The UNESCO declaration on an International Decade for a Culture of Peace 2000-2010 and the UN Hague Appeal for Peace conference in 1999 triggered an active engagement for Peace Research and Peace Education among students and staff at the University of Tromsø. In May 2000, our Centre for Environment and Development, headed by its manager Håkon Fottland, arranged a conference called Higher Education for Peace. This conference demonstrated a lack of peace education, especially research-based and integrated peace education, in Norway and internationally. The conference revealed the great potential of many existing programmes and initiatives at all levels of education, nationally and internationally, and the international field of peace research presented itself to us as a very vigorous field of academic research, albeit one that was complex and not very well integrated.

 

In 1999, Rector Tove Bull asked the Faculty of Social Science to examine the possibility of starting a Master’s Degree Programme in Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, under the auspices of the Faculty of Social Science. The conclusion of the investigation, presented in January 2000, was positive, and in the course of the next three years our Master’s Degree Programme in Peace and Conflict Transformation was developed.

 

Simultaneously, Professor Ole D Mjøs, Chairman of the Nobel Committee since 2003, worked to realize a National Centre for Peace Studies / Peace Education at the University of Tromsø. His work was crowned with success when, in 2002, the Storting (Norwegian Parliament), at the direct initiative of Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, granted two million Norwegian kroner to establish such a Centre. As a result of this grant, and a further grant of 1.3 million kroner from the University of Tromsø, the Faculty of Social Science was also able to allocate the resources to complete the preparations for the Centre, and simultaneously begin the above-mentioned Master’s Degree Programme in the autumn of 2002.

 

We are very grateful for their generosity, but committed only to our academic and other responsibilities for Peace Research, Peace Education and Peace Work.