Peace Building Summer School Armagh

Program overview

The summer institute will focus on the enormous achievements of local activists and agencies in bringing Armagh to its current state of peace, through years of community dialogue, negotiation and with the formation of new institutions and processes.

Representing a chance for participants to engage with local peace-builders, this ten-day program aims to deliver mutual benefits for participants and locals. Students learn about the Northern Ireland conflict, get an intimate perspective of the methods and practices used to address this dispute and in dialogue with local practitioners, and critically evaluate their effectiveness in Northern Ireland and their utility in other contexts.

The program will be led by Professor Marie Breen-Smyth, a native of Northern Ireland who has written extensively about conflict in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The Institute’s faculty contains a range of experts and practitioners from Northern Ireland and the US and is organized in partnership with a consortium of Armagh community groups led by the  charity Diversity Challenges working on conflict resolution, reconciliation and storytelling . The local consortium will organize the logistics and participate in classes and visits. There will a mixture of local and international participants who are working on peace-building thus facilitating learning,  exchange of local and international perspectives and networking opportunities.

The ten-day institute will focus on the achievements of the past and the key contemporary challenges still facing peace-building in Northern Ireland:  dealing with the past and provision for victims: memorials; parading; flags and paramilitaries. The program will begin with a survey of the issues, with expert speakers on each topic and then focus in more detail on two of these issues: dealing with the past and parading.

Local participants can either stay in en-suite accommodation in the Charlemount Hotel or attend daily  and classes will be held in the hotel or on site at venues.  In addition, the program includes visits to Belfast, with a tour of the city’s peacelines and political murals.

Local participants can enroll for a dedicated Open College Network accreditation. The oragnisers have applied for funding for a number of bursaries and hope to be able to offer these to selected participants. This will be a competitive process and  details can be found on the application page on the web site.