Andria K. Wisler

It is imperative that education, specifically its developments designed to cultivate a culture of peace such as the academic field of peace studies, be researched in transitional societies war-torn from violent conflict. This project focuses on one such educational effort intended to ease this national and global tension--the cultivation of peace knowledge--as it is being constituted, lived, and taught by scholars associated with peace studies within Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, FYROM, and Serbia-Montenegro. The study is based on several months of on-site fieldwork in which comparative qualitative research methods, informed by phenomenological inquiry were utilized. The study further complicates the perception that peace and war are dichotomous and that the former supersedes the latter when a declaration ending armed conflict is signed. The project uncovers themes underlying the concept of peace knowledge among those most intimately involved in moving it from the margins to the mainstream of academia in these war-torn settings.