Racial and ethnic conflict has been a rising issue of concern in Cambodia over recent years as grievances have arisen along nationalistic and religious lines. The IEPB Project focuses on the promotion of a more positive, inclusive vision of Cambodian national and ethnic identity and relationships through training, education programmes, research and cultural exchange.

ACT have been building on its ongoing research on Ethnic Conflict Transformation since January 2004. We actively transform theory into practice by developing the skills of peace practitioners to actively engage in preventing and resolving ethnically-based conflict and through facilitating youth and NGO workers to become advocates for and models of peaceful relations with other ethnic communities. The NEIP views the engagement and involvement of young Cambodians to be an important constituency for peace and the creation of a peaceful multi-ethnic society.

One particular focus of the IEPB Project over the next year is the development and implementation of a new peace curriculum for schools. In the current formal educational system, while some concepts of morality are taught, information about different cultural groups within Cambodian society is not. The curriculum would provide teachers and students with a factual basis for forming their views, as opposed to myth which, in the absence of such information in the current system, has often been the basis for ill-informed beliefs.