Master of Arts in Armed Conflict and Peace Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last year I was asked to set out the chairs for a court-annexed mediation in a boundary dispute between two families who had not spoken in six years. The mediator wanted a round table, no one seated at the head, and the elders placed so that neither family appeared to have brought more supporters. It took me twenty minutes. The session itself lasted four hours and ended with a signed agreement on a fence line. I have thought often since about how much of that outcome depended on preparation that no one would ever record. That interest in the practical conditions under which people stop fighting is why I am applying for a Master of Arts in Armed Conflict and Peace Studies.

I studied History and Political Science for my undergraduate degree, graduating with Second Class Honours (Upper Division). My final-year research project gathered oral accounts from twelve residents of an estate in Nakuru about the displacement that followed the 2007-08 post-election violence. I interviewed shopkeepers, a retired teacher and two women who had returned after living in a camp. What struck me was how differently they dated the conflict. For some it began in December 2007; for others it began with land allocations decades earlier. Writing the project taught me to treat memory as evidence with its own patterns rather than as a flawed version of an official record, and to be careful about which voices a researcher chooses to quote. My supervisor encouraged me to compare my findings with the published report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, and I learned a great deal from seeing where national findings and local recollection agreed and where they did not.

For the past three years I have worked as a court clerk at a county law court. Much of my work involves land and succession files: registering pleadings, tracing missing documents, preparing cause lists and explaining procedure to members of the public who arrive confused or angry. I am not a lawyer and do not give advice, but I have become good at organising complicated files so that a case can actually move, and at speaking calmly to people who feel the system has failed them. I have also seen how small disputes over boundaries, inheritance and grazing can carry older grievances between communities. This has made me want to study how localised conflict connects to wider political violence, and what kinds of intervention actually hold.

My reading has followed these questions. Johan Galtung's distinction between direct and structural violence helped me put words to what my interviewees described, and John Paul Lederach's writing on building peace from the middle levels of society made me think differently about the elders and church leaders who appear in so many of the files I handle. I would like to test these frameworks more rigorously, especially against cases in the Rift Valley and the borderlands of northern Kenya, where pastoralist conflict, small arms and resource pressure overlap.

Outside work I coach a girls' volleyball team at a secondary school near my home on Saturday mornings. It has nothing to do with conflict studies, though it has improved my patience and my ability to plan a session around people who arrive with very different levels of confidence. I also help my mother keep the accounts for her small tailoring business.

I would bring to postgraduate study a research project carried out with care, steady experience of administrative work in a justice institution, and a habit of paying attention to the detail of how disputes are handled. I hope to develop a dissertation on the role of local mediation in preventing land disputes from escalating, and eventually to work in research or programme roles connected to peacebuilding in Kenya.