Outline

The Itinerant Master program trains the world’s future leaders.  It uses current approaches and models to illuminate a leader’s role—in theory and practice. A university in the United States of America will issue a Masters degree at the end of the program.

Initially, the program will bring together six students and an appropriate number of professors from each of four cities: New York, Buenos Aires, Paris and Geneva—the group studying for one semester in each city, over a period of two years. Each city, each country will offer the students and teachers in the group its own unique world-view.

Students and professors from other countries will be invited to join the four-city, four-semester group, their universities eventually becoming centers of study, in the same four-city model.

Philosophy

The course will include workshops focused on the future leader as a person, instilling in him the strategic thinking tools needed to confront a chaotic and complex world.

Gaining insight into the world in movement, into peace in movement and conflict in movement, the future leader learns that change is opportunity. He comes to see that chaos and the varying ethics of the world can be turned to the advantage of all. He learns “alterity” on a visceral level.

Alterity is political negotiation entered into with an eager desire to fully appreciate the “other” party’s heretofore unknown world, and political action taken that embraces that world. Without taking “his” world into account, we are merely making decisions for “him.”

For every context there is a strategy. The program analyzes context, allowing the student to expect the new context to give rise to new thoughts in him: the new context molds him as much as he molds it.

The Student becomes politically and socially militant in a world where compromise and integration are a priority. 

The program doesn’t just stop after two years; it’s a continuing process. Through subsequent intensive courses in different parts of the world, the Student will continuously refresh his grasp of the real, current world.

Structure

The Master’s Administrative Headquarters will be in Geneva, Switzerland, under the canopy of the Strategic Institute for Peace, Knowledge and Human Relations  created by Roberto Butinof in 1996—lovingly dubbed “Sermacavalta” (or “Ser-ma-ca-val-ta”) by Dr. Butinof, in affectionate brevity, using the first syllables of his five children’s names).
Students will work with professors in:
Buenos Aires, from the universities of . . . Buenos Aires, San Andres, Di Tella, and the National School of Defense (Argentine experts from other universities and institutions will also join our team);
New York, from the City University of New York, Department of Sociology, and by specialists from the United Nations, Columbia University, New School and other institutions;
Geneva, from the University of Geneva, experts from the United Nations and other non -profit organizations, such as the GIPRI;
Paris, from the University of Paris (specific department/s to be determined), IRIS, CIPRES and IFRI.

(From the list of participating universities and institutions for each country, teachers and other experts from the region’s academic community will decide which institutions offer a potentially fascinating vision of the world—from a unique perspective.)

Background

The Master program is the brainchild of ROBERTO BUTINOF, who currently teaches Strategy and International Relations at the School of Law at the University of Buenos Aires.

Now giving seminars and conferences three times a year on a circuit including New York, Geneva and Paris, Dr. Butinof has become a consultant to individuals and institutions, as well as to other professionals working in the social, political and humanitarian fields. To every city where Dr. Butinof lectures, and to his “home town” of Buenos Aires, individuals seeking greater success in their lives travel great distances to study with him.

The genesis of the ITINERANT MASTER program occurred in 1994, when UNESCO-PEER, wanting to create a strategy for peace, commissioned Dr. Butinof to evaluate their program in Nairobi (Kenya), Ngara (Tanzania), Kigali (Rwanda) and Mogadiscio (Somalia).
 
Prof. Butinof noticed two forces at work in Africa: a quest and a need. While politicians and other movers and shakers were trying to find concrete economic solutions to urgent calamities, the need for strategies to realize a defined future for each nation was being ignored.

Then, in 1996 Prof Butinof and a number of researchers and academics in Geneva created “The Strategic Institute for Peace, Knowledge and Human Relations “Sermacavalta(!).” The institute’s original thought was to create an integrated approach to world affairs. Its founders wanted to focus the world’s attention on the essential common need of inter-dependence between . . . the international, the institutional, the individual, and the family. The Institute wanted to construct a new form of knowledge, one responding to people’s individual needs.

This idea developed into the present program: the production of future leaders who, in their quest to serve every individual in a nation, are capable of adjusting opportunely to a chaotic and unpredictable world. These leaders may not be presidents or other highly-placed politicians, but they will be the decision-makers, the quiet firebrands of social growth. They will be in positions to propose viable models and strategies for international organizations, governments, political parties and social, humanitarian, educational and cultural institutions.