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This document challenges a widely-held assumption that education is inevitably a force for good. While stressing the many stabilising aspects of good quality education, editors Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli show how education can be manipulated to drive a wedge between people, rather than drawing them closer together. This Innocenti Insight outlines the negative and positive faces of education in situations of tension or violence, including the denial of education as a weapon of war (negative) and the cultivation of inclusive citizenship (positive). It emphasises the need for peacebuilding education. The publication is about children of all ages, but it also discusses the creation of ethnic identity from an early age (section 1), and gives examples of the destruction of primary schools as a weapon of war (p.11)