Summer School on Conflict Prevention and Transformation

To all prospective students,

The Institute for Peace and Justice Education, Lebanese American University (LAU) with support from the Mennonite Central Committee Lebanon (MCC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Consensus and the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue (FDCD) proudly launches the Summer School on Conflict Prevention and Transformation, 2009. The summer school comprises two training programs which will take place at the LAU campus in Byblos. The Basic Summer School is a ten-day residential running from August 16 to 25. Graduates of the Basic Summer School are invited to apply to the Advanced Course, a three-day residential running from August 23 to 25. Please find below a brief summary of each of the two programs.

Basic Summer School

The Basic Summer School seeks to draw out individuals motivated and grounded in peacebuilding and development. Through participative and dialogic activities, the workshops aim at developing essential skills and content knowledge for approaching conflict in diverse societies. This school further builds and widens the network of professionals in the peacebuilding community. Basic themes include approaches to understanding conflict styles, conflict analysis, intervention, intercultural communication, citizenship and dialogue in a multi-religious context. During the course of workshops, participants will collaborate in designing projects of intervention in the fields of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Advanced Course

The focus of the advanced course is to empower students to:

1. be introduced to the 'prevention' genre and the development of context-sensitive prevention systems;
2. understand assumptions and underlying theories of change in prevention;
3. recall appropriate conflict analyses to their context;
4. think about the particularities of their local context in terms of entry points for early warning and response systems; and
5. develop and link student projects to others in the course and to the broader Lebanese context.

Note that the deadline for applications is July 6, 2009, 9:00am.

Please do not hesitate to contact me on ipje.summerschool@lau.edu.lb if you have any questions. On behalf of the Steering Committee, we look forward to another successful summer school.

Best wishes,

Dr. Bassel Akar
Program Coordinator

Application Form for basic summer school (Word document)

Application Form for advanced course (Word document)