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The Peace and Justice Studies Program provides an important intellectual focus on forms of peacemaking and conflict resolution. The program combines the social scientific analysis of conflict with the study of strategies for promoting peace and justice. Areas of major concern in the program are international conflict and peacemaking, forms of conflict resolution , race, class and gender inequities, ethnic conflict, human rights, grassroots urban organizing, and environmental justice. The program focuses on domestic U.S. issues as well as international ones. The core of the program consists of two courses, an introductory and an intermediate-level course.

Introduction to Peace and Justice
The introductory course, introduces students to concepts of peace and justice and to strategies of peacemaking and conflict resolution such as mediation or human rights activism. The course explores these issues through a focus on case studies, analyze these cases and connect their own experiences of conflict with forms of peacemaking they have studied.

Peace and Conflict Resolution
The second course has a shifting topic and is offered by a Wellesley faculty member or, occasionally, a visiting scholar. Topics for this course include Human Rights in Latin America, Women and Human Rights Law, and the literature of non-violence. Faculty in a variety of departments such as English, history, Spanish, and sociology may teach these courses in the future. Students make up the rest of their major by taking courses from the curriculum which focus on the particular themes of their major.

Events
The Peace and Justice Studies program sponsors its own events and contributes to many other student-initiated events on campus. Last fall, the Program brought to campus a Guatemalan activist working to prevent rain forest destruction. Later in the fall, the program hosted a lecture by the Albania ambassador to the United Nations on the humanitarian costs of conflict in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo. We also contribute to a wide range of events concerned with social, economic, and environmental justice throughout the year.

Wintersession in India, January 2009

Every other year, the Program holds a Wintersession in India course during January. Last time, the topic was Grassroots Development and the Gandhian Legacy. This trip provided a wonderful opportunity to examine Gandhi's principles of non-violent action, to see important places in his life, and to visit several cooperatives now following the Gandhian ideals. For more information, please contact Soraya Andrade-Winters, x2685.

• Wintersession in India flyer brochure (PDF document)