Final Project Brief - KBA13 Academy

PCS-C05 · Module 7 — Final Project · Lesson 7.1 · Study time: 90 minutes · Language: English

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

Scope a capstone project on identity, religion and conflict that is answerable within the time and access available to you.
Design the project so that its method is visible and its conclusion is falsifiable.
Produce a submission that meets professional standards of evidence, citation and presentation.
Defend the choices made in the project, including what was excluded and why.

Key terms

Capstone: An integrative piece of work that requires you to use the concepts, frameworks, evidence standards and analytical method of the whole course on a single problem of your own choosing.
Scope: The boundary of the question. The most common cause of capstone failure is a scope that could not have been completed by anyone in the time available.
Deliverable: The physical artefact submitted. Specify its format, length and audience before beginning, because those decide what the research has to produce.
Falsifiability: The property of a conclusion that specifies what evidence would have refuted it. Required in this submission.
Positionality: Your relationship to the subject — professional, personal or institutional — and how it may have shaped access, framing and interpretation. Declared, not concealed.

Lesson

The task

This lesson. Final Project Brief belongs to Module 7 — Final Project of PCS-C05 Identity, Religion and Conflict, taught in the School of Peace, Conflict and Security Studies. Work through the written lesson first, then the slide deck below, then the activity. Every element on this page is live HTML text: it can be enlarged, printed, searched, read aloud by assistive technology and machine-translated without loss.

Your capstone is a single integrative project on a question of your own choosing within identity, religion and conflict. It must be a question, not a topic. ‘Identity, Religion and Conflict’ is a topic; ‘under what conditions does X produce Y in setting Z, and what follows for practice?’ is a question. The distinction is not pedantic. A topic has no completion condition, so work on it expands until the deadline and the submission reads as a survey. A question can be answered, and the answer can be judged.

The submission has five required elements: a statement of the question and why it matters; a method section saying what evidence you used, how you selected it and what you could not access; the analysis itself, using at least one framework from Module 2 explicitly; a conclusion carrying a stated confidence level and a named falsifier; and a limitations section that says what the work cannot support. Total length is 3,000 to 4,000 words excluding references, with a full reference list in author–date form.

Scoping it properly

Apply three tests before committing. The access test: can you actually obtain the evidence, or does the design depend on interviews that will not be granted and data that is not released? The time test: estimate how long each stage will take, then double the figure for anything involving other people, because that estimate is reliably wrong in one direction. The answerability test: write the two or three conclusions the project could plausibly reach. If you cannot write them, the question is not yet sharp enough; if only one is plausible, you are planning an advocacy piece rather than an inquiry.

Then cut. Almost every proposal at this stage is between two and four times too large. Cutting scope is not a reduction in ambition; it is what makes depth possible. A tightly bounded question answered thoroughly, with evidence a reader can check, outperforms a broad question addressed at the level of generality that a rushed survey permits. Markers see the difference immediately, because thin work has a characteristic tell: it cites widely and interrogates nothing.

Method and evidence

Your method section should let a competent reader reproduce your reasoning. State the evidence classes used — typically conflict event datasets, peace agreement texts or truth commission reports in work of this kind — and say how items were selected. Selection is where bias enters, and a frank account of it strengthens rather than weakens the submission. If you searched, give the terms, the sources and the dates. If you chose cases, give the logic. If access was refused or a dataset was unavailable, say so; a documented gap is a finding, while a silent one is a flaw.

Apply at least one framework explicitly and show the working. If you use Galtung’s violence triangle, include the artefact it produces, not merely a claim that you used it. If you use Principled negotiation, show the populated structure. Examiners are assessing whether you can operate the method, and that cannot be inferred from a sentence saying you did. Where a framework proved unsuitable partway through, report that too; abandoning a method for stated reasons is competent practice and is credited as such.

Writing, ethics and submission

Write the conclusion first, in draft, so you know what the document has to support, then write the analysis that earns it, then revise the conclusion against what the evidence actually turned out to show. Keep known, assessed and assumed material visibly separate throughout. Every figure and table must be legible in black and white with units labelled, and no substantive content may be delivered as an image, since text inside an image cannot be read by assistive technology, searched, or translated.

Ethical requirements are not optional. If your project involves people, you need informed consent, a plan for confidentiality and a justification for any risk. Do not include identifying details that are not necessary to the argument. Declare your positionality where it bears on access or interpretation. Include a use-of-AI statement covering any generative tools used for searching, summarising, translating or drafting, and remember that you remain fully responsible for every claim and every citation in the document, including those a tool supplied.

Worked example: narrowing a capstone question

A student proposes to study ‘Identity, Religion and Conflict’. It is a topic, not a question, and it is unbounded. The first narrowing adds a relation: what explains variation in outcomes across settings? Better, but still unanswerable in the time available, because it implies a comparative design across many units. The second narrowing fixes the unit and the period: what explains the difference in outcomes between two comparable settings over a defined three-year window?

The third narrowing fixes the evidence: using published documents and five practitioner interviews, does the difference correspond to the mechanism proposed by Galtung’s violence triangle, and if not, what does it correspond to? That version is answerable, its method is visible, its conclusion could come out either way, and it can be completed by one person. Notice that ambition has not fallen; the claim being made is now sharper and considerably harder to dismiss than the survey the student originally planned.

Slide deck

A ten-slide presentation of this lesson, built in HTML so that it prints, translates, enlarges and reads aloud on any device.

Slide 1 of 10