Pioneering a regional collaborative graduate program on human rights and peace in ASEAN

By the AUN-HRE SecretariatJanuary 2021Endorsed by the ASEAN Senior Officials of Education (SOM-ED) since October 2018, the initiative of the AUN-HRE to establish an ASEAN regional collaborative graduate program in human rights and/or peace was further approved by the SOM-ED and concretised by the AUN-HRE in 2020. The initiative is being supported by the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo.To implement the program, AUN-HRE, through its participatory and consultative process, held the first consultative meeting among all its members in August.  Eleven partner universities from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam expressed their interest to pioneering this joint initiative in developing such a collaborative program. The first series of consultations among 11 partner institutions began in November 2020, and concluded with a setting up of a task force, mandated to propose concrete recommendations regarding plan, goals and objectives as well as potential model(s) for consideration and deliberation of all partner institutions.AUN-HRE Task Force comprise eight members from five universities including the Secretariat.  The first meeting of the task force was held on 21st December 2020 to discuss, deliberate, and identify the objectives of such collaboration as well as a possible model to be formulated. The Task forced agreed on a list of objectives of the collaboration between universities to establish a graduate program on human rights and peace , that  the focus of the graduate program would be human rights and peace, and the model of the graduate program would be a joint degree where a new master degree program on human rights and peace would be developed. The Task Force emphasizes on interdisciplinary and futuristic nature of such a program.The next step would be to develop the curriculum for a master degree program on human rights and peace. In doing so, a survey regarding potential topics that should be included in the curriculum will be developed and circulated to the partner universities before the curriculum on human rights and peace would be drafted. The draft curriculum would be presented to the plenary meeting of all participating universities for deliberation.