Social Work Peace Studies

Armed political conflicts and their aftermaths and social work interventions with individuals, families, and collectives call for social work peace studies. The topics of war, post-war, and peace must be included in social work curricula from a historical, critical, comparative, and multidimensional perspective to promote human dignity, human rights, social work values, ethics, and antimilitarism. Social work approaches to war are diverse and multifaceted and include gender-, disability-, age-, and antiracist social work frameworks, trauma-informed work, and community mobilization. Critical social work peace studies are sensitive to pre- and post-war structural injustices and take these into account when responding to individuals, groups, collectives, and structures. While war causes humanitarian disasters, economic devastation, and unspeakable human suffering reflected in raging dehumanizing ideologies, insurmountable inequalities, and intergenerational trauma, social work peace studies have to advocate for unconditional antimilitarism and global peace.