PEAC216 The Doukhobors

PEAC 216: The Doukhobors offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Doukhobors and their ongoing connection to issues of peace and conflict. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, this course analyzes the Doukhobor experience in light of what social scientists refer to as a social movement. Rooted in the religious turmoil of early modern Europe, that experience has situated this group within some of the most important political, economic, social, and identity-based tensions of the past 200 years. From this perspective, we assess how the Doukhobors reflect an ongoing effort to negotiate an alternative vision of modernity, that process of transformation that is expressed in forms including secularism, liberalism, the rise of the individual, the proliferation of capitalism, the growth of the modern state, and increasingly destructive technologies of war.