Abstract

Inclusive refugee education is often reduced to structural access while the relational work of belonging, recognition, and epistemic justice goes unattended. At the same time, intergovernmental peace and human rights education  frameworks remain largely top-down and declarationist, drifting from earlier anti-colonial commitments and risking the reproduction of Eurocentric knowledge. This conceptual paper advances poetic peace pedagogy as a decolonial praxis of critical peace education (CPE) that humanizes refugee education and reclaims peace and education as lived rights. Building on decolonial CPE, engaged pedagogy, and pluriversal human rights education, I argue that poetry operates as ethical, sensory, and dialogic method: it surfaces desire and agency, names the unspoken, and moves learners from language to ideas to action. Synthesizing a limited but promising empirical base from refugee and conflict-affected settings, the article maps poetry’s mechanisms to CPE’s core aims and specifies ethical guardrails to avoid romanticization, damage-centered practice, and “ethical violence” (e.g., co-authorship and situated solidarity). The article concludes with implications for policy and research: pairing macro-level commitments (resourcing, teacher preparation) with micro-level, context-responsive practices that cultivate belonging, recognition, and reasonable hope, especially within forced displacement and securitized schooling.