Students receive training for understanding peacekeeping scenarios – University of Reading
09 January 2003Understanding Peacekeeping Scenarios
Bruce Newsome has some unusual ways of teaching university students: he's made them pretend to be terrorists trying to kill Western expatriates; he's made them negotiate for the lives of hostages; and now he plans to give them a few hours to rescue refugees in a war zone.
The scenarios are not real but simulated. Whilst militaries have used training simulations for years, academia has traditionally found no use for such practical methods - academia is concerned with intellectual skills, right? But Bruce Newsome - Lecturer on Terrorism and Security at the University of Reading - thinks that students get a better understanding of even the most abstract concepts when they are embedded in realistic challenges. Bruce thinks that in the future the vast majority of lectures and seminars will incorporate some form of experiential training.
During the evening of Friday January 17th and all day on Saturday January 18th, Bruce puts over 60 students from the University of Reading's Graduate School of European and International Studies through their toughest challenge yet - a simulated Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia. Spread over 15 teams, they will have to cooperate with each other and negotiate with role players in order to rescue an unknown number of survivors of an alleged atrocity, whilst also resolving their competing secondary objectives.
They must achieve all this with only a map, a radio to talk with their field units, and their collective talents. Their field units will be nervous; the refugees will be distrustful; the local militia will be recalcitrant; and headquarters may become confused. But they must still learn to work together whilst remembering their intellectual training. How do nationalist groups behave? What sort of evidence does an International Tribunal require? How do decision makers achieve multilateral cooperation when the bullets are flying?
This simulation and previous press reports are described at the following website:
www.consequenceconsulting.com/experiences/peacekeeping_sim.htm
For further details, please contact Sue Rayner or Carol Derham