Education and Peace

Yes, OfTru have been working very closely with OfPax and there have been valuable spin-offs. The programme for monitoring college students has already paid back: we identified some subjects who were over-enthusiastic about certain unacceptable ideas in their classes. And our higher education programme is proving very popular and has engaged the academic community’s research capability and ability to work across fields. We now have courses in Community Safety and Security at all levels, from NVQ to postgraduate academic degrees. Homeland security and emergency planning, emergency response courses in public health curricula—all this has emerged out of research devoted to winning the War on Disorder.

It’s interdisciplinary—anthropology students, for instance, can engage in this discipline at home or abroad among problematic or failing cultures, and their research can provide us with valuable logistical intelligence in the battle for hearts and minds, and an understanding of the origins of militant antisociality. We need people who speak the languages and are familiar with critical cultures—and these days those critical cultures can be found on our own doorstep—on estates as well as in the war-torn landscapes of the east.

And this research programme in the universities (which we liken to the Manhattan Project) has benefited in many spin-offs for industry in such growth areas as business continuity planning in industry and risk assessment. This assists companies that want to increase their sense of security amongst their workforce and protect them from terrorism, not to mention bullying and all the other twenty-first century risks we face.