welcome
We are delighted to invite the peacebuilders of the world to come to our second annual Canadian School of Peacebuilding. This comes out of a dream of creating an energizing place where practitioners, students, and scholars from around the world and from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds can respectfully gather together to deepen their practices of peacebuilding. We offer courses from local, national and international peacebuilders, which will benefit a wide range of NGOs, practitioners and learners of peace. We invite you to join this community of engaged peacebuilders from around the world.
Canadian Mennonite University, through Menno Simons College (our campus at the University of Winnipeg) and through our Shaftesbury Campus, is said to offer the world’s largest undergraduate program in peace and conflict studies. Drawing from this area of strength, and from a deep commitment, rooted in Christian-Mennonite history and theology, to respectfully practice peace in difficult places in the world, the Canadian School of Peacebuilding offers opportunity for dissimilarly rooted peacebuilders from around the world to come together to learn, to share and to practice peace. I invite you to join us.
Introduction
How do we support and sustain the imagination and genius needed to shift from cultures of violence to cultures of peace? How do we equip people on the ground to act courageously for peace? How do we resist the temptation to make things bigger, more complex and more violent? How do we cultivate the daily practices that move in the opposite direction?
These are the challenges of peace as set out by Albert Einstein. These are the challenges of peacebuilding the annual Canadian School of Peacebuilding has been designed to address.
The Canadian School of Peacebuilding (CSOP), a program of Canadian Mennonite University, has been created to serve practitioners, professionals, activists, students, non-governmental organizations and faith-based groups engaged in peacebuilding. Its goal is to serve peacebuilders around the world by bringing them together in a collaborative learning community, nurturing and equipping them for various forms of peace practice and exposing them to some of the most significant, emerging ideas and teachers in the field.
This second annual Canadian School of Peacebuilding will be held at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) in Winnipeg, MB, from June 14 to July 2, 2010. Three 5-day sessions, each with two or three courses running concurrently, will be offered for academic credit or for professional training for practitioners.
Learning Community
The CSOP is a learning community of diverse peacebuilders who come together to learn, network and engage in peacebuilding. This requires respect, curiosity and a broad range of connecting points for both students and faculty.
The CSOP is hosted by CMU, a Christian university that is rooted in the historic Anabaptist tradition of peace, justice and service. Drawing on our 480-year faith-based peace tradition, we want to create a space where people from different backgrounds and perspectives can connect in positive and respectful ways—learning together, supporting each other and creating networks of engaged peacebuilders.
The CSOP is for peacebuilders from all faiths, countries and identity groups. The CSOP community is shaped by this ethic of respect and collaboration.
Canadian School of Peacebuilding would like to thank our collaborating partners:
Canadian Foodgrains Bank
Congregational Peacebuilding Partners
Mediation Services and Resolution Skills Centre
Mennonite Central Committee Canada
We also thank our sponsors:
Africa Peace and Conflict Network
CAUSE Canada
Center for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, Rutgers University
Centre de ressources sur la non-violence
Conscience Canada
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Institute for Community Peacebuilding
Institute for Theology and the Church
La Maison de l'Amitié Student Residence
Mediation Northern Ireland
Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies
Physicians for Global Survival
Project Peacemakers
And our Cooperating Academic Programs:
The Centre for Peace Studies, McMaster University
Justice and Peace Studies Program, Creighton University
The Lion and Lamb Peace Arts Center, Bluffton University
Peace and Conflict Studies, Bluffton University
Peace and Conflict Studies Program, University of Colorado at Boulder
Peace and Justice Studies Program, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary
The Peace Studies Program, University of New England, New South Wales, Australia
Please click here for more information about our sponsors.
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It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein