Our global demographics are changing rapidly, and few places remain in the world that are highly homogenous. In many of today’s global-oriented organizations and businesses, leaders will often confront culturally challenging situations. It is imperative to understand and be able to work in environments that are fundamentally different from one’s own. The objective of this course is to help build the capacity of the learner to be sensitive and respectful of diversity and to learn how to better maneuver within different cultural contexts.
This course is divided into two related parts. The first half is dedicated to developing the learner’s understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of culture, multiculturalism and diversity. The learner will understand what culture and diversity mean, culture’s relationship to peacebuilding, and some of the debates surrounding cultural relativism. The second half of the course is devoted to developing the skills and capacities of leaders to work in multicultural contexts. The learner will begin by examining her or his own culture and developing skills for understanding and effectively working with other cultures. Various practical skills will be developed, including leadership with diversity and utilizing cultural resources for peacebuilding.
There are nine lessons in total for the course. Each lesson takes at least five hours to complete, including the reading and related the activities and assignments.
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.
The course examines the complex relationships between gender, violence, economic exploitation, scientific abuse, distorted ethics and warfare. The focus of the course is in assessing the possibilities of engendering notions of peace, conflict, justice, and conflict gender arrangements. It is also about challenging discourses and practices which ignore, minimize or justify the domination of women worldwide.
Gender is embedded in every single aspect of society, from sex to war. We will study the debate over the rise of patriarchy and its creation of different, unequal and violent social and cultural structures of power and domination. We will try to answer questions on whether there were any biological or cultural reasons for a division of labor that led women to be subjugated, since prehistoric times. It will study on how this initial division of labor has been maintained throughout most economic revolutions. It will analyze the connections between masculinity, wealth accumulation and violence. Are men more aggressive? Do different historical economic systems depend on the exploitation of women? Is masculinity the problem for obtaining world peace? Can we have enlightened masculinity and achieve more egalitarian families and more peaceful social relations? We will look at the problem of war and the military. Are armies run for, and by, men? Are women better at resolving conflicts? Will their inclusion into armies help create world peace? This course will also study science, economics, medicine and psychology as engendered disciplines that sometimes reproduce, instead of resolve, conflict and exploitation. We will look at how science has been a partner in genocide and how it can be used to oppress women and minorities. Finally, the occurrence of migration and trafficking will be analyzed, as it is considered a modern form of slavery.
This course will introduce students to the relations between the environment, natural resources, and peace and conflict.
We will discuss the concepts of Global Environmental Change, Sustainable Development, and Environmental Security. Specific focus will be given to Climate Change and Deforestation, and to the different approaches to development inside the sustainable development discourse. Environmental Security will be analyzed emphasizing the underlying neo-Malthusian ideas that still prevail in much of the literature.
Specifically, we will look at the linkages between natural resources and conflicts focusing not only on environmental scarcities, but also on the resource curse and resource abundance approaches to so-called “environmental conflicts”.
We will take an in depth look at the role of the environment and of natural resources for sustainable peace, and how natural resources can or could be used in initiating a peace process.
The students will examine the Rwanda genocide and the different approaches used to analyze and explain this conflict. This case study will serve to bring all the concepts of this course together and to draw general conclusions.
The course aims at strengthening the capacity of scientists, administrators and students into respond to specific donor demands to achieve complementary funding for projects (Project Funding) and institutions (Endowment Fund).
The course is an instrumental one and systematically develops a logical framework based project matrix which is used by most of the international agencies, a concept paper and gives an overview about potential funding sources and options.
The course is oriented towards the needs of the participants. They start the course with their own project idea in which external funding is required and finalizes with concrete results such as a project planning matrix, project profile and potential donors identified to launch the project.
The University for Peace Capstone Course in Peace and Conflict Studies is an online, cumulative course allowing students to demonstrate integrated knowledge, skills and methodology that they have gained from a graduate-level curriculum in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies.
This course has been designed for Asia-Pacific Center (APC) students, to engage them in an online examination of the foundations of peace and conflict studies. It begins by focusing on the historical ‘big thinkers’ who have shaped contemporary ideas of peace, and goes on cover the key names in the development of peace studies as a contemporary discipline. This includes a brief history of the international architecture for peace, principally focusing on the United Nations. During this course students will learn the key concepts and definitions in the discipline such as peacebuilding, conflict escalation, conflict resolution, and positive and negative peace. They will also be encouraged to explore how the political economy and inequality are related to conflict and violence; and the limits to the current system of international aid and conflict transformation will be explored. This course provides an opportunity to explore a range of connections and challenges in the field of peace and conflict studies from a holistic perspective.
The central goal of this course is to provide an introduction to a variety of research approaches and methods in the social sciences. The aim of the course is to enable students to develop their own research designs as well as be able to critique the research designs of others. Students will be exposed to different research methodologies (quantitative and qualitative), and data analysis techniques.
