Today’s world is so much focused on conflict issues. The Master’s degree programme in ‘Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research’ at Åbo Akademi University offers a profound understanding of peace studies concentrating on the deeply rooted causes of conflict.

Unlike other peace programmes, the programme at Åbo Akademi focus on the solutions, not only at the aftermath phase of conflicts. Combining an anthropological and a psychological approach, the programme helps to understand human behavioural reasoning for peace and aggression. It’s really interesting to know, though human beings are highly potential to a peaceful manner, how they are misrepresented as conflict-inherent.

The programme offers a wide choice of courses that are richly diversified in different areas of peace studies including new trends in peace and conflict studies such as gender, media, negotiation, and mediation while keeping a major focus on research methodology. As a student from Bangladesh with a Political Science background, the programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research was an opportunity for me to look at peace and conflicts through a new lens than politics.

I chose to study in Finland because of its world’s best education system and peaceful, secured environment to study. I was looking for programmes that were relevant to my background, but more specific and research oriented. I found that the Peace programme at Åbo Akademi provided a detailed outline of courses which were really intriguing to me.

Åbo Akademi, Vaasa campus offers a truly international atmosphere that not only helps one to come to know different cultures but also understand conflict resolution from different points of cultural context. Besides, staying in a small serene city like Vaasa, far from the crowd assist, gives the feeling that peace is not merely a concept, it’s a lifestyle as well.