Program Description
The Faculty of Social Sciences is excited to offer a rigorous one-year international graduate program in Peace and Conflict Management. Viewed through both international and regional lenses, the field of conflict management will be explored in its many facets, with special attention paid to the wider Middle East conflict while conceptual, practical and comparative elements of conflict management of other global conflicts are examined.
As a deeply divided society and a country in protracted conflict with other countries in the region, Israel is a unique environment for a program whose goal is to enable students to understand how conflicts unfold from the grassroots level and move up through the halls of government to the international community.
As the field of peace and conflict is multidisciplinary, the program maintains ongoing collaboration with other faculties and expose students to relevant emphases from education, social welfare, the law and the humanities. Through tailor-made workshops, special lectures, and reflective practices, the program offers an in-depth journey into the work of the conflict engagement specialist and prepares the students to conflict transformation and peacebuilding work in complex social environments.
Israel supplies excellent opportunities for future professionals in this field. The program exposes students to the complexities academically as well as experientially. It consists of field study that allows students to see how attempts to manage conflicts and promote shared living, mutual understanding, and peace processes actually develop and take root, and is a real-time hands-on working laboratory for advanced international and Israeli students, offering encounters with ongoing conflicts as well as successful and failed efforts to achieve peace. Haifa is a diverse city, the only city in Israel that is part of the global Intercultural Cities Network, and the program leverages the opportunity to get acquainted with the complexities of the immediate surrounding.
What you will study
The interdisciplinary program of study includes courses in political science, international relations, psychology, sociology, communications, history and regional studies. Workshops expose students to scholarship from education, criminology, social welfare and more. Hands-on negotiation, mediation and facilitation skills are also provided. Included in the course of study are a number of field trips throughout Israel in order to gain close familiarity with certain aspects of the local conflict. There is also a practicum component in NGOs related to aspects of peace-making and conflict management; thoughtful simulations of decision making processes, negotiations and conflict management; and guest lectures given by activists, practitioners, politicians, diplomats, academics and former military officials.
Over the course of three semesters we will study sources, types and levels of conflicts, where students will become familiar with tools to trace their development. The curriculum takes as its focus courses on conflict management and provides students with practical tools in the fostering of peace and conflict transformation processes. A reflective journey that invites students to develop their vision and professional identity as conflict engagement specialists, preparing them to the day after graduation, is also included.
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