COURSE DESCRIPTION

It 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 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. An important aspect of the course will also be the introduction to skills integral to the field of peace and conflict studies and to the UPEACE pedagogy at large. These include non-violent communication, appreciative enquiry and dialogue.

The main objective of this course is to support Master students’ learning of research methodologies for peace and conflict inquiries. The course provides a synopsis of key conceptual, theoretical and methodological frames in different peace categories, e.g. energetic, moral, modern, post-modern and trans-rational families. As such, the course explores perspectives, underlying claims, methods and applications and limitations of those selected categories. The philosophy of the course is informed by post-positivist concerns and hence aims at raising students’ awareness of their position vis-à-vis their research with emphasis on relationality and ethics. Importantly, the course draws insights from scholarly work in peace and conflict studies, yet a large part is based on the students’ own papers and participation. Therefore, willingness to collaboratively work both in written and orally is indispensable for participating in the course.

Being used to seeing war movies, looking at war photographs and listening to war news, we rarely hear anything about peace. Pictures and also language form part of a system full of war-rhetoric. How to escape that machinery? How to even detect that machinery?

If we want peace media, we have to create them – and this is what this course is about, because the best way to understand manipulations and the system of media is to learn how they work.

This course constitutes an advanced seminar in Gender Theories specifically as it applies to violence and conflict creation and resolution. It examines the complex relationships between gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, militarization and masculinity both in the domestic and the public spheres. The entire focus of the course is in assessing the possibilities of engendering notions of peace, conflict, justice, reconstruction, reparations and pre-post conflict gender arrangements and in challenging discourses and practices which invisibilize, minimize or justify the domination of women worldwide. It intends to give students a theoretical lens from which to examine Gender and Peacebuilding.
The course will then focus on masculinities, including sexual orientation and identity issues, and their relationship to structural oppression, dominance, violence, especially that directed at women, and militarism. Is masculinity intrinsically related to violence? Can violence at home be separated from violence at the war front?
Femininities, including sexual orientation and identity issues, will also be discussed especially according to their traditional relationship to passivity, militarization and victimization. Are women really more peaceful? Does motherhood and maternal thinking make women more peace loving? Discourses about women's agency and women as victims will be critically analysed.

In addition participants can choose an elective course (3 credits) offered by the UPEACE Institute or other UPEACE programmes.

For UPEACE students, the Institute offers the elective courses that have to take as part of their corresponding plan of studies at UPEACE. During these courses, UPEACE students can share learning experiences with students of all UPEACE MA programmes and non-UPEACE students as well.

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.

In 1996, Usama bin Laden declared that his aim was to directly affect the lives of ordinary Americans in terms of human and economic costs, as well as to initiate a global insurgency against infidel regimes. More than 15 years later, and in light of the current global economic recession, this goal seems to be finally in reach. While the number of acts of terrorism has slightly diminished since September 11th 2001, their intensity and scope throughout the world have become unprecedented. Whether through taking a flight or filling their gas tanks, citizens of the United States are being affected daily by the specter of a global insurgency. In the last 15 years, international “terrorism” has mutated from a being a cluster of exclusive organizations to a grass-root dogma that possesses a global reach. How did it come to this and what role did mass communication play in all this? How did al-Qaeda become ‘al-Qaedism’, an ideological franchise that Usama bin Laden himself would have been unable to stop?

This course will assess the systemic nature and globalization of insurgencies 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 analysis of five political insurgency networks: the Lebanese Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, several Zionist groups that contributed to the creation of the State of Israel, and Kashmiri separatists from India. The course will prepare students to think analytically about insurgencies, 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 and to actively engage in changing the common political narratives on terrorism.

How has the growing popularity of blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and the video-sharing community YouTube changed media in the Arab world, and to what extent has it been responsible for the 2011 uprisings? Satellite channels like Al Jazeera have been challenging state-owned media across the region for years now and a new crop of daring independent newspapers are provoking governments in several countries. Are blogs a new form of challenge for the State? Do social media reinforce narratives of war, conflict and extremism or are they a force for conflict resolution and tolerance? This course explores the role of new media in the 2011 uprisings as part of a greater shift in a volatile region where the previous absence of a public sphere was partly responsible for much suffering and oppression.

The destructive role that media can play has been amply demonstrated during conflicts from Nazi Germany to Rwanda. Their (potentially) more constructive role when it comes to fostering a culture of peace, preventing escalation or adding to processes of reconciliation and peace-building, however, has received comparatively scarce scholarly attention.

He is currently (since 2007) Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UBC (awarded 1999), and also held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University from 2005-07. He taught for five years at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City (2000-05). He is the author or editor of fifteen published books, including Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2nd edition, 2011), Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations (2009), and the forthcoming The Scourge of Genocide (2013). He was recently selected one of Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide for the book project of this title (Routledge, 2010). He serves as an expert consultant to the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, and have co-led genocide prevention workshops and seminars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, Thailand, Switzerland, and the USA.

