critical interrogation of contemporary transformations in knowledge ecosystems. In a scenario marked by informational acceleration, discursive simplification, polarisation, and the spread of disinformation, peace education foregrounds the centrality of the public use of reason and of educational responsibility in sustaining practices of critical judgement, deliberation, and democratic coexistence (UNESCO, 2023). In this sense, peace education does not merely respond to ongoing transformations, but functions as an epistemic space in which the quality of educational knowledge itself, and its capacity to orient action in complex and conflictual contexts, is called into question.

The sample consists of 266 teachers working across different school levels (early childhood, primary, and secondary education), with heterogeneity in terms of years of teaching experience and territorial contexts. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, in accordance with ethical principles of educational research. Data were collected through a predominantly qualitative online questionnaire, structured into two main sections: Socio-professional data, aimed at contextualising responses (school level, years of experience, territorial area); Open-ended questions, designed to explore: definitions and representations of peace; the relationship between peace and conflict; the aims attributed to peace education; declared educational practices and conflict-management strategies. The decision to privilege open-ended questions reflects the need to capture the semantic complexity of professional representations, avoiding a reduction of peace to predefined or standardised categories. Textual responses were analysed through thematic analysis, supported by the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA. The coding process followed a hybrid approach: a deductive phase, drawing on theoretical categories established in the peace education literature (positive and negative peace; structural and cultural violence; conflict as an educational resource; dialogue; rights and democracy); an inductive phase, aimed at identifying categories emerging directly from the empirical corpus. This analytical process made it possible to relate representations of peace to declared educational practices, highlighting convergences, tensions, and ambivalences in the relationship between pedagogical knowledge and professional action.

The findings highlight a conception of peace education predominantly understood as a complex, relational, and dynamic educational process, rather than as a mere absence of conflict. In teachers’ professional representations, peace emerges as a daily practice constructed through the quality of relationships, recognition of the other, and nonviolent management of tensions. Conflict is frequently recognised as a structural dimension of educational experience and, in many cases, as a potential formative resource, provided it is supported by dialogical and reflective practices. This view is consistent with peace education approaches that conceive conflict not as an anomaly to be eliminated, but as an opportunity for ethical, social, and political learning. In conclusion, the contribution argues that peace education can function as an epistemic device for rethinking the public role of educational scholarship, understood not only as the production of descriptive knowledge, but as the construction of interpretative frameworks capable of orienting professional action in contexts marked by plurality and conflict.

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