The dynamics of the contemporary, complex, interconnected and highly-charged international environment present new challenges for scholars, policy analysts and decision makers, both at the international level and in the context of the Middle East.
This situation is especially relevant to the Greater Middle East and the Mediterranean region, which are fraught with chronic tension, cleavage and conflict among (as well as inside) their national entities, and which face several acute social and economic crises.
Against this backdrop, the new graduate program in Diplomacy Studies is intended to elucidate the role of diplomacy as a main vehicle and mechanism for systematically addressing the broad cluster of issues that impinge upon the entire region, and which can no longer be effectively dealt with exclusively from a narrow unilateral or bilateral vantage point.
The program is primarily intended for practitioners who are employed in a range of public and private international, transnational and multilateral organizations, as well as for future diplomats, researchers, and interested academics abroad and in Israel.
This focus on the role of collaborative diplomatic mechanisms is designed to provide students with new insights, concepts and analytical tools for fully understanding the enhanced functions of diplomacy in this new setting. The program is intended to enable students to identify effective solutions to a broad range of political, cultural and economic problems with which they will be faced and be continuously involved (both regionally and globally) as bureaucrats, officials and decision makers, in the context of an array of complex negotiating situations and points of decision.
The one-year program is taught in English over three consecutive semesters from October through August. Exceptional students wishing to apply to the thesis track will need, upon acceptance, to submit a research thesis within one year of completing their coursework.
A thesis is required for those students planning to continue on to doctoral studies in Israel, which is normally completed in the year following the completion of coursework. Students who complete their thesis later than one semester after the completion of their coursework, may be expected to pay an additional fee as detailed by the Graduate Tuition Authority.
Upon completion of the program, students will be awarded an MA in Political Science, with a specialization in Diplomacy Studies from the School of Political Sciences and the Division of International Relations