International Peace Studies

Academic Year 2007-2008

Overall Description of the Master Programme
The Master of Arts programme in International Peace Studies is designed to enable students from diverse cultures and backgrounds to attain a deep understanding of the central issues of peace and security, which will determine the future of humanity. Through their coursework, participants in the programme will broaden their base of knowledge and will engage with the major concepts, themes, and debates within international peace and conflict studies, preparing themselves for work with NGOs, governments, aid agencies, the UN and other organizations where a deep understanding of these issues is critical.

Drawing on the unique mandate of the University for Peace and its privileged access to information and expertise from the whole United Nations family, the MA in International Peace Studies represents a unique educational opportunity. With access to scholarship and research from a range of partner universities, research, and policy centres, students will be exposed to a variety of key perspectives on the most serious international and global challenges to peace. They will learn from leading professionals, academics, and experts from around the world to develop their insights into these major challenges to peace in the 21st century. Progressively, students will be challenged to design and undertake their own research projects and to develop their capacities for critical analysis of complex issues in this area through a process of specialization, and ultimately through the composition of a final thesis project. The programme encourages students to develop a global perspective and the ethical and intellectual foundations that will be needed to confront current and emerging challenges to peace.
The programme is intensive. It will be accomplished: from August to July. The programme includes a number of compulsory courses, and an elective, for a total of 42 credits.

Student profile

The programme is designed for graduate students from all professional or academic backgrounds, who desire to follow a career in international peace issues vis-à-vis the aspirations and principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations. Very often students show a 3-5 years of working experience, after they have received their baccalaureate degree, in international affairs and multicultural issues.

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 provides a common foundation for UPEACE students from all M.A. programmes. 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 meet these challenges. Participants in the course will engage critically with various theories of conflict and violence. They will develop their understandings of the theoretical resources available in the area of peace and conflict studies as well as their capacity for putting theory into practice. The foundation course provides an opportunity to explore connections, sympathies, and synergies between the challenges and approaches identified in many different disciplines from a “wide-angle” perspective that will encourage students to continue making interdisciplinary connections and analyses throughout and after their tenure at UPEACE.

IPS-6011 Conflict Prevention
This seminar will provide students with a broad overview of the field of conflict prevention. Students will study the causes of conflict, the cycle of conflict, methods for conflict prevention, different stages of prevention, the role of different actors, and recent case studies of successful and failed prevention efforts.

The goal of this seminar is to provide students with a strong foundation to understand the causes of conflict and the theory and methods of conflict prevention.

IPS-6052 Sustainable Development
The seminar equips students with a sound understanding of the relationship between worldwide development trends, environmental constraints and conflicts linked to development, and of the potential avenues for constructing a more sustainable developmental practice. Students are introduced to diverse proposals for sustainable development at local, national, regional and global levels. Key themes include: human development within a framework of ecological economics; poverty alleviation and gender equality; sustainable production and consumption; use and control of natural and human resources; biodiversity, fresh water management, environmental conservation and protection, rural and urban sustainability, health promotion; and environmental factors as causes of conflicts, violence, and wars.

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.

PCS-6005 Mediation Capacity and Techniques in International Organizations
The academic and theoretical perspective of the role of international organizations in mediation efforts to settle conflicts that threat domestic and international peace are discusses. The rationale and underlying concepts of the mediation techniques more frequently used are also discusses.

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.

PCS-6003 United Nations Governing Bodies and their Procedures
Practical issues will be discussed on how UN General Assembly and Security Council work. There are other political diplomat intergovernmental bodies in the UN system such the Human Rights Committee, UNESCO Executive Committee and governing bodies in other branches of the UN system that should be examined for a very practice oriented learning experience.

Electives
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 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.

IPS-6013 Urban Violence
A human security perspective will be used to analyze and develop an effective understanding of urban violence, a critical problem in many cities of developing and developed countries, which becomes increasingly urgent as the phenomena of urbanization and immigration continue to spread and intensify around the world. Current social, economic and political phenomena of many cities of the world, such as increasing demographic rates, immigration, failed public services, informality, social exclusion, gender exclusion and poverty will be analyzed in order to understand how such features affect peace and human security at the city level. It will also provide students with the academic and practical instruments to analyze how insecurity and violence in cities hinder local and global peace. Based on the conceptual frameworks and examples presented in the learning sessions, participants will be encouraged to present the cases that, departing of their own realities, they are more familiar with.

IPS-6015 Gender and Peace Building
The course is designed to provide theoretical as well as field-based knowledge on the gender dimension in peace and conflict studies. Throughout the course, the students are exposed to the major trends that have been used for the incorporation of a gender perspective in peace building and conflict settlement. Policies, programmes and practical case studies are shared with the students with the aim of getting a thorough understanding of the positive and negative aspects of peace building endeavors in different environments worldwide. At the end of the course, the students shall be able to understand the cost of ignoring gender in peace building and conflict settlement and its consequences, as well as to analyze current situations with a gender perspective.

IPS-6014 The Political Economy of Development and Peace
This course introduces students to a significantly important range of explanations for war and peace in the modern world. The political economy approach applied to Peace Studies is relatively new though the theoretical basis is well established. The course is designed to complement and further enlighten the elements of political science located within other courses on the programme, aims to unify two important underlying disciplines, that of economic and political science, and provide an important base for students going on to understand how the political economy approach is useful for knowing the nature of development and peace building.

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.

PCS-6004 Contemporary Issues on International Peace
The course consists of fifteen 3-hour sessions distributed during fifteen afternoons to be scheduled between February and April 2008.
Distinguished lecturers will be invited to deliver speeches about topics such as human security, economic cost of violence, border disputes, it threats against environment and so on.

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.