Media, Conflict and Peace Studies

Academic Year 2007-2008

Overall Description of the Master Programme
This MA programme is designed to enable students coming from diverse cultures and academic backgrounds to develop skills to manage the many complex ways in which media interact with conflict, peace and security. The new thinking about media coverage of conflict on international and local level is also studied and students can develop critical thinking around issues such as objectivity and ethics in news reporting and news gathering. In this programme students can also discuss how free, responsible media can help prevent conflict and build peaceful societies – and in so doing provide the international community and employers with informed individuals.

Courses in this 42-credit MA programme are taught by UPEACE resident faculty and visiting professors who are prominent professionals and scholars in media affairs.

Objectives

• To meet the growing demand from students and mid-career professionals to develop skills to manage the many complex ways in which media interact with conflict, peace and security.
• To inspire new thinking about media coverage of conflict on international and local levels.
• To help students develop critical thinking around issues such as objectivity and ethics in news reporting and news gathering.
• To educate in how free, responsible media can help prevent conflict and build peaceful societies – and in so doing provide the international community/employers with informed individuals.
  

Student Profile
Students enrolling in this programme are expected to have some professional experience in media and related matters, because the MA provides them with limited practical journalism training. The courses do provide the students with a focus on media and their role in the areas of peace, conflict and security; therefore, though a first degree in any discipline is acceptable, a degree in the social sciences or humanities is an advantage. All the courses are taught in English in which a high level of fluency is expected, but competence in a second language is also an advantage.

Students who have completed the MA in Media, Conflict and Peace Studies will have acquired wide, systematic knowledge in the many ways media interact with peace, conflict and security. They will be able to go on to work in communication, post-conflict assistance or peacebuilding through international organizations such as the UN or national governments, as well as in the media and academia. They will also have the skills to do media monitoring and content analysis with a media watchdog.

Plan of Studies:

Course Descriptions:

PCS-6000 Foundation in Peace and Conflict Studies
The University for Peace Foundation Course in Peace and Conflict Studies is designed to engage students in an examination of the major contemporary challenges to peace, sources of conflict and violence, and several key nonviolent mechanisms for conflict transformation and prevention. The course is designed to provide a common foundation for UPEACE students from all of the different M.A. programs (as its name suggests). During the course, an understanding of the complex and interconnected challenges to peace will be developed, as will an understanding of the need for multi-faceted approaches to meeting these challenges. Students will also engage critically with theories of conflict, and will develop their understanding of the theoretical resources available in the area of conflict studies. During the course of their studies at UPEACE students will engage in increasingly specialized inquiry into various dimensions and issues in their specific MA areas. The foundation course provides an opportunity to explore connections, sympathies, and synergies between the challenges and approaches identified in all of these areas from a “wide-angle” perspective that will encourage students to continue making such interdisciplinary connections and analyses throughout their tenure at UPEACE and after.

MPS-6010 Media in Conflict –Prevention and Peacebuilding– Introduction
The course discusses the complex role played by the media - and the problems they face - in conflict situations, whether before, during and after the actual conflict. It also addresses the clashing relationships that often occur among media and governments, the military, other armed players and NGOs, international agencies and humanitarian organizations in these circumstances. The course provides a broad understanding of the modern history of media in conflict and war situations, and draws the distinction between information and propaganda, while explaining the ways in which media work and produce information and discusses the different roles they actually play - and the possible ones they could play. The course is intended as a general introduction on these topics. It analyses dozens of examples and draws lessons from contemporary experience.

Can the media be a tool for peace in a broad sense? What kind of role can media play in an escalating conflict, in preventing any greater explosion, in helping in peacekeeping or peace building situations? Should media and journalists have a “peace agenda” and try to save lives, or should they stick to the business of informing and doing it accurately and independently? What are the differences between covering a war in which their own country is involved and covering “other’s wars”, i.e., wars where media are just observers?

IPS-6020 Research Methods
This course develops students’ theoretical knowledge and applied skills in conducting qualitative, quantitative and participatory research in the social sciences. It addresses, inter alia: epistemology, critical theory, research ethics, and project development and grant writing. The course serves also to prepare students for the design and writing of the major research project required for their degree through the development of their abilities to formulate research problems and proposals and to conduct research.

