Scaling research and practice of scholarships impact for peace: The role of theory

Abstract

The scope of appraising international higher education scholarships’ potential impact on peace should be broadened beyond assessing their contribution to technical recovery and development. Extant research often limits appreciation of this contribution to instrumentalist terms of human capital import, underpinning it with a view of ‘peace’ as a flat phenomenon of technical functions in a neoliberal order. I present here an alternative approach for fuller and more critical examination of scholarships’ potential impact on peace in Palestine. Working within critical realism, I collected qualitative data from 32 Palestinian alumni on their master's scholarship experiences, which I then analyzed in a data-driven, descriptive mode followed by abductive analysis. Descriptive and inferential findings developed from this two-stage analysis demonstrate that the participants’ perceived academic, career, and identity developments relate to peace in Palestine in deeper, more complex ways than advancing career progress and human-sourcing higher education recovery. Interpreted through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of everyday peace capability, these perceived developments suggest that scholarships enhanced the participants’ ability to reposition themselves in relation not only to conflict but also to a reflexive agenda of individual-national progress, enabled their transgression of oppressive forces disciplining their national and global connections, and expanded their capacity for working with advanced methods of knowing. These findings illustrate the significant role that critical interdisciplinary theorization can play in developing fuller, context-informed understanding of the impact of scholarships and of international academic mobility more broadly. While these findings demonstrate only micro-level effects, i.e., impact on individuals, they have clear implications for scaling research and practice of scholarships impact for peace at the meso- and macro-levels.