Peacebuilding and Mediation (MLitt) 2025 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 differential outcomes of mediation processes based on literature review and case studies.

• Optional

  • Armed Governance: examines the origins, motivations, and dynamics of armed governance, developing new multi-disciplinary perspectives and frameworks for understanding these governance arrangements.
  • The Changing Face(s) of Diplomacy: Emotions, Power and Persuasion in International Relations: highlights the role of emotions, persuasion, and communication technology into the diplomatic arena.
  • 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. Including the European Union, trade, and global care chains.
  • Global Constitutionalism: explores global constitutionalism from a political theory perspective focusing on three concepts: law, power, and rights.
  • 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.
  • Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: familiarises students with different approaches that seek to explain how ethnicity and nationhood are created and maintained, how different forms of ethnic conflict and ethnic violence come about, and what possible mechanisms to contain nationalism and ethnic conflict are.
  • Political Economy of Conflict: provides a political economy perspective on conflict in a developing economy.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Security and Justice Institutions in World Politics: examines the role of different international institutions in governing world politics.
  • Terrorism and Liberal Democracy: addresses conceptual and definitional issues concerning terrorism; the relationship of terrorism to other forms of political violence; and the dilemmas and challenges of liberal democratic state responses to terrorism; and reviews case studies in terrorism and counter-terrorism.

• Dissertation

  The final element of the MLitt is a 15,000-word dissertation. The dissertation should focus 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.

  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.