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The Programme
The three-month long South Asian Human Rights and Peace Studies Orientation Course of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) combines distance education and a direct orientation course. The programme is held each year. The Fifth Orientation Course will be held from 1 July to 20 September 2004. The course has two components - correspondence course from 1 July to 31 August, and a direct orientation course in peace studies to be held in Kathmandu from September 5 to September 20. Participation in both segments is compulsory for the selected participants.

Like the previous four courses held in Kathmandu in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003, the 5th programme will continue to explore the relation between peace in the region and the activism for democracy and human rights. The course reaches out to community leaders, social workers, human rights and peace activists, thinkers, researchers and academics, professionals engaged in the fields of law, medicine and media as well as persons engaged in formulation of policies for conflict resolution. About thirty participants are selected each year based on criteria related to human rights and peace activism and work in the area of peace studies. The course is participatory and involves intense course work, fieldwork and visual studies. Frontline activists and researchers on human rights, peace, and reconciliation share their knowledge and experience with the participants. This enables the participants to return to their workplace with an enriched and critical understanding on issues of justice and peace in South Asia.

The peace studies programme is participatory, and is built around several modules based on deliberative exercise over a variety of experiences. SAFHR's own experiences chronicled in its reports on its peace audit exercises, its work in sensitizing journalists on reporting conflicts and exploring norms for peace journalism, in research and advocacy for strengthening women's peace activism, its programme on minority rights and for developing policy inputs for better protection of refugees in the region, and finally its own direct work in defence of peace and justice in various areas of the region form a critical part of the peace studies course. These experiences are complementary to the lessons that frontline thinkers and activists on human rights and peace bring to the course. Together these two segments produce an enriched collective understanding of issues of justice and peace in South Asia.

The distance education or the correspondence program part

• The first two months of the program will be taken up by the correspondence course. From SAFHR peace studies desk relevant literature will be sent to the participants in phases electronically and by post.

• Participants will be required to study the reader on the basic concepts of human rights and the appraisals of their role and relevance in the shaping of 20th century history of South Asia.

• The course assignments, advice and consultations on the subjects of term papers, choices of the optional modules, preparations for workshops, and exchanges of views among participants and between participants and members of the faculty are some of the features of the correspondence part of the program. A core faculty comprising 6 resource persons, who will also act as country coordinators and tutors, will aim to make the correspondence program engaging. In coordination with the Peace Studies Desk, the core faculty will respond to all queries, comments and requests for guidance from the participants. SAFHR is planning to set up a Blog [web log] for all participants and the core faculty members to hold their course related discussions online.

• SAFHR's peace studies desk is also experimenting with the possibilities of helping the participants assimilate the issues and debatable assertions under various modules and also in digesting the collection of reference material in the Reader by providing them with concept notes, audio supplements and additional research guidelines. These supplements will be made available directly as well as through SAFHR's website.

• Preparations during the correspondence phase of the program will be crucial for the following 15-day direct orientation course in Kathmandu.

The Review and the Term papers

• Participants will have to write two papers: [1] A review paper discussing some of the basic concepts of human rights and their links to peace, discussed under the first compulsory module, from the perspective of their location within the human rights and peace movements in the region, and [2] a term paper on any compulsory module from 2 to 5 offered in the course. The participants will have to identify the module relating to which s/he wishes to write the term paper. The participant will consult the peace studies desk and the faculty on an appropriate theme and the relevant module and confirm it before June 30th.

• Guidelines for the term papers will be sent to the participants.

• The participants will write the two papers and submit them before they come to the 15 day direct orientation program. These papers will be presented and discussed in a workshop during the program in Kathmandu.

• The term papers will have to be revised on the basis of the workshop discussions and re-submitted within 15 days after the conclusion of the course.

• The term papers, typed in double space and submitted in hard copies by post, will not be less than 3000 words. Copies of the same will also have to be sent by e-mail.

Field visits:

• Field-visit(s) is/ are organised on any of the themes related to the course. Field visits are integral to the program.

• Information on the visit(s) will be provided to the participants beforehand.

• Each participant will have to write a report on the fieldwork for discussion during the 15 day program.

• These reports may draw from their earlier experiences of work on peace and human rights issues.

• The participants can constitute themselves into groups for the purpose of writing group reports.

Interactive sessions:
Peace studies course includes interactive "face to face" sessions between participants and frontline peace/ human rights thinkers and activists. These "face to face" sessions aim to expose experiential accounts of the ideas and experiments in peace and human rights activism in their myriad variations to intuitive interrogation by the participants.

Daily rapporteurs, course diaries and participants' seminars

• Two participants will daily be appointed as repporteurs to report to the desk their impressions, comments and suggestions on the program. They will be encouraged to submit their reports in writing.

• All participants will be encouraged to maintain daily course dairies briefly recording their day to day impressions, comments and suggestions.

• All participants will present their term papers in a participants' seminar, which is an integral part of the course. The details of the seminar will be notified beforehand. Every participant will have to comment on a fellow-participant's term paper besides presenting his/her own term paper.

• Faculty members will also join the seminars.
   

Public lectures

• Public lectures, followed by question and answer session, will be organised as part of the peace studies course in Kathmandu. Notices about the public lectures will circulated and publicized in advance.
   

Peace studies films

• Several peace studies film sessions, followed by discussions, will be held in the evenings during the course. The fifth orientation course will also experiment in new pedagogic formats with an audio-visual approach and the adoption of films, sound-tracks, and literary texts as the main instruments of appreciation and instruction.