Turkey

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Field Work with Syrian Refugees

It has been more than a decade since the Syrian uprising began, and it has gone from being a nonviolent revolution to one of the bloodiest and most tragic conflicts the Middle East has known in modern times, with half the population of the country in exile and many hundreds of thousands dead.

This course will explore conflict management and mitigation in the context of this humanitarian disaster, including service to refugees, psychosocial care, and citizen diplomacy in a host country. We will explore the combination of skills and practices necessary to address short-term challenges but with an eye to the fact that most humanitarian tragedies of war are only overcome over extended periods and in ways that dovetail universal and longstanding trends of violence reduction. Violence reduction is associated by science with ideas, philosophies, and behaviors that promote empathy for all victims but that lead to concrete expressions of compassionate care for and solidarity with strangers; the empowerment of women in conflict situations; the establishment, promotion, and inculcation of laws and principles such as human rights that are universal; the promotion of areas of mutual benefit across sectarian, gender, religious and class lines in any given society; negotiation, conflict, and communication skills that promote compassion, self-control, moral reasoning, and the use of higher reasoning to tackle problems and struggles.

This is a service-learning course that brings students face-to-face with the refugee situation and the realities of the conflict on the ground.

We will address the general history of nonviolent resistance and social movements and the fate of nonviolence in the Syrian struggle. We will also look at the effect of outside actors and geopolitics on the direction of these movements. CRDC staff have over thirty years of research and practical experience with religious extremism, and we will examine the practical ways to cope with the externally- and internally-funded extremist realities that have profoundly altered the challenges of building peace in Syria.

Explorations will be made of goal-oriented and principled processes of coalition-building that focuses less on what or who is being opposed and more on the ethical practices of what can be built for the future, as well as an ethical approach to nonviolent social change that is radically inclusive in the process of building peaceful post-conflict societies.

The course will entail lectures by Dr. Marc Gopin, touring selected sites and various agencies, studying with CRDC’s Director of Interfaith Peacebuilding, Hind Kabawat, and engaging with activists and refugees.

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