Program Overview

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Peacebuilding and Mediation (MLitt) 2025 entry

Overview

Explore the relationship between formal and official peacebuilding and mediation initiatives and informal, unofficial, and community-based efforts.

Application Deadline

Thursday 7 August 2025

Starts

September 2025

Duration

One year full time

School

School of International Relations

Fees

• UK: £14,850
• Rest of the world: £29,990

Why Study This Course?

The programme showcases the School’s world-leading research strengths in the broad field of peace and conflict studies, including in peacebuilding and mediation of conflict.

Course Highlights

• The focus of this programme on peacebuilding and mediation ensures that the study of conflict focuses not only on violence, its actors, and modalities, but also on the different insights deriving from critical engagement with processes of peace.
• The programme is strongly influenced by postcolonial, feminist and critical theory.
• The programme locates and analyses both global and more local cases of peacebuilding and mediation.

Teaching

Delivered through lectures, tutorials, and seminars.

Assessment

A mix of coursework and exams.

Dissertation

A 15,000-word project with regular support from an assigned dissertation supervisor.

Modules

All Peacebuilding and Mediation students take two compulsory and two optional modules.

Compulsory Modules

• 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 Modules

• 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.

What It Will Lead To

Careers

The MLitt programme purposefully prepares students for career prospects in a variety of fields. Students who graduate from this programme can expect to go on to work in various professional fields, including:

• human rights
• law
• policy research
• NGOs
• charities
• international organisations
• civil service
• academia

Further Study

Many graduates continue their education by enrolling in PhD programmes at St Andrews or elsewhere.

Why St Andrews?

Alumni

When you graduate you become a member of the University's worldwide alumni community. Benefit from access to alumni clubs, the Saint Connect networking and mentoring platform, and careers support.

Entry Requirements

• A 2:1 Honours degree in Political Science, International Relations, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Geography, History, Sociology, English, Comparative Literature, or other relevant disciplines. If you studied your first degree outside the UK, see the international entry requirements.
• English language proficiency. See English language tests and qualifications.

Application Requirements

• CV
• personal statement indicating your knowledge of the programme and how it will benefit you (500 words)
• sample of your own, single-authored academic written work (2,000 words)
• two original signed academic or professional references
• academic transcripts and degree certificates

English Language Proficiency

If English is not your first language, you may need to provide an English language test score to evidence your English language ability. See approved English language tests and scores for this course.

Fees and Funding

• UK: £14,850
• Rest of the world: £29,990

Scholarships and Funding

We are committed to supporting you through your studies, regardless of your financial circumstances. You may be eligible for scholarships, discounts or other support:

• Snowdon Trust Masters Scholarship
• GREAT Scholarship
• St Andrews Sanctuary Scholarship
• St Leonard's funding opportunities
• Graduate discount (15% off tuition fees)

International relations scholarships