PEACE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL
COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 8 Nov 2009
There is an enormous need in the world for people with skills in nonviolent and creative conflict transformation and work for peace in general. By solving conflicts in peaceful ways, creative energy can be released at the personal, social and world levels and material and nonmaterial destruction avoided. Peace studies, like medicine, are clearly value-oriented: to save and promote life for all, to meet the basic needs for security, well-being, freedom, identity and a livable environment.
Some argue that peace research is "advocacy", not a real science, because it portrays the world how we wish it to be, not how it really is. But there is nothing wrong with applied, goal-oriented sciences, like engineering, medicine or peace research. To achieve their goals, they must be strictly scientific. If a medical researcher–as has happened–paints microscopic black spots on tissue samples of mice in an effort to "prove" his hypothesis of the origin of cancer, he does not advance human health, but harms it! To achieve a goal, it is necessary to be strictly scientific. To argue that pursuing a desirable goal is unscientific is like saying that an architect is unscientific if he seeks to design a building that is beautiful and does not collapse.
The goal of peace studies is to train not only theorists, but practitioners who can apply what they have learned. Learning about peace without putting that knowledge to use would be as irresponsible as studying medicine without using the insights gained to alleviate the suffering of the sick. Johan Galtung used an analogy to expose the absurdity of the notion that science must be "value-free": Imagine you are sick and visit a doctor. He examines you and says, "You have a very interesting disease, I will write it up in my next scientific paper." You ask, "But don’t you have a cure for me?" The doctor protests, "Oh no, I am value-free. I simply observe, I do not intervene."
In 1996, Johan Galtung and George Kent designed a comprehensive and systematic curriculum for a "Master’s Degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution" at the University of Hawai’i. Hawai’i did not adopt it, but it has served as model for the curricula offered by many of today’s university peace studies programs, including the latest, the "Master of Advanced Studies in Peace and Conflict Transformation" offered by the University of Basel, Switzerland, in cooperation with the World Peace Academy, recently founded by Pierre and Catherine Brunner. This program begins in March 2010 and is scheduled to run every year thereafter from March to November.
The curriculum is designed to provide students with theory, practice and values. It seeks to develop the intellectual competence to analyze conflicts and their underlying causes (diagnosis), to project likely future developments if no remedy is applied (prognosis) and to design creative interventions to achieve mutually acceptable and sustainable solutions (therapy).
It trains students in practical skills to transform conflicts peacefully, using case studies, role-plays, exercises in dialogue, negotiation and mediation, and field work, to supplement academic learning with real life experience. Finally, it seeks to develop students’ personal competencies as peace workers, such as responsibility, empathy and creativity, and to motivate them to do everything in their capacity to help create a better, more peaceful world in which everyone’s basic needs are met.
The program is addressed to students from any discipline interested in peace and conflict resolution, including young diplomats, government officials, NGO members, teachers, journalists, lawyers, social workers, officers, psychologists. Students and teachers come from all over the world.
The program deals with conflicts at all levels, beginning with
· micro-conflicts within and between persons: how to overcome domestic and work conflicts on a daily basis, particularly useful for couples, parents, teachers, social workers and many others.
· Meso-conflicts deal with issues on gender and generation, race or class, employers vs employees, where groups of people are in contradiction with each other.
· Macro-conflicts take place between states and nations, like the numerous conflicts among nations within states for independence or autonomy.
· Finally, mega-conflicts concern contradictions between East-West, North-South and between civilizations like Christianity-Islam.
Conflicts at all of these levels of human society exhibit some similarities, and insights gained at one level can often be applied at other levels. There are many different ways to find solutions to conflicts. If the only tool we have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A good doctor has a comprehensive medicine chest, with a variety of cures for different illnesses.
In addition to courses, students also learn through seminars where they present their work and receive comments from faculty members and fellow students. Films, cultural evenings, excursions to places of interest, reading, library research, written assignments, dialogues with faculty members and fellow students, and the immersion into a culture and society at peace complement the learning process. This has an effect beyond mere book learning.
It is remarkable, for example, that Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s closest adviser and the key architect of perestroika, glasnost and democratization, was a member of the first delegation of thirty Soviet students who studied a year in the United States with a Fulbright fellowship in 1958. There is no doubt that this scholarship did more to help end the cold war than billions spent for weapons, which only exacerbated tensions.
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Dietrich Fischer is Academic Director of the World Peace Academy (www.world-peace-academy.ch) in Basel, Switzerland, and Director of the TRANSCEND University Press (www.transcend.org/tup).
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Nov 2009.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: PEACE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL, is included. Thank you.
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