The student in this course will be required: to read compulsory readings and optional ones, to interact with fellow participants and instructors, listening to weekly presentations by the Instructors and most importantly, critical self-reflection.
At the end of the Course, the student will have a research design that should be conducted as part of their professional work and is an academic requirement for a course.
The 21st century is described as the age of globalization, a phenomenon which is increasingly affecting human beings in every aspect of their lives. While globalization has undoubtedly resulted in significant economic and social integration at the global level, the pace at which it is occurring has also brought with it several unintended consequences for the respect and promotion of human rights at other levels. The principal institutions facilitating this phenomenon such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, have often been accused of keeping human rights issues out of their respective domains. The critical challenge, therefore, facing the present world order lies in ensuring that the vehicles of globalization are oriented towards development and promotion of human rights, through appropriate laws and policies. This course will introduce students to the major themes and debates concerning these different linkages between globalization and human rights and explore the new streams of critique that have enabled a confluence as well as a questioning of the globalization-human rights interface.
This course looks at the origins and understandings of masculinities and the construction of the male identity. It uses this knowledge to explore the relationship between masculinities and range of violences, including; domestic, interpersonal, social, sexual, political violence and warfare.
The course aims at understanding the impact of climate change on the global environment and on human activity. Climate change increases risks to livelihoods and may endanger the security of individuals and groups. This in turn could increase the propensity for conflict within and between states and generate the displacement of people due to environmental stress and conflict.
Components of the course will include a critical examination of the drivers of climate change, in particular those induced by human activity. In addition, international efforts to limit the magnitude of climate changes—including those concluded in Kyoto and Cancun—will be reviewed. Consequences of climate change for human health, for economic activity, for resource use and resource availability will also be examined, as will be the options for adapting to climate change.
Revolutionary armed conflict was once considered the only way for oppressed peoples to change severe injustice and oppression. Bloodshed was deemed necessary, often justified by the cliché that what was taken by violence can only be retrieved by violence. In the last decades of the 20th century, however, it became clear that armed insurrection is not the only choice for aggrieved groups and societies, and that nonviolent civil resistance, relying on a variety of forms of nonviolent action, could bring some impressive results. Some failures also occurred. Although this phenomenon has been coherently utilized to achieve political and social change for well over a century by groups, peoples, and societies in differing cultures and political systems, only recently has it gained respect as a potentially formidable strategic force by policy makers, political analysts, scholars, peacemakers, and international specialists of many fields.
Contemporary dictatorships and tyrants have collapsed from the pressure exerted by popular mass movements of nonviolent action, in countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, Chile, East Germany, Georgia on the Black Sea, the Philippines, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, or Ukraine, to name a few. In 2010–11, national nonviolent movements in Tunisia and Egypt changed the face of North Africa and the Middle East. Evidence shows that countries that experience bottom-up, grass-roots nonviolent struggle are more likely to sustain human rights and democracy once established than when armed insurrection is used, and that nonviolent movements succeed more often than violent insurrections. Given this record, it is important for would-be peacemakers to explore systematically the theories, methods, dynamics, and strategies of such movements
According to Martin Luther King, “true peace” can only be achieved through “the presence of justice.” Since it took almost one century for the US Civil Rights Movement to emerge after the post-Civil War Reconstruction was initiated in 1865, the assumption that a peacemaker’s mission is accomplished as soon as peace breaks out could not be further from the reality of conflict environments. Not only does the real challenge of building peace starts after a war, the action of peace-building has sometimes drawn entire regions into an abyss, hence the importance of conflict prevention at all stages of conflict. Countless examples of recurring armed conflicts, protracted conflicts, account for this latter assumption. In some cases, could the search for positive peace actually maintain or lead to structural violence? If yes, what lessons can be drawn from past experiences to achieve positive peace? Can there be a solution to everlasting conflicts?
This course offers a deeper understanding of the change processes that lead to more effective projects and impacts within organizations. It is intended to increase the students’ capacities to formulate strategies and to design, implement and evaluate projects within a development and conflict prevention perspective. The students learn and critically discuss the theories of change as well as the processes of strategic planning, and project design and evaluation. They apply these notions to the study of concrete cases and to the preparation of their own strategic development and projects. The course delves deeper on such tools as: all the steps leading to the formulation of strategic plans; context, problem and stakeholders’ analysis; project cycle; logical framework; outcome
mapping; adaptive management; project implementation; phasing out; project monitoring and impact assessment.
What is Human Trafficking?
Article 3, paragraph (a) of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines Trafficking in Persons as:
“The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the
giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs”. (UN Protocol article 3).
