It is with this in mind that this PhD Programme was created, focusing on three primary goals that have direct and indirect impacts on Peacekeeping Operations, amenable to provide a higher education platform for professionals to boost their knowledge on how to improve these Operations while elevating their skills and expertise in governance issues in general:

· Political, Military, Social, and Governance Factors: addressing their interplay, evolution, and relationship to sustainable peace;
· Coordination, Cooperation, and Integration: reviewing the role of each actor involved in Peacekeeping Operations, highlighting their actions, modality of work, interoperability or lack thereof; and
· Peace and Development: identifying principle thesis and their application to specific Peace Operations scenarios by engaging the candidates in coaching-on-the-job, simulation exercises, and applied research to sustain her/his Thesis dissertation.

PhD Candidates’ New Skills:

A major contribution of this PhD Programme to candidates is no doubt the opportunity it creates for them to learn about problems and obstacles faced by peacekeepers (civilians and uniformed personnel), to be exposed to field situations, including physical visits to the theatre of operations and role-playing on the ground, and to address and fine-tune their ideas, proposals, and thesis dissertations to real-life situations.

The wealth of distinguished professors made available by UPEACE also channels candidates to identify missed opportunities to make each actor’s action complement, follow up, enhance, or boost those of other actors. This will facilitate their quest to propose Mission adaptation to changing situations on the ground, notably when they are not sufficiently fast to accompany evolving trends. Pivotal to candidates will also be their increased ability to detect insufficient joint mission mandate communications with local authorities and partners, as well as misinterpretation and misimplementation of mandated activities across the pool of actors in the field.

PhD Candidates’ New Methodology:

Key risk issues in Peace Operations such as Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (S.E.A.) by both civilian and uniformed personnel are central to the PhD Programme, as well as the many possibilities of misuse of Mission Funds, particularly at the field level. Additionally, the Programme also offers an opportunity for in-depth assessments of the incapacity for integrated planning and action based on institutional turf, lack of coordination, cooperation, and integration within institutions, between them, and with local authorities. To this is added the absence of detailed scenario strategies to operate alongside “Other Security Forces” invited by Local Authorities (e.g., other countries and/or mercenaries) are addressed.

Moreover, methods to detect undefined client-oriented concerns and results-oriented actions, which are often part of reduced impact in Peace Operations, are also addressed in detail. So is the isolation of Mission components from Local Authorities at the political and logistical levels, and the lack of an “Exit Strategy“ galvanizing all actors towards increasing local governance, a sine-qua-non condition for sustainable development.

PhD Candidates’ New Eligible Backgrounds:

UPEACE, therefore, promotes the widening of the professions that study peace operations, which today is mostly focused on the political aspect of conflicts, or mostly concentrated on the SDGs issues as a separate issue from peace studies. This approach leverages the rich contribution that every profession can make to peace and development, but also to the often misunderstood relationship between peace and governance. Hence, a larger pool of experiences coming from a widened labor market might find interest in the PhD Programme which, at its core, forms candidates to address issues that also play at scenarios other than that of Peace Operations. Candidates will learn Transferable Skills which are also needed in other scenarios, thus giving them added value to contribute to the labor market.

This methodology chosen for this PhD Programme is daring, innovative, and future-oriented in its concept and implementation plans. It requires considerable work by UPEACEE to galvanize human, material, financial, and other resources from civilian, uniformed personnel and their equipment to a variety of actors at the bilateral (Individual countries and private sector), regional (inter-governmental organizations such as OAS, AU, LAS, OAS, ASIAN, etc) and Global Institutions (including the UN, INGOs, Foundations, and others).

PhD Candidates’ New Professional Frame of Mind:

In sum, this PhD Programme stands as a futuristic initiative to elevate higher education and applied research with the principle objective in mind to nourish higher learning in a way that wakes the candidates’ abilities to think in terms of a problem-solving, proposal-making, and solution-oriented frame of mind: the Programme helps UPEACE build the future today.