Rethinking Security Education

Abstract

The conversation about terrorism is in the process of shifting, increasingly opening to perspectives from peace studies and conflict transformation. In order to prepare students to approach security from this perspective, the University of Maryland’s Program in Terrorism Studies turns to peace education principles. We ask students to develop critical competencies for peacebuilding—empathy, relationship-building, creativity, and adaptability—alongside technological literacy competencies, so that they may one day have the cultural and technological competencies necessary to counter violent extremism and promote peace. In this chapter, we describe this transformative approach to security education, illustrated by one notable example of a pedagogical exercise aimed at developing such competencies among 20,000 online students from more than 180 nations.