The "Goldilocks Zone" of War and Peace

Abstract

There is a pedagogical hurdle to teaching war and peace. War should not be glorified by educators, and
from a normative perspective, peace should be advocated for. However, the world we live in shows that
the most developed and wealthy countries came into being precisely because of war, not because of
attempts to remain pacific. In this article, we contend that educators should strive toward an educational
“Goldilocks Zone” approach, where students are forced to grapple with counterfactuals and case studies
to understand the implications of the human condition, cultures, and societies within conflict. We further
argue that weak states breed persistent civil wars, and that overcoming this “conflict trap” requires warmaking
and the teaching of such to resolve contextualized political disputes. Moreover, we discuss the
utility and limits of military force to include the precarious nature of militarily intervening in civil wars
– past and present – in order to illustrate how future leaders should engage in constructive classroom
engagements about humanitarianism in such scenarios. Finally, we conclude with an example of Africa as
a “Petri Dish” for how to guide classroom discussions based on current events, with particular emphasis
on enabling students to distinguish between subjective and objective assessment methods in their
assessments of these complex cases.