This book illustrates the multiple roles of textbooks as victim, transformer, and accomplice to conflict by introducing the Intersecting Roles of Education in Conflict (IREC) framework for use in the research, development, production, distribution, and dissemination of textbooks and learning materials. The framework illustrates these three potentially overlapping roles by mapping the complex educational contexts of conflict-affected societies and considering how textbooks, learning materials, and education systems more broadly may simultaneously operate within these various roles. Country case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are used to analyze primary and secondary school textbook development, content, and application from a variety of approaches that articulate conflict as protracted and/or socio-political violence. The breadth of case studies shows how conflict discourse circulates in educational systems and materials in a wide range of contexts, indicating that the complexity of the relationship between textbooks and conflict is not unique to one culture, geographic region, or type of conflict.

In the mountains of the Northern Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan School and schooling are both symbolic of wider ranging cultural and political battles over morals, modernity, development, gender and the rule of law. Educational Policies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan: Contested Terrain in the Twenty-First Century is about both the normative battles over the purpose of education, as well as about the structural impediments to providing instruction in those remote and challenging locations where it is attempted. The analytical frames in this collection come primarily from the social sciences and comparative education. Contributors examine education, policy, processes and structures in the broader socio-cultural, religious and economic context of three countries sharing somewhat similar colonial and post- colonial legacy and current uprising of extreme religious positions and a drive to social-cohesion.

This book illustrates the multiple roles of textbooks as victim, transformer, and accomplice to conflict by introducing the Intersecting Roles of Education in Conflict (IREC) framework for use in the research, development, production, distribution, and dissemination of textbooks and learning materials. The framework illustrates these three potentially overlapping roles by mapping the complex educational contexts of conflict-affected societies and considering how textbooks, learning materials, and education systems more broadly may simultaneously operate within these various roles. Country case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are used to analyze primary and secondary school textbook development, content, and application from a variety of approaches that articulate conflict as protracted and/or socio-political violence. The breadth of case studies shows how conflict discourse circulates in educational systems and materials in a wide range of contexts, indicating that the complexity of the relationship between textbooks and conflict is not unique to one culture, geographic region, or type of conflict.

'Sinzela felt her appearance made her vulnerable because it was associated with the village life, which was not considered modern at all. They would wear skirts, and they had short haircuts like men. And they looked at us like we just came from the jungle?' (Sinzela, Interview Two) Sinzela's experiences are not unique, but rather reflect the voices of countless women throughout rural Afghanistan. For years, these women have lived sheltered and isolated lives, that have limited their opportunity, especially in regards to education. This book provides a unique opportunity to hear voices of rural Paxtun women, a group that is further marginalized due to their practices of a strict patriarchal code. The author, raised in the rural Afghan tradition, shares her experiences of growing up in Afghanistan and Canada.