Lasting Alliances: Experiencing AUP’s Partnership with the Sorbonne
A signature part of AUP’s Master of Arts in International Affairs, Conflict Resolution and Civil Society Development is engagement with outside experts and institutions. From onsite learning and fieldwork at the International Criminal Tribunal Practicum in the Hague to projects alongside France’s top trained diplomats and military officials through the intensive Ecole de Guerre Practicum, students are pushed to build skills and apply theory beyond the classroom.
Since 2008, AUP's MA students have had the opportunity to develop these capacities in a cross-cultural community of scholars through AUP’s partnership with the world-renowned University of Paris I-Sorbonne. Every year in this two-year, bilingual program, AUP master’s students who meet the B2/C1 DELF level of French enroll in four graduate-level Sorbonne courses. They take oral exams and travaux dirigés, or small-group tutorials, right alongside their French colleagues. At the same time, a handful of Sorbonne students who are proficient in English enroll in AUP modules through an exchange that enriches both student bodies.
By learning two languages and studying across two universities, AUP students experience different educational systems and engage with subjects from distinct vantages. As Professor Susan Perry, Program Director, explains, it’s an invaluable opportunity to “see France from the inside. You have professors who are teaching political sociology, and you're having them teach it during a semester of rioting, for example; or when you're seeing the gilet jaunes, you're getting the French explanation of the gilets jaunes, not the Guardian or the BBC, or the New York Times telling us how to think about the French. And these French professors are also writing editorials for Le Monde and Liberation …and occasionally for the Figaro. They're influencing public opinion while they're teaching about what's going on.
This political science, it's current. It's a window into French thinking as events are happening in France.
Through this cultural and educational immersion, the AUP-Sorbonne partnership provides MA students with an outstanding opportunity to gain a pluralist perspective, along with the robust skills and network needed to build future civil society alliances and promote peace and social justice at the community, national and international levels.