Innovative Illustrated Course on “United Nations and Conflict Resolutions” by Alexander Nikitin on Coursera

26 November 2021

The MGIMO Institute for International Studies and the School of Business and International Proficiency have designed and published lectures by Alexander Nikitin entitled “United Nations and Conflict Resolution”, setting a new innovative standard of illustrated courses and lectures for the Coursera platform.

Presented by Alexander Nikitin, Director of the MGIMO Center for Euro-Atlantic Security and Professor at the Department of Political Theory Department of the University, the analysis of UN peacekeeping missions and methods of resolving modern conflicts is accompanied by unusual and interesting illustrations developed by a group of electronic designers. They complemented the course with numerous fragments of historical newsreels, photo documents of political and military UN missions, field photos, live photocollages.

Since the course is in English, it is aimed not only at Russian undergraduate and graduate students and researchers, but also at international students at the Coursera platform. In some respects, Russian evaluation of UN, NATO, and EU operations and interventions in conflicts is at odds with the assessments of peacekeeping operations provided in the Coursera courses of Western universities.

Preparing the course, the author used his previous experience of creating electronic educational encyclopedias and libraries, including “Russian Civilization in Space, Time and World Context”, “International Policy of Russia and International Politics”, and “Conflictologist’s Library”.

The course is complemented by the textbooks written by Alexander Nikitin entitled “International Conflicts” (in Russian, published by Aspect Press) and “International Security” (in English, published by MGIMO).