The Influence of the Scout Movement as a Free Time Option on Improving Academic Performance, Self-Esteem and Social Skills in Adolescents

The word scouting refers to the Scout movement, born more than a hundred years ago, which educates millions of young people between the ages of six and twenty-one in their leisure time. We aimed to study the effects of scouting on the academic results, social skills, and self-esteem of high school youths compared to a non-scout sample. The selected sample consisted of 430 secondary students aged between thirteen and seventeen. Self-esteem and social skills were measured, and the average mark of the total sample was analysed. After the study, it was shown that belonging to the scout movement significantly influences the improvement of academic results in formal education and conflict resolution; however, there are no statistically significant differences in self-esteem and other social skills.

The Hizmet Movement: Negating Radicalism and Countering Extremism

If the relationship between education and conflict is taken into account it can be said that education has a great potential to make a profound contribution to preventing violent conflicts. There is an increasing recognition on the fact that civil society plays a significant role in conflict management and peace-building by participating, engaging and educating the grass roots. As a civic society, the Hizmet movement utilizes social capital in order to alleviate ethno-religious divisions in heterogeneous multi-ethnic communities around the world, and strives to provide the basic pre-conditions for a peace-oriented society to emerge from those communities. This study argues that the Hizmet movement’s educational and social activities in conflict zones have been helpful in minimizing ethno-religious conflicts in order to prevent violence in conflict-ridden zones of the globe.

Learning in the chaos: A political economy analysis of education in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is often characterised as a ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ state in terms of state ‘functionality’, lacking in capacity to provide security and wellbeing to its citizens and failing to prevent violent conflict and terrorism. Since 2001, education has become a major victim of Afghanistan’s protracted crisis that involves international military interventions, fragile democracy and growing radicalisation. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with educational officials and practitioners in Afghanistan and critically examining the literature in education and conflict, we argue that Afghanistan’s education is caught in the nexus between deteriorating security conditions, weak governance and widespread corruption, resulting in rebel capture of educational spaces for radicalisation and violent extremism. More broadly, we contend that education faces the risk of capture for radicalisation in contexts where state fragility and fundamentalism intersect. Finally, we highlight some critical issues relating to educational programming in conflict-affected contexts.

Urban Wildlife Organizations and the Institutional Entanglements of Conservation’s Urban Turn

Urban wildlife organizations—which include groups focused on wildlife rehabilitation, rescue, removal, advocacy, education, and conflict resolution—have typically been viewed as out of step with the goals of wildlife conservation because of their focus on encounters with individual nonhuman animals, common species, and degraded habitats. The recent shift by large conservation NGOs toward a “humans and nature together” framework, because of its focus on urban natures, has brought the field into discursive relation with urban wildlife organizations. Drawing on a case study of four wildlife organizations in an urban center, this research explores their discourse about human-wildlife relationships in the city, and the challenges and opportunities presented by their emergent intersections.