An online course on Peace Building and Pluralism for Academics was conducted as part of NPC’s Creative Youth Engagement for Pluralism (C-YEP) project.

Six one-and-a-half-hour sessions were held daily to share new thinking on issues of peace building in societies that face ethnic and religious tension. A group of 33 academics from the universities of Jaffna, Ruhuna, Sabaragamuwa and the Eastern university of Sri Lanka were capacitated through these online sessions.

The online training had a line-up of eminent local and international resource persons who shared their ideas and thinking including Neil Devotta, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University, North Carolina; Donald Horowitz, Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke Law School and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Oliver Richmond, Professor in International Relations, Peace, and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester; Vasuki Nesiah, Associate Professor of Practice at the Gallatin School at New York University and Dr. Malathi de Alwis, feminist scholar and activist at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.

NPC Executive Director, Dr. Jehan Perera, delivered the opening session.

The objective of the programme was to discuss theoretical and practical issues related to peace building globally and encouraging participants to incorporate the learning into work undertaken through the C-YEP project with university students.

NPC’s overall intervention, supported by GIZ, includes the capacitation of university students to raise their awareness on pluralism and positively influence public discourse on pluralism and inter community relations to strengthen peace building in Sri Lanka.