When Peace Education Programs Forget: Historical Trauma of the Luo Community and Kenya's National Reconciliation
Abstract
The continued failure of peace education programs in Kenya to break the cycles of ethnic and political violence highlights one of the most important, yet rarely addressed, blind spots namely, the long-term effect of historical trauma. Instead of the generic forms of critique, this paper presents a serious conceptual examination with the Luo community as a case study, where the history of political marginalization and state violence, including the 1969 Kisumu Massacre to the systemic exclusion, represent a national crisis of unresolved traumas. Contemporary peace interventions and curricula consistently stay strictly ahistorical, thus propagating silence to the very grievances that bring fragmentation to society. As a response, we offer a radical intervention: the Trauma-Informed Peace Education (TIPE) framework, which does not constitute a minor change but a paradigm shift in the peace education pedagogical approach. TIPE combines the concepts based on the analysis of historical trauma, critical peace education and social identity theory to replace the superficial safe space with the transformative "brave space". These nascent spaces are progressive learning places, where challenging pasts are recognized, power systems are scrutinized, and strength is jointly nurtured. In the case of policymakers, this study will provide a practical insight for redesigning the policy of peace education, reforming the curriculum, and professional development of peace educators and mentors. To scholars and practitioners, it offers a context-based model that makes the healing of collective memory a central component in sustainable peace-building. We argue that Kenya will truly reconcile only when their social and education systems transition from its past with a sense of courage, thus triggering the processes of recognition, reconciliation, and forgiveness through an intentionally maintained, strong peace education system.