Alvaro Sierra has been a journalist for more than 25 years and has worked for the past years as a senior editor and editorial adviser of the daily El Tiempo, Bogota. He was president of the board of Medios para la Paz (Media for Peace), a major Colombian NGO of journalists that designs and teaches courses and seminars for journalists working in conditions of armed conflict. For the past eight years he has designed courses and trained local journalists in Colombia, and also in Haiti, Mexico and Ecuador. He teaches for the Knight Center of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin courses on conflict coverage and on coverage of the drug business. He has extensive experience covering armed conflicts both as a local reporter and a foreign correspondent. In the past 20 years he has worked in Nicaragua, the former Soviet Union, Russia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, Hong Kong and Colombia, among other places. He’s fluent in Spanish, French, Russian and English. From 2008 and 2010 he was Associate Professor at UPEACE, in charge of the MA on Media, Peace and Conflict Studies. Since January 2011 he’s back in Colombia, where he works as chief editor at Semana, the main newsweekly in the country.

Dr. Abdalla is Professor and Vice Rector at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE).  Before arriving at UPEACE, he was a Senior Fellow with the Peace Operations Policy Program, School of Public Policy, at George Mason University, in Virginian, USA.   He was also a Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Virginia.
 
Both his academic and professional careers are multi-disciplinary.  He obtained a law degree in Egypt in 1977 where He practiced law as a prosecuting attorney from 1978 to 1987.  He then emigrated to the U.S. where He obtained a Master's degree in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University.
 
He has been teaching graduate classes in conflict analysis and resolution, and has conducted training, research and evaluation of conflict resolution and peacebuilding programs in several countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.  He also authored, and co-authored, several research and evaluation teaching manuals including: Doing What You Want With Your Data, A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning and Implementing Evaluation Strategies, and Qualitative Evaluation: The What and Why.

He has been an active figure in promoting effective cross-cultural messages within the Islamic and Arabic-speaking communities in America through workshops, T.V. and radio presentations.  He has also been actively involved in inter-faith dialogues in the United States.  He pioneered the development of the first conflict resolution training manual for the Muslim communities in the United States titled (“…Say Peace”).  He also founded Project LIGHT (Learning Islamic Guidance for Human Tolerance), a community peer-based anti-discrimination project funded by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ).
 

Associate Professor in Media, Peace and Conflict Studies Master Programme, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies
Daniela Ingruber is a war researcher, specialised on war photography, film and the ethical aspects of media-production, and a journalist and editor. She also works for the Diagonale – the Austrian Film Festival (web, catalogue, film discussions), as a political consultant as well as a writer for film productions.

Besides her position at UPEACE she is a faculty member of the UNESCO Chair for Peace at the University of Innsbruck/Austria and the Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok/Thailand.

Gerald Caplan, a Canadian, has a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.  His major preoccupation for the past dozen years has been the genocide in Rwanda, on which he has written widely and spoken around the world. His most recent book is The Betrayal of Africa in which he attempts to synthesize his lifetime's immersion in Africa. He has also been a lifelong social and political activist.

Jacobo Schifter , PhD in History from Columbia University (1983), is Emeritus Professor at Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica. He has published several controversial books on Costa Rican-US relations and on Costa Rica’ s Civil War. He has also published several books on AIDS and sexuality, including Lila’s House. A Study on Male Prostitution in Latin America (Haworth, 1998), Macho Love. Sex Behind Bars in Latin America (Haworth, 1999), From Toads to Queens. Transvestim in a Latin American  Setting, (Haworth, 2000), Public Sex in Latin America (Haworth, 2000), Truckdriver’s Trade (Haworth, 2001).

Assistant Professor, in Human Rights, Media, and Peace; Vice Rector Office
Ph.D., University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009. LL.M. in International Public Law at Amsterdam Law School, 2007, and M.Sc. in International Relations and Communication Science, University of Amsterdam, 2005.

Before obtaining her first Master’s Degree, Julia Hoffmann studied Media Management at the Institute for Journalism and Communication Science in Hanover, Germany, and Political Philosophy at Hong Kong University.

She has been working as an academic lecturer since 2006 and as a free-lance consultant, speaker and trainer for a number of NGOs in the field of media, human rights, peace and conflict.
 

Karim El Mantawi is a Cairo/Vancouver based consultant. Previously serving at Soliya, a partner of the UN Alliance of Civilizations, Mr. El Mantawi used new media technologies to facilitate a media literacy-based dialogue between western and Middle Eastern universities. He also served as field producer for documentary films in Egypt, and as project manager at Sarmady, a Vodafone company specialized in digital communications.

Mihir Kanade is the Director of the UPEACE Human Rights Centre and is an Academic Consultant to the Department of International Law and Human Rights at UPEACE. Prior to the present position, Mihir practiced for 6 years as a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India and the Bombay High Court, focusing on issues of fundamental human rights violations. He holds a LL.B. from Nagpur University and a Master’s degree in International Law and the Settlement of Disputes from UPEACE. He has served as a legal advisor to many human rights organizations in India and has represented them before different courts and tribunals in criminal, constitutional and labour cases. His principal area of academic research and study is Human Rights and International Trade Linkages, on which he has also worked as a consultant with the United Nations University, Tokyo.

PhD candidate, Department of International Peace and Conflict Studies

Saumava Mitra holds a Master’s degree in Journalism and Media within Globalization specializing in conflict reporting (2010) from Swansea University, UK, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and University of Aarhus, Denmark under the Erasmus Mundus Masters programme of the European Union for which he was awarded a scholarship. Before starting his PhD programme at the University for Peace, he had worked as a journalist for international news organizations like Associated Press and Bloomberg. Most recently he was working as the Chief Editor of a newsweekly and as a communication consultant for a Dutch NGO working in strategic information intervention, in Tanzania. His bachelors (hons.) degree is in English Literature (2006).