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Announcement
Post graduate studies
School year 2006/2007
Call for application
Application deadline: June 1, 2006

Applied Conflict Transformation Studies – ACTS programme is designed for people who want to develop skills and wider competences they need to build greater peace and justice in their own communities and countries.

ACTS programme in the Balkans is part of global ACTS programme and is implemented in East Africa and South East Asia. In the Balkans ACTS is result of cooperation among three partner organizations: Nansen Dialogue Network, Respond to Conflict and University of Novi Sad.

ACTS is two year course and completion of it will result in Master's degree.

Throughout the first year of the course, participants will be introduced to the Action Research methodology and will have the opportunity to engage in it through small research projects. The second year of the course will also consist of three modules, which will focus on one major Action Research project.

The learning modules are:

• Building the foundations: Theories of conflict, conflict transformation skills and action research methodology
• Conflict, Power and Change: Engaging with Actors, Systems, Structure and Policies
• Designing and Facilitating Conflict Transformation Processes
• Action Research
• Building theory from practice
• Action Research results and taking it forward

It is desirable that participant com from different ethnic groups but there is no racial, ethnic, religious or gender restriction to participants in the ACTS programme. Since participants and tutors will be of different nationalities and the reading list is in English, the course will be held in the English language. That is why it is a prerequisite for all participants to be fluent in English.

All participants will need to be familiar with the basic elements of conflict transformation, probably through having attended a course on this or related topic.

Organizations interested in the aforementioned field are invited to support their employees, financially and in any other ways as knowledge and skills offered by ACTS will bring them certain benefit in their future work.

If you are interested to apply for the course, please visit ACTS web site at www.globalacts.org or send your information to Nansen Dialogue Centre e-mail: acts@sezampro.yu .

Nansen Dialogue Centre,
Partizanske avijacije 11,
11070 Novi Beograd,
Serbia and Montenegro
Tel: +381-11-30-17-024
Fax: +381-11-30-17-029

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT ACTS

ACTS is a world-wide collaborative initiative which is developing innovative MA courses in Conflict Transformation Studies in regions affected by intractable conflicts.

ACTS is for people actively working on critical social issues, including peacebuilding, conflict transformation, reconciliation, rights, development, the environment.

ACTS has been developed to enable participants, and through them their organisations and communities, to:

•  learn from the work that they are already involved in
•  develop and articulate the experie nc e that they have from working in the fields of peace, human rights, democracy and justice,
•  enable individuals and organisations to be more effective and sustained in their work,
•  provide an environment where the voices of experie nc ed practitioners can feed into global discourses on key issues.

Why is the ACTS course different?

Each course is based within a regional centre.
This means that each learning group will be composed of participants from within that particular region, and the course adapts to take into account the context of the participants.

Each course is taken part-time over two years.
This means that participants can work and study at the same time.

The course focuses on the actual work of the practitioner.
Participants will use action research methodology throughout the course to learn from, explore and create new theory based on the work they are involved in.

The ACTS programme is currently on offer in the Balkans and SE Asia, and is under development in Eastern Africa and Western Europe.