18 months
Duration
90
ECTS
English
Language
Overview
The purpose of the programme is to establish a specialized, holistic MA that links Strategy, Intelligence and Cybersecurity in an effective and balanced way, in order to offer both theoretical and practical knowledge and skills to postgraduate students.
The program is based on three pillars – strategy (in politics & business), intelligence and security – and is addressed to students of political sciences, economics, and journalism, diplomats, military, intelligence and law enforcement officers, as well as business executives, not only in Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and the Balkans, but worldwide. The ambition of the programme is to create the future leaders, both in politics and business.
The programme is in the discipline of political science generally and in the academic field of international relations and its subfield, strategy, in particular. It is characterized by multidisciplinarity since the academic faculty is coming from different fields, like International Relations, Strategic Studies, Comparative Politics, European Studies, Intelligence Studies, Business Studies, and Economics.
In this framework, the objectives of the proposed programme include:
- to provide to postgraduate students a generic approach of strategy, both in international politics and business,
- to describe the current strategic, geopolitical, and geoeconomic environment, with its trends, new challenges, threats, and opportunities,
- to thoroughly examine the uses and limits of intelligence, as well as its importance in decision making both in international politics and business,
- to define the concept of security, explore its dimensions and analyze the most important security challenges of the 21st century,
- to describe the evolution of European security and scrutinize its institutional aspects, as well as the most important problems, challenges, threats and opportunities for the Member States of the European Union for the 21st century, especially under the prism of pandemic (Covid-19) and the War between Russia and Ukraine, and their consequences for the European economy generally and energy security, in particular,
- to fully analyze the importance of cybersecurity as the fifth dimension of strategy, as well as its implications for international security in the 21st century,
- to assess the importance of leaders in world politics, and trace the most important characteristics of leadership throughout history (Themistocles, Pericles, Churchill, Napoleon etc.),
- to offer a holistic approach of the U.S. grand strategy, its schools of thought and their influence on several U.S. administrations, its goals, as well as to assess its effectiveness, and address its problems,
- to assess the evolution of Russian grand strategy, and to evaluate its goals and its means, as well as to assess its effectiveness, and address its problems,
- to analyse the development of Chinese grand strategy and asses its goals, and its means, as well as to evaluate its effectiveness, and address its problems,
- to offer to postgraduate students the main methodological tools in order to produce an exceptional dissertation.
The programme studies duration is 1½ year (18 months) and to qualify for the Master in “Strategy, Intelligence & Cybersecurity” each student will be required to complete 90 ECTS in total. There are “mandatory” and “elective” courses. The particular postgraduate programme, which is considered as “Academic”, is provided to students using the distance education methodology.
The programme is completed within three (3) semesters and each semester corresponds to thirty (30) ECTS. During the first semester of the first year, three (3) mandatory courses and one (1) elective course are offered, of 7.5 ECTS each. In the second semester the students should attend three (3) mandatory courses (including Research Methodology) and one (1) elective course, of 7.5 ECTS each. During the third semester the students are obliged to write a master’s thesis credited with 30 ECTS.