2026 Theses Doctoral

Teachers’ Strategic Agency in Protracted Conflict: The Case of Cameroon

Hough, Whitney Francis

Teachers in conflict-affected contexts occupy a pivotal yet understudied position in shaping how education functions, survives, and influences the broader conflict landscape. Across these contexts, teachers are increasingly expected to serve as peacebuilders, protectors, and stabilizing figures within education systems strained by violence and political upheaval. Yet despite expanding expectations, little is known about how teachers themselves interpret their roles or navigate the moral, political, and personal dilemmas embedded in their daily work during ongoing conflict. Existing scholarship often treats teachers as neutral implementers or idealized agents of change, overlooking the constrained, risk-laden environments in which their decisions unfold.

This study examines how secondary school teachers in Cameroon understand, negotiate, and enact their professional responsibilities amidst overlapping protracted crises that have politicized schooling, heightened insecurity, and transformed teachers into both frontline actors and direct targets. Drawing on a multi-sited qualitative case study across seven regions in Cameroon, including 150 semi-structured interviews with secondary school teachers, school administrators, and education stakeholders, the study provides a rich and nuanced view of teacher agency during ongoing conflict. The analysis highlights how teachers both embrace and reinterpret their roles, even as their professional identities are forcibly politicized by state actors and non-state armed groups.

Findings show that teachers’ agency is not expressed through full autonomy but through strategic, relational, and survival-oriented practices shaped by insecurity, political pressure, institutional fragility, and the erosion of community trust. Teachers’ decisions on whether to teach a topic, discipline a student, travel to school, or even reveal their professional identity are filtered through calculations of risk, ethics, and care. The study identifies three forms of agency that emerge under duress: survival-oriented agency, ascribed agency, and moral-risk agency. Each one shapes how teachers adapt their practice through approaches such as strategic invisibility, covert peacebuilding, and pedagogical improvisation.

By foregrounding teachers’ perspectives, the study advances teacher agency scholarship, illuminates the distinct pressures facing secondary school teachers, and offers insights for conflict-responsive teacher professional development, protection policies, and peacebuilding initiatives. Ultimately, it provides a more layered understanding of the possibilities and limits of teacher agency in protracted conflict and underscores the need to support teachers during conflict, when their decisions carry profound consequences for students and for the resilience of education systems.