MPS-6020 Media Ethics in Times of Conflict
By analyzing cases and defining principles, this course considers ethical issues related to news coverage of conflict, with particular emphasis on journalists’ wide range of professional responsibilities. It examines pressures on the news media that are grounded in economics, politics, and technology, as well as those related to fundamental techniques of news gathering. Topics studied include the dynamic tension between news media and governments, the role of indigenous media and conflict coverage in the context of globalization, and the significance of covering (or not covering) crimes against humanity. At the conclusion of the course, students should possess an understanding of how individual journalists and the news media collectively address the ethical complexities of covering conflict around the world.

MPS-6030 Role of the Media in Rwandan Genocide
The 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda is taken as a test case to illuminate the potential role of local media in a conflict situation for inciting murderous behavior, and of the international media for distorting the reality of the conflict in a way that adds to the tragedy.

PCS-6002 United Nations and International Peace
The practitioner perspective will be approached to discuss the following specific topics: UN evolution since 1945. UN peacekeeping role. Preventive diplomacy and peacemaking. Peace building and post-conflict reconstruction. Peace enforcement by the UN to enhance human security and human rights.

Elective Courses
During a three-week period, in January, students have the opportunity of choosing a 3-credit course as elective –This period coincides with the UPEACE Institute where non-UPEACE students are accepted for being enrolled in the regular UPEACE students.

All of the courses are taught by international academicians and professionals with extensive expertise in each of these areas.

IPS-7030 Conflict Management
This course examines the changing nature of contemporary conflict and the practices and techniques used in conflict management. It engages the question of the roots of conflict in greater depth and also explores the range of options for responding to conflict including negotiations, conflict resolution activities, the role of the UN, the role of peace operations, and the challenges of peacebuilding activities. A primary focus of the course is an examination of the capacity and potential of various cultural conflict resolution and transformation practices. The course also covers trigger events, ripeness theory, features of effective and ineffective peace process, and postconflict justice and reconciliation. Case studies at the local, social, national, regional, and international level is used throughout to examine the complex way conflict dynamics emerge and interact with social, environmental, economic, political, and other factors.

MPS-6011 Gender and Media
This course aims at identifying some of the areas on which the media perpetuates patriarchal practices in different cultures and societies.

From a multicultural and transnational perspective, we will examine how feminist media studies have contributed to the analysis of the specific role of the media in reinforcing social relations, in particular gender relations of power. We will work within the theoretical frameworks elaborated by critical and cultural media feminist scholars.

MPS-6060 Media and Ethno-Cultural Conflict
“History,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “is littered with the wreck of states that tried to combine diverse ethnic or linguistic or religious groups within a single sovereignty.” And from Homer to the reporters embedded in Iraq, journalists – or versions thereof – have always been recording the conflict. In modern times, the idea has been that journalists remain detached and dispassionate – objective in the face of inhumanity around the world, from Indonesia and Africa, to Europe and South and Central America. But that’s only an ideal – or a goal.

“The propagandist's purpose," wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” This course will look at the ways ethno-cultural conflict are really covered these days, from how media choose which conflicts to cover, how they report on armed conflict and what happens when prejudice and/or emotions get in the way of objective, or detached, reporting.

MPS-6014 Covering Asia

MPS-6015 Communication Strategies

MPS-6040 Media, Terrorism and Insurgency
This course will assess the globalization of terrorism and insurgency in terms of the mass communication used by groups to grow, self-sustain, recruit militants, spread their identity and elicit support from their target audience. This will be facilitated by the analyses of five terrorist and insurgency networks: the Lebanese Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency and several Zionist groups that contributed to the creation of the State if Israel. The course will prepare students to think analytically about terrorism and insurgency, and use various models of mass communication to understand their dynamics and processes. At the end of the course, the students are expected to have a sound knowledge of the field of mass communication applied to terrorism and insurgency.

MPS-6013 Practicum

IPS-7000 Thesis
The thesis must be comprised of original work, independently performed, or it may be a comprehensive, in-depth survey of a topic agreed to by the student’s advisor. It should be no longer than 23,000 words.