Form:
Lectures, 16 hours (in four batches), analysis of videos, pictures and texts from conflicts with the help of closed discussion blogs related to these analyses. Each student will participate in a student working group of 4-6 people which each produce a presentation either on the central arguments of one of the books mentioned in the bibliography or an analysis of case of conflict resolution using the theoretical inputs from the course.

Objective:
The objective of the course is to introduce the student to a selection of theories of conflicts and their prevention by means of conflict management, dispute resolution and conflict transformation. Conflict theories will be presented as diagnoses that aim at revealing junctures on the path to conflict that can be influenced by blocking or redirecting the path to violence.  

Pre-requirements:
The series of lectures requires an interest in peace research. Some of the basic concepts of peace and conflict studies will be discussed in the class in a way that would be more meaningful if students were familiar with the basics of Peace Studies. Discussions will also rely on some of the basic concepts of political science and world politics/international relations theory. The course would optimally be placed at the end of B.A. studies in political science/international relations or peace research or sociology/social anthropology.  

Description of the lecture:

A. The lecture will start with a presentation of the concepts of conflict and peace in theories by classical security studies scholars, Johan Galtung, Louis Kriesberger, Chris Mitchell, quantitative peace research (COW, PRIO and Uppsala datasets) and discusses the conceptual “gerrymandering” in political thinking of peace and the political implications of different constructions of peace and war to the efforts to prevent political violence.

B. From there the course proceeds to the presentation of two kinds of ideas on the sources of conflict: ideas that produce generalizations on correlative regularities between conditions and violence, on the one hand, and ideas that look at more specific paths to conflict violence by studying the specific, socially created meanings of elements of conflict. The former ideas will be presented by introducing the ideas on

1. Conflict opportunities by Charles Tilly’s resource mobilization theory, James Fearon’s theory of rational explanations to conflicts and the traditional security studies theories of the resource/opportunity-based sources of conflict.
2. Non-violent opportunities for change and protest by the theorists of the relationship between democracy and peace (this discussion will be discussed in conjunction with the less correlative research on peaceful change by Patomäki and Miall). 
3. Conflict motives by
   a. Theorists of greed-motivated conflicts (theorists of relative deprivation, such as Gurr, Runciman, and Davies)
   b. Theorists of economic threshold of violence (Collier, Hoeffler)
   c. Theorists of conflict incentives (Collier, Hoeffler, Fearon) and resource curse (Sachs, Kaldor).
   
   The theories of sources of conflict that are more idiografic, and based on more interpretative methods of understanding the sources of conflict will be presented in a discussion that will be based on pictures of ethnic warfare in West Kalimantan, Indonesia and a video about a negotiation process on Mindanao between the leadership and regional leaders of the Moro National Liberation Front, as well as propaganda material of the MNLF and some other rebel groups. With this picture material it will be possible to analyze the ways in which ethnic clothing argues and articulates interpretations of the collective nature of the violent actions, the structures of actors in the conflict, how traditional amulets tackle with fear and how traditional headbands give responsibility for killing to an entire group (and relieve the individual from the blame). In short, the intention after the presentation of the generalizable, observable correlative regularities between material conditions and war is to show the sources of conflict that are specific to the context of the conflict and the local interpretations of the elements and dynamics of it. The intention is also to show how violence is not necessarily action in its traditionally understood form where its focus is in its consequences, but that instead, how sometimes violent action is an argument or a demonstration of a reality that the conflicting party favors of the social structure that frames interaction between the conflicting parties.

C. After the presentation of the sources of conflict, the lecture moves to the theories of conflict prevention, including theories of containment of conflict behavior (conflict management, military defence or deterrence of violence, etc.), dispute resolution that goes beyond the level of conflict behavior to the disputes that motivate conflict, and conflict transformation that looks at the level of conflict structures that gives rise to conflicts. In this section theories of conflict conducive conditions (correlative regularity-focused theories) and more interpretative theories will be looked at. Building on the earlier analysis of the pictures and videos and explanations of the symbolic meanings of different visual demonstrative elements in the conflict in West Kalimantan there will be a presentation on the ways in which the conflict narratives and socially constructed realities on the causal path to the conflict of West Kalimantan could be changed by offering alternative ways to argue for constructions of the actors and their relationships in the conflict area, by making some interpretations less credible, by denaturalizing some conflict constructions and by tackling some of the material conditions that created the need to demonstrate specific conflict constructs violently.

D. After the presentation of these ways of analyzing conflict prevention and peace facilitation, the course will focus on a number of cases of conflict prevention and peace facilitation. In addition to the cases that the lecturer is familiar with, group work will be used for the presentation of cases that will be analyzed with the theoretical tools presented in the previous sections of the series of lectures.

The course will consist of a standard lectures with discussions in the entire class and combine them with group work assignments and discussions in groups of 4-6 students.  Groups will use self-evaluation where each student will inform the teacher her/his assessment of the percentage of innovative contributions to the work of the group of each of the student. This tends to help groups with the problem of free-riding.

Plenum and group discussions will utilize the lecturer’s and openly available archives of pictures and videos of meetings with conflicting parties and documentary texts from peace processes in order to make the teaching on the meanings of acts of violence, construction of conflicting parties and myths that are being used to get around fear and norms of normal societies in conflict situations.

Moodle will be used to facilitate the continuation of group discussions after the lecture in a chat forum. Participation to this chat could be made compulsory and it would be possible to set a minimum quantitative limit to the participation in the development of arguments in the chat forum.

Participants: Maximum 40 students (priority on students majoring international politics). Enroll by filling out the form below.

Literature 

Selected chapters of the following book:  

Kivimäki, Timo. Can Peace Research Make Peace. Lessons in Academic Diplomacy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. 

In addition to these chapters, compulsory to all student groups will present the main arguments to the class from the following books:  

Mitchell, Christopher. Handbook of Conflict Resolution. New York: Pinter, 1996.
Galtung, Johan. Peace by Peaceful Means. London: Sage, 1996.
Suganami, Hidemi. On the Causes of War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.