Peace and Conflict Studies Minor

Mission Statement

The PACS minor takes a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach to studying inclusive and sustainable strategies for managing, transforming, and resolving conflict and promoting peaceful societies, systems, policies, and institutions. The curriculum explores theoretical foundations and practical strategies (advocacy, consensus-building, partnership development, and intervention tools) for advancing human rights, social justice, restorative goals, and cultural awareness by exploring real life settings and situations. Foundation courses prepare students to more closely examine questions related to peace and conflict across the undergraduate curriculum. The minor also provides students with an enhanced understanding of the varied causes, conduct, and consequences of conflict, representations of conflict and peace, theories of conflict mitigation and resolution, practices in humanitarian assistance, and related mechanisms for the prevention and containment of violence through statecraft and international peace promotion efforts and organizations. The PACS curriculum also includes multiple opportunities to prepare for taking the Foreign Service Exam, which is offered every semester and available through the CCU Testing Center.

Minor Requirements

The minor requires successful completion of eighteen (18) credit hours from categories A, B, and C below, with a minimum grade of C in each course. No more than nine (9) credit hours can be in a single discipline. Up to six (6) credit hours may be double dipped with other programs.

Benefit to Students

The PACS minor will prepare undergraduate students for careers, graduate studies, and professional opportunities related to peace and conflict studies in the following areas:

• Policy advising in government, private sector, or NGOs;
• Research and analysis in human/economic development, dispute resolution;
• Environmental protection;
• International law/justice;
• Political organizing;
• Human rights implementation;
• Religious, faith-based and interfaith work;
• Ethical advocacy;
• Education at all levels;
• Socially conscious business and entrepreneurship;
• Mediation/facilitation (from grassroots to international);
• Restorative justice; and
• Program development and training in conflict transformation.

Student Learning Outcomes

This minor introduces students to a broad set of theories, analytic tools, and policy mechanisms for understanding and acting on issues of peace and conflict. The curriculum revolves around integrating and applying theoretical perspectives on the causes and consequences of conflict and the success of peace initiatives and/or prospects for peace to various case studies. Students will examine, analyze, and evaluate the following:

1. What is conflict?

2. How is conflict experienced at different levels and in different places in the world?

3. What are the causes and dynamics of conflict?

4. What ethical issues emerge from the study of conflict and from interventions in conflicts?

5. Who is best positioned to address and/or resolve conflict?

6. What are appropriate responses to conflict?

7. How do we understand and imagine peace?

8. What is required to ensure peace?

9. Who is best positioned to enable a peace process?

Curriculum

The minor requires successful completion of eighteen (18) credit hours from categories A, B, and C below, with a minimum grade of ‘C’ in each course. No more than nine (9) credit hours can be in a single discipline.