Potsdam, Germany (Jan. 28, 2016) – As part of a multinational effort to better educate national leaders on the nature of counterinsurgency (COIN), the Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC) is nearing completion of a COIN Curriculum, envisioned to find its way into classrooms of national defense universities worldwide.

Having begun the COIN Curriculum development effort in January of last year, the PfPC’s Conflict Studies Working Group, in collaboration with a multinational group of professional historians, has produced a draft defense education curriculum which is now underway with final review. The PfPC, in concert with NATO Allied Command Transformation, expects to begin distributing the curriculum to national defense universities and other defense education institutions starting in 2017. The curriculum is anticipated to play an important role in the education of government leaders, who are increasingly confronted with a security environment largely shaped by irregular warfare.

The latest COIN curriculum development review took place from 21 - 22 January and was sponsored by the German Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Armed Forces in Potsdam, Germany. The collaborative review included experts from the French Ministry of Defense (MoD), Hungarian MoD, the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA), the Baltic Defence College, and the U.S. National Archives & Records Administration (NARA).

COIN Curriculum development is the latest in a series of PfPC defense education curricula development activities, which also include the development of Cyber Defense, Gender Studies, and Countering Violent Extremism curricula. 

In June 2016 the Conflict Studies Working Group aims to produce a final draft COIN Curriculum in Paris, France, during a curriculum review event to be hosted by the French MoD.