Program Overview

As crime becomes increasingly transnational, its causes can no longer be viewed solely through the prism of local circumstances. Understanding criminal justice and social conditions on a global scale is now vital to stopping the proliferation of crime and injustice.

UB’s Master of Arts, MA in Criminal Justice and Human Security degree program, is designed to help you attain expertise in the worldwide political, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions that contribute to crime and its attenuation. Our program will help you gain insight into the cultural, ethnic, religious and ideological differences often discovered at the root of criminal acts, violence, and terror.

Among some of the in-depth topics covered in this program: domestic, international, and comparative criminal law; transnational crime; cybercrime, and cyberterrorism—all taught by experienced faculty from UB’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Human security, as it relates to modern threats such as terrorism, human trafficking, and ethnocentric violence, will also be explored.

This broader understanding of human rights and its connection to history, global policy, international peace and security, and humanitarian affairs provides a strong foundation on which you will be able to draw correlations and build solutions towards a safer world.

Learning Outcomes

Our Criminal Justice and Human Security (M.A.) graduates will:

• Demonstrate the skills necessary to excel in professional careers in federal, state, and international law enforcement agencies where intercultural communication skills, foreign language skills, and insights into other cultures are increasingly important both to address criminal activity and to take needed steps to prevent it
• Demonstrate an understanding of and appreciation of the rule of law, law enforcement’s role in the securing and protection of civil and human rights, and an understanding of the social conditions and circumstances that foster or discourage criminal behavior
• Demonstrate an understanding of Human Security and its role in the realization of a just and lawful society and the impact that this understanding of security has upon the existing notions of national, regional and international security
• Demonstrate the intercultural literacy skills needed to relate to an increasingly globalized population where norms and values may differ
• Demonstrate an understanding of the role of non-state actors in international crime and justice, in such fields as norm creation, deviance, terrorism, and crime prevention
• Demonstrate an understanding of the interpretations of religion, ideology, and culture that contribute to the proliferation and/or the deterrence of violence and crime