The University for Peace was established in 1980 by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, born from the conviction that lasting peace would need its own institution of higher learning—one dedicated not to winning wars but to understanding what makes them end for good. Headquartered on a campus built into a protected forest reserve outside San José, Costa Rica, UPEACE has spent more than four decades training people from over 120 countries in peace and conflict studies, international law, and sustainable development.
Chartered independently rather than folded into the UN’s regular bureaucracy, UPEACE has had the freedom to build a genuinely multidisciplinary approach to peace—treating reconciliation, human rights, environmental security, and governance as threads of the same work rather than separate specialties. Its graduate and doctoral programs draw practitioners already working in mediation, humanitarian response, and policy who want to deepen and formalize what they’ve learned in the field.
Why It Matters: Individual acts of peacebuilding matter, but so does having institutions dedicated to training the mediators, policy-makers, and truth-tellers who carry this work into governments, courts, and communities at scale—UPEACE has been doing exactly that since 1980.
