Press Release
A chance at learning ways to create lasting peace in the world at The Open University
14 February 2006
In a time when the world offers many lessons of war, with conflicts on every continent around the world, The Open University is now educating more people to promote and build peace.
The Open University ‘s new postgraduate course War, Intervention and Development (TU875) is a 30 point course taught entirely online making it suitable for people around the world to take part. It is partially funded by government and emphasises a peace building and development approach to dealing with violent conflicts.
This course is designed for people who have been interveners in civil wars, worked in post-war peace support operations or expect to be in this role in the future, and covers humanitarian/development organisations, an international body and government or military bodies.
The first course is already underway with students praising its content, purpose and convenience.
“This module has challenged my pre-conceptions on the occurrence of violent conflict. However, the course has not presumed to replace these with a series of general explanations for the outbreak of war. Rather, the course’s central tenet has been to emphasise that each situation is unique, requiring careful investigation, and that, correspondingly, the approaches to intervention must be similarly unique. I will complete the course with a much better appreciation of the complexity of contemporary conflicts and equipped with the tools to develop my own understanding of why these conflicts occur and are sustained.”
Peter Beaumont
Officer, Royal Engineers TU875 student
“I have found TU875 to be the most clearly constructed module I have studied to date. It has encouraged me to examine different interpretations of terminology and the background to the significant rise in the number of civil wars that have begun and restarted during the past fifty years. I have been able to analyse the key factors behind the outbreak of the civil wars highlighted by the course in relation to each country in which we are asked to work. This has enabled me to gain a better understanding of the complexity of each situation, and to identify the predominant causes leading to and prolonging the conflict.”
Wendy Wilkin
Governance & Social Development
Resource Centre Manager,
Enterplan Ltd. TU875 student
“It is a course that will help many development practitioners learn more about a very
important area of increasing political interest.”
Claire Vallings
Department for
International Development
(DFID) TU875 student
“There is no framework or best practice associated with intervention and
students have to critically analyse complex situations and detach
themselves from the emotional imperative to do something quickly and
instead take the long-term view.”
Gerry Pye
Officer, Royal Air Force Tutor TU875
War, Intervention and Development includes case studies from countries that have made headlines for decades; places like Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and Nepal.
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