Admission requirements
Students must be in their 2nd or 3rd year of International Studies or Security and Conflict Management. This course has place for a maximum of 15 students. A total of 50 students can register with a letter of motivation (300 words), to be sent to the instructor, and 15 of them will be selected.
Please note that you can’t register for this course as this course is already full for this year.
Description
In this class, the students will study the peace-keeping and peace-building approaches of a conflict case (this semester: Israel-Palestine). The structure of this course is problem-based: the instructor will act as course supervisor, while the students will research various topics assigned to them, present these to each other, and discuss the relevance thereof for the overall case study. This requires intensive preparation for each class, whereby the students will make use of a variety of written sources, ranging from theoretic works on conflict resolution, legal and policy documents, academic analyses of case studies, memoires of peace negotiators. Academic and professional experts will be asked to sit in at some of the seminar sessions.
Program (6 times 4-hour sessions):
1. Background: history, main actors
*In this session the students will get a grasp of the basic history of the conflict. It may very well be that the outcome of this session is that some elements are omitted or need further elaboration: this will be taken into account for the further course. *
2. Core elements of the conflict
In this session the students will try to determine the main elements that constitute the root of the conflict. This can be the subject of the conflict (land, ethnicity, religion, etc) as well as contributing factors (violence, international law, regional politics, etc.).
3. Comparison to other conflicts
In this session, the students will see if comparisons can be made to, and possibly lessons can be drawn from, other conflicts (past or present).
4. Peace negotiations: lessons learned
In this session, the students will familiarize themselves with peace initiatives that have been taken in the Israel-Palestine conflict and see what key issues these negotiations considered to be of relevance for peace building in this conflict.
5. Peace solutions / conflict resolution
In this session, the students will try to come to an inventory of the main elements needed to reach a viable peace between Israel and Palestine. With these elements, they will see what possible peace scenarios may be.
6. Winning trust
*In this session, the students will focus on the so-called CBMs (confidence building measures). They will study past experiences in the Israel/Palestine conflict, and experiences in other conflicts, and come up with the CBMs that they deem most important in this conflict.
Course objectives
The student will gain knowledge about the particularities of the conflict under discussion, and of the modalities of peace keeping and peace building in the broadest sense by studying the experiences thereof in other conflicts.
The student will gain insight in the main conflictuous elements of this course's conflict, and use these insights to evaluate and discuss these elements, and apply them to possible peace building scenarios.
The student will be able to collect relevant data from a multitude of source materials, analyse and summarize these data, and present the main elements in oral and written form. The student will also develop the skill of comparison, by studying other conflict cases and apply the relevant 'lessons learned' to this course's case study.
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Seminar.
Assessment method
Assessment
Active Participation/coöperation in class/group
Essay, paper
Abstract, oral presentation.
Weighing
| Partial grade | Weighing |
|---|---|
| Participation | 40% |
| Essays | 30% |
| Oral presentation | 30% |
End Grade
To successfully complete the course, please take note that the End Grade of the course is established by determining the weighted average of all assessment components.
Resit
Oral examination.
Retaking a passing grade
Please consult the Course and Examination Regulations 2023 – 2024.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
A reading list will be provided in the course syllabus.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Registration Exchange
For the registration of exchange students contact Humanities International Office.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Student Affairs Office for BA International Studies/BA Urban Studies
Remarks
None.