International Conflict and Security – (M.A.)

Understanding the dynamic and complex factors of modern conflict and fashioning effective and legitimate responses to the main contemporary security issues is a major challenge for the international community. The MA in International Conflict and Security at the Brussels School of International Studies is carefully designed to provide the necessary knowledge, as well as analytical and practical skills to meet this challenge. The MA programme is structured to introduce students to the key concepts and theories necessary to understand contemporary international conflicts and security issues. At the same time, through practical and case study driven modules, students learn about security policies, conflict prevention and early warning as well as the appropriate ways of managing conflicts peacefully through negotiation and mediation. The programme also provides students with the opportunity to explore how international organisations can contribute to the promotion of peace and security, and under what conditions international institutions are robust and stable.

The MA programme builds on a tradition of internationally renowned expertise in conflict studies at the University of Kent embodied in the Conflict Analysis Research Centre. This tradition rests upon a commitment to apply the latest insights from the academic study of conflict to a practical engagement with conflict and security issues and to conflict resolution and prevention. In that spirit, each year many of the students on the programme take advantage of the variety of opportunities in the Brussels area to gain internships in conflict and security related areas. In recent years, students enrolled in conflict studies at BSIS have worked at NATO, in national embassies and representations, in the European Parliament, as well as the large number of NGOs working on conflict issues in the Brussels areas, including the International Crisis Group, the East-West Institute, and the Centre for European Policy Studies and the European Policy Centre.

In the Twenty-First Century violent conflict seems never far from the headlines. In Asia, protracted conflicts in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, southern Thailand, Kashmir, and Burma continue to claim hundreds of lives every year. In Central Asia and the Middle East, the violent confrontations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon form a chain of instability across a strategically vital region. In Africa, fighting in Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has led to millions of deaths. Over the past two decades, the Balkans has seen the worst violence in Europe since World War Two, while in the Caucasus region a series of conflicts, notably those centred on Chechnya, remain active two decades after the end of the Soviet Union. In the Americas, insurgent groups based primarily in Colombia have been involved in regular violent clashes with government forces that have at times appeared to threaten stability across the region.

The continued presence of widespread and major violence around the globe has led many to conclude that conflict, in its various forms, is a permanent and perhaps even defining feature of human society. At the same time, in recent decades the nature of major armed conflict around the world has undergone transformation. Conventional notions of war, formed over the past three hundred years and based upon confrontations between large, standing, and highly organised armies managed by states have all but ceased. With direct violence between states in abeyance, some have gone so far as to proclaim the end of war.

But conflict has clearly not gone away. In place of interstate war, ‘new’ wars have emerged. These conflicts are characterised by confrontations between violent non-state actors, including groups employing terrorism, and state-backed agents. Modern conflicts are fluid, dynamic and chaotic. Flowing across international borders, obscuring the division between civilian and combatant and blurring the line between war and peace, and between internal and external security threats; ethnicity, religion, and the struggles by warlords to control natural resources are often identified as at the heart of the new conflicts.

The new wars appear to mark a break with the form of warfare that reached its peak with the Second World War and the confrontation of the Cold War. Indeed, for some observers the contemporary forms of conflict represent a return to chaotic, barbaric and medieval forms of warfare. In this environment, the international community has felt ever more compelled to launch complex operations in key conflict zones to reverse the slide to unchecked violence and the creation of failed states. From Timor Leste, DRC, Sudan, to Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, international actors have become involved in unprecedented forms of intervention that frequently challenge established notions of sovereignty. Reflecting the emerging relationship between states in conflict and the international community, concepts such as ‘peace building’, ‘peace enforcement’, and the ‘responsibility to protect’ have become the mantras of post-Cold War international peace operations.