Peace Studies (PEACE-UH)

This course surveys the political science and economics literature on social conflict and peacebuilding. The class will focus on major themes and issues such as the determinants of peaceful cooperation and sustainable peace; the root causes of armed conflict; the determinants of ethnic conflict; the political economy of civil wars; the variables affecting the duration and termination of wars; the phenomenon of different forms of political violence-including protests, riots, military coups, political assassinations, and terrorism; and the politics and economics of peacebuilding. The course is highly interdisciplinary and will cover a wide variety of cases from a comparative perspective.

The creation of international organizations (IOs) is a crucial moment in historical efforts at structuring and civilizing international affairs. Organizations such as the League of Nations and the UN have been at the heart of attempts to create a peaceful international order. In today's international system, international organizations perform a huge variety of challenging tasks: they provide safeguards against the military use of nuclear technology, destroy chemical weapons, convict war criminals, assist developing countries with loans, and deliver food to populations in need. This course will examine international organizations' origin, logic and impact within both global and local contexts. It will provide students with a better understanding of both the theory and the practice of international cooperation and global governance. Specifically, it will study why states cooperate in IOs, how member states and international bureaucracies interact, and how IOs contribute to peaceful conflict management and human development in today's international system.

The focus will primarily be on the experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, why and how it came into being, how it was structured, how it functioned and its impact on the nation and national development. Sub-themes will include an analysis of four kinds of truth, the problem of denialism, and the difference and relation between restorative and punitive justice. The course will offer comparative reflections on how similar issues have been dealt with in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Sri Lanka.

This course will study violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine - indeed, the most important problem, since it could potentially, in this age of nuclear weapons, cause the self-extinction of the human species. To do so, students will review writings that illuminate and illustrate the causes and prevention of violence, including wars and civil wars, inter-ethnic violence, revolutions, genocide, terrorism and structural violence. Students will study how the moral emotions, shame and guilt, can motivate as well as inhibit both group and individual violence. Students will also examine cognitive causes of violence, including the backlash, in the form of "political religions" - Nationalism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism, and most recently, Apocalyptic Fundamentalism - against the modern scientific world-view and its challenge to the credibility of the traditional sources of moral and political authority. Readings in this course will include the Bible and works by Thucydides, Shakespeare, Buchner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Adorno, Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt.

The power of arts and culture in safeguarding heritage, curating history, stimulating contemporary expressions in a post-conflict country. What methods are viable, what tools proved useful, what approaches failed? This course will provide a platform to explore and debate this specific approach to reconstruction, revitalization, reconciliation and peacebuilding. The case of Cambodia with its troubled past provides the backdrop for exploring issues of changing dominant narratives, governance of culture, social welfare, cultural economy, and many others. Through contextualization you will discover the social, cultural, economic and political interdependencies that frame the Cambodian arts ecosystem.

Nation-building is a process that is closely tied to post-colonial state formation across the world. In constructing post-colonial political identities, societies have to define membership in the national community and to distinguish themselves from the former colonial masters and neighboring proto-national communities. The process of defining the national community is usually contested and often leads to violence. In many societies, this process is still ongoing. In this class, we will examine the process of post-colonial nation building through the prism of a fascinating and topical case-study, that of contemporary Ukraine. Ukraine continues to struggle to define itself visa-á-vis its former imperial neighbor Russia. In examining the Ukrainian case study, we will ask what a nation is in the world, how political identities are created and how they take root, and what role the institutions and culture play in the persistence of durable national identities. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the concept of nationalism, the forces and processes behind the construction of durable national identities, and a chance to engage with cutting edge methodological questions.