Scholars have developed original pedagogical approaches to impart the knowledge and skills required for professional life in the area of peace and development. Experience-based learning, simulations, games, and role-plays have been used with positive results. Yet most efforts tend to overly simplify and narrow down the learning experience in contrast to the complexity of contemporary post-conflict societies. At the same time, governments and international organizations have developed complex multidimensional and multifunctional training platforms to prepare individuals and organizations to work more effectively in contemporary peace operations. Drawing on elements of the Viking training platform developed by the Swedish government to organize the world’s largest peace operations exercises, this article outlines an original type of classroom simulation designed to address the educational and training needs of future peacekeepers and peacebuilders. Contrary to short simulations and rule-bound games that tend to focus on strategic decision making, it describes a simulation played at the operational and tactical levels and sufficiently long and complex to mimic reality and enable learning across the peace operations spectrum of staff categories and activities.

Incomplete and insufficient university programmes in the field of Peace and Conflict Resolution have led to an important gap in knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) among peacebuilders and peacekeepers. In theory, experiential learning through problem-based learning (PBL) and simulations should be able to address this gap. This article explores the opportunities and limits of this pedagogical approach to educating peace actors using the case of the Carana simulation delivered at Linne University (LNU), Sweden. Using mixed-methods, this article confirms the added- value of PBL in the development of KSAs but identifies challenges peculiar to the field of Peace and Conflict Studies that limit its effects. PBL has a clear added-value for the development of skills in learners with a consistent development of professional skills. It can be used to foster conscientization as a precursor to transforming societies towards nonviolence and justice.

Peace research has abandoned thepursuit of positive peace becauseof a profound commitment to anontology of violence. By assumingthat the world is shaped by arbitrarypower relations, scholars workingon the liberal and post-liberal peaceend up focusing their research onnegative peace. The article developsa critique of this ontology ofviolence assumed by the Realist,Liberal and Critical traditions whichconceals the possibility of positivepeace. Following the lead of CharlesTaylor, it locates the philosophicalshackles that stifle peace research inthe immanent frame that underpinsthe political work of Hobbes and hiscontemporaries. The article outlinesthe contours of an ontology of peaceand revisits the concept of eirenismto conceptualise positive peace.

Peace operations are increasingly multi-dimensional and are affecting ever more aspects of life at the grassroots level. While this evolution is necessary, it has created a tension in the field of legitimacy. Indeed, how can the United Nations possibly legitimise its actions in a domain traditionally subject to domestic laws and norms? International and domestic standards of legitimacy are clashing but neither of them is fully adapted to the particular case of peace operations. This article outlines a third approach to legitimacy centred on the UN Charter which incorporates the views of the entire legitimacy constituency of peace operations deployed in volatile environments.