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.

How do societies emerging from authoritarian rule and intra-state armed conflict deal with past mass human rights violations? In their attempts to address past gross human rights violations, what types of justice mechanisms do such societies employ? Ruti Teitel first coined the term transitional justice in her book Transitional Justice (2000). Since then the term has circulated widely in scholarly and policy communities to describe a set of mechanisms and approaches to address past violence. This course analyzes the problems facing societies with past human rights violations, the numerous options they have at their disposal to engage these abuses and the political, economic, legal and ethical ramifications of each choice. The course is organized into two sections. The first section introduces theoretical approaches to study of transitional justice. The second section analyzes the most frequently used mechanisms, focusing on their potency in advancing democratization and reconciliation. Case studies include: the prosecutions of Nuremberg and Tokyo; the international tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; the hybrid tribunals of Timor Leste, Cambodia, and Sierra Leone.