Dissertation Project

Forgive or Forget? History Education in Post-Conflict Countries

In my dissertation, I examine the role of history education (or its lack) in peace-building and nation-building after conflict. Many post-conflict countries attempt to build peace while suppressing and erasing their histories, leaving out all or large parts of their pasts from school curricula. Whether this strategy can truly help society to move on, or will only allow tensions to fester across generations, remains unclear. At the same time, it is unclear whether there is a way to teach history that promotes reconciliation, rather than backlash. While Holocaust education has been held up as a model of how to use violent histories to teach peace and tolerance, there is little existing empirical evidence about whether it succeeds in these goals, and whether and how its model could be transported to other contexts.

To answer these questions, I am pursuing two stages of data collection in Nigeria, where history has been inconsistently taught. First, I conducted an inter-generational survey of 2584 current secondary school students and their parents to determine what narratives about historical violence spread through families and communities in the absence of formal education about past conflicts. Next, I am running a field experiment in Nigerian schools to test the effects of education about past national violence, compared with alternative approaches to peace education which are more abstract. My work coincides with ongoing policy efforts in Nigeria to design peace and history education with support from UNESCO.

Other Projects

My other projects touch on various aspects of a larger research agenda, including 1) the long-term and micro-level effects of civil violence and 2) the role of inter-ethnic prejudice and distrust in politics.

  • Poll Workers and Public Trust: The Role of the National Youth Service in Nigeria’s 2023 Elections (with Nicholas Kerr and Amanda Edgell)

  • Pushing Apart or Pulling Together? The Impact of Rising Violence on National Identity and Social Trust in Nigeria

  • Tribeless Youth? Political Attitudes of Kenyan Students toward Democracy and Ethnicity, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2022 (with Sebastian Elischer and Amanda Edgell)