Teaching Peace Top-down, Bottom-up, or Both?

Despite decades of calls by the international community for the need to pivot the primary approach to cross-cultural conflict resolution education away from privileging Western, prescriptive models and methods of outside educators toward those based on the knowledge and expertise of local stakeholders, the dominant top-down paradigm persists. This article presents a new framework for cross-cultural conflict resolution education that builds on John Paul Lederach’s original distinction between prescriptive (top-down) versus elicitive (bottom-up) approaches, and extends it through grounded-theory research with expert practitioners working across cultures in conflict zones. The result is a contingency approach to working adaptively across different types of cross-cultural situations — based on five key factors — as well as insights into enacting hybrid combinations of both approaches. The implications and next steps for research and practice are discussed.