Is Early Childhood Relevant to Peacebuilding?

How Legacies of Genocide Are Transmitted in the Family Environment: A Qualitative Study of Two Generations in Rwanda

“…Second, in conflict-affected societies, there may be difficulties in disentangling potential confounding effects of, for example, cultural differences or poverty [25]. For example, Baldwin et al [50], who explored effects of societal conflict on intergenerational transmission of poverty-through transitory poverty-suggested that conflict may drive processes of intergenerational poverty while poverty drives conflict. Careful analysis of relevant mechanisms in conflict-affected societies is thus needed.…”

“…Third, children were coming of age too, meaning that their needs and their possibilities to interpret and (re)act to the legacies developed over time. Insight into these changes over time are important in order to identify opportunities for intervening in the cycle of violence, which may be strongly connected to children's life stages [50,51]. Fourth, further research is needed to refine insight into the various outcomes of societal violence.…”

Integrating Early Child Development and Violence Prevention Programs: A Systematic Review

“…An integrated ECD+VP approach is consistent with recent recommendations that ECD can most sustainably be promoted through multisectoral interventions that cut across health, nutrition, safety, caregiving, and early learning (Black et al., ; Britto et al., ). Through promoting healthy brain development and supporting individuals, families, and communities, integrated interventions may, moreover, promote peacebuilding and peacemaking, which is influenced by relationships between children, families, and communities more broadly (Britto et al., ; Sunar et al., ). Indeed, the benefits of taking on an ecological approach to intervention have been demonstrated in high‐income countries (HICs).…”

Steps Toward Peace and Violence Prevention Across Generations: The Potential of Early Child Development in the Context of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

“…Her work with Sevda Bekman and Diane Sunar at Boğaziçi University in the early 1980s in developing group‐based curricula for early mother–child education programs that were then implemented and refined in poor areas of Istanbul and rural communities in Turkey, provided the inspiration and foundation for the Mother–Child Education Program (Anne Çocuk Eğitim Vakfı, AÇEV). Indeed, Çiğdem's efforts and those of AÇEV lead to a series of reports and scholarly articles and an exploration of the possibility that early childhood development programs could serve as a path to peace (AÇEV, ; Kağıtçıbaşi, Sunar, & Bekman, ; Kağıtçıbaşı, Sunar, Bekman, Baydar, & Cemalcılar, ; Sunar et al., ). This led in turn to the convening of more than 40 international experts in Frankfurt for the 15th Ernst Strüngmann Forum in 2013 and the publication of the resulting deliberations by MIT Press of Pathways to Peace: The Transformative Power of Children and Families (Leckman, Panter‐Brick & Salah, a, b; Britto, Gordon, Hodges, Sunar, Kagitcibasi, & Leckman, ).…”