This paper examines how positive peace education (PPE) is enacted in schools, drawing on Johan Galtung’s (1969) foundational theory of positive peace. Unlike negative peace, which focuses on preventing direct violence, positive peace addresses structural and cultural violence embedded in education systems, institutions, and social relations, aiming for sustainable transformation. Operationalizing PPE in schools remains conceptually and practically underdeveloped, with limited shared understanding of what constitutes positive peace in the classroom. This paper addresses this gap through a critical interpretive synthesis of international literature, combined with empirical insights from teachers’ practices, to examine how educators, students, and school communities enact PPE across curriculum, pedagogy, relationships, and daily school life.

The study draws on ethics of care theory (Tronto, 1993, 2013) to complement Galtung’s framework, providing a relational lens through which PPE can be interpreted and applied. Care ethics highlights attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity in school interactions, enabling a practical understanding of how peace can be cultivated through everyday actions and relationships. Integrating care ethics with PPE allows us to examine not only what schools should change but how change occurs, from interpersonal interactions to institutional practices.

Using a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (Dixon-Woods et al., 2006), the paper analyzes 50 peer-reviewed studies of PPE enactment worldwide, highlighting key themes: (1) situated practice, the contextualized ways schools interpret and implement PPE; (2) pedagogical balancing, the negotiation between competing curricular, cultural, and policy demands; (3) teacher and student agency, demonstrating how individuals navigate structural and cultural constraints to foster peace; and (4) lived peace praxis, showing how peace is embodied in everyday classroom and school interactions.

The paper contributes in two ways. First, it offers the first systematic, international synthesis of empirical studies on PPE enactment, addressing a critical gap in the literature and providing evidence of culturally and contextually grounded approaches. Second, it develops a care-centered theoretical framework reconceptualizing PPE as a relational ethics of peace, highlighting the interconnection between moral, social, and structural dimensions of peace.

The study’s European and international relevance lies in its synthesis of diverse educational contexts, including examples from post-Soviet, Global South, and conflict-affected regions, offering transferable insights for policy, curriculum design, and teacher professional development. By foregrounding ethics of care and teacher/student agency, this work provides actionable frameworks for implementing PPE that can inform international educational policy and practice, including UNESCO’s 2023 Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights, and Sustainable Development.

This study employed a Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS) approach (Dixon-Woods et al., 2006; Barnett-Page & Thomas, 2009) to examine how positive peace education (PPE) is enacted in schools. CIS was chosen because it goes beyond summarizing or mapping literature, instead generating new theoretical insights and frameworks – essential in an emerging, interdisciplinary field like PPE where conceptual clarity is still developing. CIS’s iterative, dynamic, and recursive process allowed us to adapt interpretations in response to emerging insights, while collective reflexivity among the research team (Pillow, 2003; Ryan, 2005; Watt, 2007) supported critical discussion of assumptions, coding decisions, and evolving themes. This approach enabled integration of evidence across studies into a coherent theoretical framework linking PPE to ethics of care (Tronto, 2013), framing it as a relational and ethical practice grounded in attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity. A comprehensive search strategy was implemented through Web of Science, including SSCI, A&HCI, SCI-EXPANDED, and ESCI indexes, covering literature published from 1965–2024 in any language and without geographic restrictions. Multiple search terms captured the diverse ways PPE is referenced (e.g., “positive peace” AND “educ*,” “peacebuild*” AND “school*,” “peace” AND “social justice” AND “educ*”), yielding 1,312 papers. After removing duplicates and screening titles and abstracts for relevance to school-based PPE, 130 articles underwent full-text review. Using adapted CASP criteria (Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, 2018), 50 studies were retained based on relevance to enactment of PPE and quality of reporting, with detailed data extraction including methodology, context, key concepts, findings, and researcher reflections. For data analysis, we conducted reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) in six stages: familiarization, line-by-line coding in Atlas.ti 24, generating initial themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and writing the analysis. This inductive process, aligned with CIS principles and influenced by grounded theory, focused on developing a coherent theoretical framework from diverse qualitative and quantitative evidence. Emergent themes were iteratively discussed within the research team to ensure critical interpretation and integration. For consistency, the term “themes” is used here, conceptually aligned with CIS synthetic constructs, which transform evidence into new conceptual forms (Dixon-Woods et al., 2006). Through this methodology, the study systematically synthesizes international evidence on PPE enactment, offering both conceptual clarity and a relational, ethics-of-care-informed framework to guide theory and practice in schools.

After coding, merging, and refining the literature, four key themes dominated the findings: (1) situated practice, (2) pedagogical balancing, (3) teacher and student agency, and (4) lived peace praxis. Situated practice emphasizes the importance of context-specificity. PPE is enacted as an ethical, contextually responsive practice shaped by local histories, sociocultural dynamics, political structures, and global influences. Teachers navigate structural, cultural, and direct violence by drawing on community knowledge, local rituals, and culturally relevant strategies, highlighting the necessity of responsiveness, attentiveness, and responsibility (Tronto, 2013). Pedagogical balancing reflects the tension between structure and flexibility. Effective PPE requires shared responsibility across policy, institutional, and classroom levels, allowing teachers to exercise autonomy while being supported with resources, guidance, and professional development. This balance influences whether schools focus primarily on peacekeeping or engage in peacemaking and peacebuilding. Teacher and student agency is pivotal for sustainable PPE. Teachers act as facilitators, role models, mediators, and transformative intellectuals, while students develop agency through democratic participation, critical reflection, and community engagement. Strong agency fosters holistic development across inner, interpersonal, and societal spheres, linking ethics of care principles to practical enactment. Lived peace praxis demonstrates outcomes through the cultivation of values, skills, and knowledge. Programs promote empathy, conflict resolution, civic engagement, and reflective practices, though assessing long-term internalization remains challenging. While peacekeeping predominates in some contexts, peacemaking and peacebuilding emerge through dialogic, arts-based, and transformative pedagogies, reflecting aspirational and future-oriented outcomes. In sum, PPE is a relational, context-sensitive practice grounded in ethics of care. Successful enactment relies on attentiveness to local needs, shared responsibility, competence in teaching approaches, responsiveness to students’ agency, and solidarity with communities. These findings highlight the need for contextually grounded, flexible, and participatory frameworks to enable transformative peace education across diverse settings.

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