The United Nations Protocol on Trafficking in Persons was adopted in November 2000. This protocol has 105 signatories. In our globalizing world, trafficking of human beings, especially women and children, has increased in both magnitude and in reach, becoming a major human rights concern. Trafficking grew enormously. Human trafficking affects vulnerable individuals, particularly women and children, in every region of the world; the criminal nature of human trafficking makes it
difficult to know the real extent of the phenomenon. The course deals with the
human trafficking and articulates the gender dimensions of the industry. It addresses, as well, challenges facing international community in combating
human trafficking.
The destructive role that media can play has been amply demonstrated during conflicts in Nazi Germany to that in Rwanda in the 1990s. 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.
This course seeks to introduce students to the main theories and practice pertaining to the role journalists, and media more generally, (ought to) play in such processes. It will focus on the critiques against contemporary mainstream media coverage, leveled mainly against ‘Western’ media coverage of conflicts in the Global South, and the call for reconsidering the dominant paradigm of what is called ‘War Journalism’. Alternative paradigms for more conflict sensitive coverage seek to incorporate insights from Peace and Conflict Studies to bring about what has been termed an alternative way of practicing journalism: Peace Journalism. We will examine a number of academic case studies of covering different conflicts in the world which seek to operationalize the concept of Peace Journalism and will examine the impact of the “war against terrorism” on mass media narratives of global conflict(s).
Having introduced the idea of Peace Journalism and examined its practice, the course will subsequently consider normative as well as practical challenges that render the concept controversial among many journalists and scholars which may impede the realization of its ambitions in practice. Students will be provided with the most salient arguments, theories and empirical evidence that underpin this ongoing debate and be challenged to position themselves within it.
Most recently, new media technologies have increasingly been hailed for their potential to foster democracy, peace and dialogue. At the end of this course, we will critically examine some of these
The current financial crisis and its implications on the living conditions of millions of people call for a revisiting of conventional economic and financial models while searching for new approaches and strategies that contribute to a more sustainable and responsible world.
Since the last century, we have been overwhelmed by different and innovative approaches that businesses, governmental institutions,and civil society organizations are implementing to respond to challenges related to poverty, unemployment, and inflation, along with climate change adaptation, population growth and depletion of natural resources.
Rights of Human Beings forms one of the most important branches of international law in the contemporary world. The experience of the 'scourge of war' during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II brought about a new international recognition and focus to the rights of human beings. Today, there are several international treaties guarenteeing a wide range of rights to human beings, both in times of peace and in conflicts. These instruments also impose obligations upon States to respect, protect and fulfil those rights. Under the aegis of the United Nations and regional organizations, several bodies have been established to monitor violations of rights of human beings. Despite these efforts, we continue to live in a world where these rights are rampantly abused. The events of 9/11 have also seriously exacerbated the challenges faced by rights protection. Today, like never before, there is an amplified need for students and professionals from all spheres of life to not only understand and mainstream rights of human beings into their activities, but also to be prepared to meet the growing challenges posed by current and emerging global issues.
This course introduces participants to the international legal regime for protection of rights of human beings. We will focus on both international human rights law and international humanitarian law. The course is divided into two parts. In part one, we will cover a broad spectrum of issues in human rights protection, beginning with the history and philosophical foundations of human rights and ending with contemporary challenges thereto. We will explore the core human rights instruments, the enforcement mechanisms established under international law and will also give special attention to the rights of vulnerable persons and groups. In Part two, we will focus on international humanitarian law which covers rights of human beings, and obligations of States and organized armed groups, during armed conflicts. In both parts, we will have a strong blend of contemporary challenges to the existing protection regime with insights drawn from case studies.
The course will adopt a dynamic pedagogy including required and optional readings, interaction with fellow participants and instructor, listening to weekly presentations by the Instructor and most importantly, critical self-reflection. The course will be covered in ten weeks and each week's theme will require a minimum of three hours of devotion by participants
The course discusses the complex role and functions played by the media, both traditional and new - and the problems they face in conflict situations, whether before, during or 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 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 and functions they actually play - and the possible ones they could play.
The course is intended as a general introduction to these topics. It draws lessons from contemporary experience, with an emphasis on new media, social networks and the role they have played in revolutions and contentious politics against authoritarian regimes in recent years. How do new media and the concept of Web 2.0 affect the relationships between traditional media, audiences and various State and non-state actors? Do social media reinforce narratives of war, conflict and extremism or are they a force for tolerance and conflict resolution?
This course presents an overview on sensible issues ranging from parents/children’s duties and obligations, including influences related to socioeconomic status and cultural differences. The importance of education, family planning, child birth preparation and care along with personal hygiene, epidemics, sexual education and drug-related influences will constitute a primary learning component. This will include an overview on the world-wide problems related to drug use and related abuses, along with a focus on HIV/AIDS. The course offers students concrete guidance and skills required to work in creating a more sustainable and peaceful world.