Peace and Justice Studies (PJS)

This course is designed as an introduction to peace and justice studies. It will equip the student with nonviolent and democratic strategies for creating and maintaining "cultures of peace" at home, in the school, in the community and in the world at large.

Are ideas really more powerful than weapons? Why was the Arab Spring in Egypt successful but the Saffron Revolution in Burma a failure? This class examines several prominent nonviolence theorists including Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene Sharp, Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez and the way in which their ideas continue to shape social movements today. The class also investigates a variety of practices that have been used to create nonviolent social change including civil disobedience, noncooperation, boycotts, sanctions, street theatre, marches, rallies, social media organizing, digital resistance and accompaniment.

This class provides a foundation for both theory and skills development in three different basic conflict resolution areas: negotiation, mediation and facilitation.

This course will highlight the practical work that the United Nations is doing throughout the world in assuaging human suffering, and in peacekeeping and peace building. Among the topics covered will be the role of the UN in creating and enforcing international law, and in peacekeeping, as well as the work of the various UN agencies such as The United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The contributions of the non-governmental organizations (NGO's) attached to the UN and their work in helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and world peace will also be discussed.

This course will explore the role of women in peacemaking and social activism throughout the world. Using the social change and empowerment frameworks, students will learn about the interdisciplinary nature of peace, viewing it from educational, social, economic, religious, health, and political perspectives. They will also examine the tools used in fostering peace on both a small and large scale, including nonviolent communication, appreciative inquiry, and nonviolent resistance. Finally, students will integrate service and learning by engaging in a community-based experience designed to promote awareness of, and action for, peace. Coure Rotation: PL: Spring.

Is the War on Terror a “war”? How do we define “peace” in the 21st Century? This course uses the Cold War to contextualize the current difficulty in making firm distinctions between states of war and peace as well as the changing face of violence, from intra-state conflict in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to contemporary manifestations of terrorism and the use of drone warfare. Specifically, the Cold War prefigured how peace and war have come to be defined. Leveraging cultural icons such as the television series The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and the film Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the course centers around the idea of the Cold War created a liminal space between conventional understandings of war and peace. The constant threat of nuclear annihilation, for instance, brought “war” to the household of every American. Under a constant state of danger, “cold war” became the new normal and justified the creation of a security state apparatus and the deployment of covert and overt force without Congressional declarations of war in order to, paradoxically, secure feelings of being at peace. The first two-thirds of the course will explore the effect of the ambiguity surrounding the status of “war” and “peace” during the Cold War on topics such as: the formation of the national security state, the military industrial complex, and the universal military service debate; the formation of the imperial presidency; and issues of gender, race, and class, selective immigration policies, and programs like the “War on Poverty.” In addition, Cold War interventions have had important, often tragic, consequences in places far from Washington D.C., in places like Vietnam, Lebanon, the Congo, and Central and South America and we place such actions within their global and local contexts with an eye toward how they shaped the post-Cold War era. The final third of the course will move us from the 20th to the 21st Centuries. In addition to the threat of nuclear war, combating terrorism, "containing" or intervening in civil wars (fragile states and the Responsibility to Protect), and dealing with widespread human migration became common 21st Century challenges. . Coure Rotation: NYC: Spring.

Philanthrocapitalism is a recent phenomenon that merges philanthropy and capitalism. It emerges as the popular, often uncontested and naive response to the failures and limitations of global development, global public policy in the name of social justice. In this course we will closely examine philanthropy not only as a social and voluntary humanitarian practice but also as an integrated part of present day capitalism, having a direct relation to the growing inequality associated with it. Drawing from economics, sociology, peace and justice studies, feminist and queer theory, trans studies and political science, among others, we will engage questions such as - Is Capitalism philanthropic? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial/imperial world order? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? Can philanthropy serve progressive and radical movements for structural social change? Can social justice movements e.g. Occupy, Arab Spring, Prison Abolition, BlackLivesMatters, and LGBT rights challenge philanthropy at large? Can we think of social movements that are making us radically re-imagine philanthropy's role in society? Our readings will problematize the operative logic in charitable, philanthropic, humanitarian, NGO, religious, and peacekeeping efforts.

