The end of summer and the beginning of a new academic year

After leaving behind Colombia and spending a few enjoyable days with friends and family in Minnesota, I have returned to my life as a second-year graduate student at The Fletcher School. In addition to catching up with old friends and meeting the new crop of first-year students, I have also spent the past several days poring over the latest Fall 2007 class schedule. While I am still somewhat undecided about which four courses to take this semester, I am leaning towards enrolling in the following classes.

International Human Rights Law
This is an introductory survey of international human rights law and procedures, including a detailed examination of global, regional, and national institutions to protect human rights. The course traces the development of contemporary concepts of human rights, including issues of universality, whether or not certain categories of rights have priority over others, and the means of creating and enforcing human rights law. The role of non-governmental organizations in fact-finding and publicizing human rights violations is also addressed.

Transitional Justice
This seminar will deal with the problems and challenges faced by any country which attempts to establish accountability for past abuses of human rights in the aftermath of mass atrocities. Students will first consider the various philosophical and moral issues associated with this subject. They will then analyze the major strategies and mechanisms available for the pursuit of post conflict justice including international ad hoc criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Court, the hybrid tribunals in Sierra Leone and East Timor, and informal mechanisms such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and mechanisms, like the gacaca process in Rwanda, which incorporates local custom. In addition, students will examine the challenges associated with the reconstruction of the domestic justice system in post conflict countries and will consider non-criminal sanctions and deterrents such as lustration and reparations.

Seminar on Peace Operations
Enthusiasm for peacekeeping has waxed and waned in recent years, from exuberance in the early 1990s to disappointment and disinterest in the mid-90s, back to cautious enthusiasm at the end of the decade, to what is now almost universal recognition that peace operations are an important strategic tool for the management of international peace and security. Between 1999 and 2007, 12 major UN peacekeeping missions were established, along with regional operations undertaken by NATO, the European Union, African Union, ECOWAS and various other organizations and coalitions. By one count, there were 40 UN and non-UN peace operations deployed in the year 2006. This course combines a thematic and case study approach to this complex aspect of contemporary international affairs. We will look at UN and non-UN peace operations, broadly defined to include peace-keeping, peace enforcement and post-conflict peace-building. We begin with a number of sessions on fundamentals: the UN Charter framework, history and types of peace operation, doctrine, functions and capacity. Select cases are then be studied, with a view to drawing out common themes and concerns, such as the problem of ‘spoilers’, the peace v. justice debate, the dilemmas of humanitarian action and the challenges of state-building. The course concludes with a series of student-led debates and discussions on the most recent missions, designed to draw on knowledge garnered from the cases, themes and issues studied earlier.

Evaluation of Peacebuilding and International Development
This course will explore core components of the program cycle, starting with social change theories that underpin program design and finish with strategies for learning at the project, institutional and field levels. The core concepts of design, monitoring and Evaluation (DME) will be applied primarily to international development and peacebuilding programming though humanitarian aid and its specific challenges will also be touched upon. Though a uniquely practical course, this class will also engage in organizational and donor government policy issues. The goal of this course is to acquaint students with the main conceptual themes in evaluation at the project level and its practical application. As such, the class will: start with a discussion of change as it pertains to designing programs that are evaluatable; discuss monitoring systems; focus on developing sound frameworks for evaluation; reflect on practical challenges, ethics and politics of evaluation; consider evaluation from differing units of analysis; reflect on the differences between development, peacebuilding and humanitarian evaluation.

And while this course load includes the writing of several long research papers and as a result promises to be quite challenging, I am excited about the possibility of taking classes that will really complement my recent experience working with IOM in Colombia.