Peacebuilding and Mediation (MLitt) 2026 entry

Course information may change. Module information and course content, teaching and assessment may change each year and after you have accepted your offer to study at the University of St Andrews. We display the most up-to-date information possible, but this could be from a previous academic year. For the latest module information, see the module catalogue.

• Compulsory

  • Critical Approaches to Peacebuilding: explores the many meanings of peace. Drawing from both theoretical analyses and applied study of peacebuilding efforts worldwide, the module examines the actors, settings, temporalities, challenges, and opportunities involved in the making of peace.
  • Mediation: Community and Global Praxis: identifies the historical, conceptual, and theoretical underpinnings of conflict resolution practices; analyses diverse forms of mediation, including ‘Track 1’ diplomacy, third-party mediation, and state- and community-led approaches; and evaluates different outcomes of mediation processes.
  • Dissertation for MLitt Programmes

• Optional

  Peacebuilding and Mediation optional modules may include:

  • Armed Governance: examines the origins, motivations, and dynamics of armed governance, developing new multi-disciplinary perspectives and frameworks for understanding these governance arrangements.
  • Critical Climate Justice: gives students a critical theoretical understanding and practical analysis of the meaning and significance of climate justice within the international system.
  • Feminist Political Economy: introduces students to feminist political economy, covering key concepts and theories, including social reproduction, and case studies, such as the European Union, trade and global care chains.
  • Global Politics of Everyday Life: critically interrogates how the global is situated and produced in the everyday, considering travel, fashion, and popular culture, among others.
  • Prisons: Spaces of Power, Resistance and Peacebuilding: examines prisons as state responses to poverty, drugs and political dissent, and analyses differential impacts of incarceration, and modes of resistance to it.

  Peacebuilding and Mediation students can also request optional modules usually affiliated with other programmes. Pertinent modules may include:

  • Counter-Extremism: Ethics, Policy and Practice: explores the most appropriate responses to extremism through collaborative enquiry and direct engagement with policymakers and practitioners.
  • Erasing the Global Colour Line: Decolonisation and the Making and Unmaking of the Third World: drawing upon international history, international relations and postcolonial theory, this module examines the processes of decolonisation that remade the world after WWII, the subsequent emergence of the 'Third World project', and its decline and demise.
  • Global Constitutionalism: explores global constitutionalism from a political theory perspective focusing on the three concepts of law, power and rights.
  • Human Rights, Politics and Power: explores what is described as the politics of human rights and its mobilisation in struggles that take place at the individual, local, national and international levels. 
  • Political Economy of Conflict: provides a political economy perspective on conflict in a developing economy.
  • Political Theory of Race and Caste: gives students an opportunity to study forms of social hierarchy and injustice based on race, caste and descent, through reading key texts in political theory that grapple with conditions of racial and caste subordination and that gesture at the possibilities for emancipation from them.
  • Security and Development in East Asia: investigates growth and development in East Asian states, and seeks to understand if there is a uniquely Asian approach to security and development that produces distinctive regional patterns.

  Optional modules are subject to change each year and require a minimum number of participants to be offered. They allow only limited numbers of students to ensure relatively small class sizes.

• Dissertation

  The final element of the MLitt is a 15,000-word dissertation focussing on an area of peacebuilding or mediation in which you are interested. Each student is supported by a relevant supervisor from the School who will advise on the choice of subject and provide guidance throughout the research process. The completed dissertation must usually be submitted by mid-August.

  If MLitt students choose not to complete the dissertation requirement, there are exit awards available that allow suitably qualified candidates to receive a postgraduate diploma. By choosing an exit award, you will finish your degree at the end of the second semester of study and receive a PGDip instead of an MLitt.