This course will introduce students to the process of Restorative Justice, by focusing on how restorative justice operates within indigenous communities, with a focus on kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiians). As this course takes a comparative approach to examining the fields of Restorative Justice, Indigenous Studies, and the Prison Industrial Complex, some of the other communities we will look at are local communities in South Africa, those behind the concertina wire, and an activist group of Latina/x women bicycle brigade in East Los Angeles. In the course, Restorative justice is explored as a resolution to the enduring legacy of colonialism via two frames: the political and criminal justice. In addition to the focus on Restorative Justice as a praxis in the field of Peace and Justice Studies, this course is designed to introduce students to the field of Indigenous Studies, which is NOT so much a study of Indigenous peoples and cultures, as a study with and by I indigenous peoples and cultures. Using film, literature, and scholarship, this interdisciplinary course aims to overturn dominant constructions of history in order to explore contemporary issues of Indigenous cultural identity, representation, sovereignty, and legal frameworks. This course is thus designed to give students an exploratory venture into the many theories and applications of restorative justice, indigenous studies and m ass incarceration.

How do we use the frameworks of justice to make meaning out of tragedy, anxiety and loss in the wake of surviving a global pandemic but also in the shadow of climate change? How do we cope with the trauma of white supremacy without becoming immobilized by pain, guilt and fragility? Grief and loss surround us. Systems and concepts that we have conceived of as stable for hundreds of years are starting to collapse. There are losses of species and ancestral lands as well as belief systems. We are living with the reality of increasing storms, wildfires and a changing climate. If we don’t have the wisdom to identify, name and grieve our losses, we stand very little chance of struggling for the preservation of what remains. People who are not allowed the space to ponder and mourn what has been lost are more vulnerable to manipulation by authoritative forces and more fearful of anyone who might threaten to exacerbate their losses. However, a time of loss can also give rise to new forms of organizing, new commitments to transformation and new ways to imagine how the world might be. We can tell new stories, form new communities and generate new paradigms out of our old ways of being.

Recent years have witnessed the global proliferation of new grassroots movements for racial justice including the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Idle No More in Canada, Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, and the CARICOM campaign seeking reparations for slavery in the Caribbean. This course will explore the internal dynamics of various movements for racial justice—as well as the external conditions to which they are responding—by charting the complex interconnections between the concepts of “race,” “peace,” and “justice.” While focusing primarily on the fraught racial dynamics of the United States, the course will situate domestic struggles for racial justice within the Peace and Justice Studies discipline, with attention to a broader international context and consider how efforts to build peace and justice in other locations around the world grapple with important similarities and key differences as a result of their own context-specific legacies of racism and colonialism. The class will begin (and end) by engaging with trauma-informed approaches to transforming racial violence that link personal and societal transformation and healing.

Artists and activists often act as cultural dissidents, raising urgent issues and engaging in civic provocation that asks society to engage in broader conversations about transformation and justice. This course explores the intersections of art and activism and invites students to bring a theoretical PJS lens to consider art as a relevant peacebuilding framework. Art and activism may help us to imagine more just, equitable, and humane ways of being together while also acting as a form of confrontation, forcing us to consider what we may choose to ignore. The arts challenge us by exposing injustice but may also heal us by addressing intergenerational trauma or reconnecting polarized communities through the importance of storytelling.

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that challenges us to think about the interplay between multiple forms of oppression and exploitation at the same time. Intersectional thinkers insist that in order to truly understand the constitution of violence in the contemporary world, we must be able to think about gender, race, sexuality, immigration status, class, education, incarceration status, and other factors together in their complexities rather than as discrete aspects of an individual or community’s lived experiences. Importantly, just as utilizing an intersectional analytical framework helps to untangle interlocking forms of oppression, intersectionality as a form of praxis also offers guidance for modes of resistance to oppression and the promotion of peace and justice that respond to complex and overlapping forms of violence and conflict. This course explores the concept of intersectionality and its usefulness for integrating it into the study of conflict, violence, and peacebuilding around the world.

Many students are interested in international work or volunteering for NGOs abroad. What does it mean to "do good work overseas"? This class analyzes and explores humanitarianism and international peace-building and development work. What does it mean to be an aid worker? What are the ethics and best practices required to work in challenging environments during a conflict or disaster?

This internship gives students practical experience working with organizations engaged in work related to peace and justice studies.

This course gives students an opportunity to pursue advanced and/or specialized courses in peace and Justice studies that are not part of the regular course offerings under the mentorship of a Pace faculty member.

This advanced course provides the student chance to deepen examination of variety of theories and applications within the field of peace and justice studies. This course takes a multidisciplinary approach to peace and justice studies by drawing on insights and analysis from the fields of political science, international relations, criminal justice, psychology, literature, environmental studies, gender studies, economics, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, the fine arts and others. The class is interactive, participatory and driven by both student interest and emerging trends in the field. Using a variety of teaching techniques including readings, lectures, class discussions, games, case studies, role plays, training exercises and a simulations, the students examine a range of pertinent issues in peace and justice and evaluate the relative strengths and disadvantages of a variety of skills and techniques.