The Centre for Peace Studies is a research and co-ordination project in Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Inspired by the conference Higher Education for Peace ( May 4-6 2000), dreams, ambitions, and hopes for such a project saw results when in November 2001 The Norwegian Parliament awarded two million Norwegian kroner to establish a national and international centre for Peace Studies. In the assignment letter from The Department it is stated that "the Centre is to establish new competence within the field of peace- and conflict-studies, and within such areas as ethnicity and democracy-building. The centre is to have a co-ordinating role for the field, both nationally and internationally."

1. Master of Philosophy (M.Phil) in Peace and Conflict Transformation (MPCT) - The programme has an international recruitment of students, with a mixture of students from Nordic and non-Nordic countries. All literature, teaching, and student work will be in English.
   
   During the programme students are expected to acquire the ability to analyse - and improve their capacity to handle and propose solutions to - complicated conflict formations at different levels of society. The programme takes an interdisciplinary approach, covering a variety of mandatory courses which student can combine with elective courses and specialisations in various fields, such as Peace and Identity, Peace and Globalisation, Peace and Health, Peace and Gender, Peace and the UN [United Nations], Peace Education and Nonviolence, and Human Rights, in addition to courses in research methods. During the first year, teaching will be intensive, with an emphasis on course work, group work, papers and oral presentations, and discussions.
   
   The overall theme of this MPCT programme is the problem of violence and violence reduction. The programme at Tromsø has been designed to provide the student with knowledge and training on the causes and consequences of violence, and of problems, circumstances, and relations which may increase the possibility of violence. In addition, students will exploring possibilities for violence reduction under varying circumstances. Although this gives an explicit value-direction to the course of study, the scientific requirements of explicitness about assumptions and methodology, inter-subjective verification of findings, and validity of conclusions are the same as in other human and social sciences.