Professors Without Borders

This page provides information about the founding members of PwoB, the mission, vision, objectives, and presently allocated responsibilities.

The Vision

·          To create a mesh structure network of expertise in Peace and Conflict Studies.  To this end, be the connecting hub in a star formation, serving as a conduit for a global relay of information and knowledge between and amongst academics and civil society.

·          To raise the level and quality of discussion, collaboration, and coordination within the international academic, activist, and other civil society communities, thereby forming a bridge between academia and society at large.

·          To encompass the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in the research discipline and promote intellectual understanding, overcoming the hurdles of limited common language, culture, and religion.

·          To create and provide appropriate institutional infrastructure and consistent assistance, and, where possible, financial support for collaborative academic research and knowledge transfer.

The Mission

The mission of Professors Without Borders (PwoB) is to contribute to the co-operative creation, strengthening, and development of expertise and collaborative experience towards the consolidation of a mesh structure between Peace and Conflict Studies researchers around the globe.  This comprises a dual relationship: one that connects academics on a global scale and one that links academics to civil society.

Professors Without Borders is more than a teaching exchange between North and South, it is an NGO that promotes academic excellence in developing world universities. PWOB aims to communicate and share knowledge with less developed universities, in order to foster a horizontal and mutual dissemination of knowledge for the greater academic community.

The Objectives

·          To promote increasing, sustained and global exchange between Peace Studies academics and activists in different countries and organisations, by developing joint research programmes, training structures and programmes, and dissemination strategies.

·          To offer an international, interdisciplinary, high quality education programmes by promoting research (and training) in the area of Peace Studies.

·          To foster the exchange of advanced students so as to develop a critical mass of inter-disciplinary comparative research expertise and access to significant human and practical resources for a better understanding of methodological approaches to research questions.

·          To generate sustained debate and exchange between policy makers, NGO’s, media professionals, activists and academics, in order to facilitate mutual understanding and an ongoing feedback between research, activism, knowledge transfer, and policy.

Executive Board

·          Alexander I Gray: President and Chief Education Officer

·          Marijke Keet: Chairperson and Chief Publications Officer

·          Victoria Fontan: Chief Scientific Officer and Treasurer

·          Fraser Gray: Chief Administrative Officer

Founding members