PCS-F01 — Introduction to Peace, Conflict & Security Studies

What this course is about

Peace studies is often assumed to be advocacy. It is not. This foundation course treats peace, conflict and security as analytical problems with a substantial empirical literature behind them. The organising questions are why organised violence occurs, why some conflicts end and others recur, and why interventions intended to stabilise a situation frequently prolong it.

How the course is structured

The opening sessions define the vocabulary carefully, because imprecision here has practical consequences. Conflict is not the same as violence. Security means different things depending on whose security is meant — the state’s, a community’s, or an individual’s — and those meanings frequently compete. Peace understood as the absence of fighting is a much weaker condition than peace understood as the presence of functioning institutions.

The middle sessions cover causes at three levels: structural conditions such as inequality, exclusion and resource pressure; institutional factors including the capacity and legitimacy of states; and the immediate dynamics of escalation, in which each side’s defensive move reads to the other as aggression.

Later sessions address resolution and its difficulties — negotiation, mediation, peacekeeping, transitional justice, and the tension between accountability and settlement. Students examine cases where reasonable choices produced poor outcomes, rather than only cases with clear villains.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to analyse a conflict without adopting a party’s framing, distinguish grievances that drive violence from those cited to justify it, assess an intervention against the incentives it creates, and write an assessment that acknowledges what cannot be known.

Who it suits

Humanitarian and development staff working in unstable settings, government and security officials, journalists reporting conflict, community mediators, and students entering the field. The course does not require prior study and is deliberately accessible to practitioners without academic backgrounds.

It opens the curriculum of the School of Peace & Conflict Studies and connects closely to analytical training in the School of Intelligence & Strategic Studies and to regional work in the School of Geopolitics. Full pathways are listed in the Academy.