Teaching Peace Informatics: Reflections from Lectures and Exercises

Conflicts in cyberspace do not longer constitute a fictional scenario of the future. To gain a better understanding of how such conflicts are carried out, interdisciplinary research and teaching building on both computer science and peace and security studies is indispensable. Even though numerous established courses and textbooks exist in some disciplines, this does not apply to their intersection. This chapter (This chapter has been published as a paper (in German): Reuter et al. (2022)) reflects on the introduction of the interdisciplinary course “Information Technology for Peace and Security” for students of Computer Science, IT Security and Information Systems at the Technical University of Darmstadt and Peace and Conflict Research at the TU Darmstadt in cooperation with Goethe University Frankfurt. The challenges and solutions of interdisciplinary teaching are presented while the importance of this type of teaching is assessed.