The Program in Peace and Conflict Management at the University of Haifa offers an integrative approach. We aim at offering a holistic experience, in which students learn how to:
• Integrate theory and practice, critically examining how theories acquired in class are implemented, critically analyzed and adapted to practical situation. In addition, in workshops and skills-based courses students engage in skill-building that is not detached but rather synthesized with the theories they read, discuss and analyze.
• Integrate Peace Studies and ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) studies, usually taught in separate programs, where concrete pragmatic approaches to conflict engagement are woven into structural theories of peace building and of intergroup conflict.
• Integrate intellectual and existential challenges, cognitive and emotional pursues. We believe in a dialogue with the theory & practice of peace and conflict management from a first-person perspective, which invites students to reflect on their studies, to examine where it meets their personal journey, to ask what challenges it all surface and what is their own hope and aspiration that they wish to follow as they develop they unique professional identity.
• Integrate between various disciplines (not an easy task), synthesize knowledge and insights from discourses and analytical frameworks that present different perspectives, different discourses that approach conflicts differently.
• The program offers an integration of different levels of conflict, not all necessarily all covered in MA programs: the personal (reflective practices for personal growth and awareness of one's own approach to conflicts), the interpersonal (developing understanding and skills of interpersonal conflict engagement, dialogue and negotiation), intergroup (developing understanding and skills for inter-group consensus-building and conflict management), social level (understanding social conflicts and the challenges & skill-set for the cultivation of a shared society among diverse social groups), and the international level (peacebuilding efforts based on international relations and political science-based approach towards diplomatic efforts and towards the pursue of peace among nations).
