Political leaders, including former South African President Nelson Mandela, South African judge and wartime prosecutor Richard Goldstone and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, have all walked the halls of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego.
The institute has seen its share of renowned leaders, delegates, military generals and Nobel Peace Prize nominees and recipients. It has been a place where men have come together to talk about the realities of world peace.
But it is also a center for women peacemakers to congregate and discuss peace negotiation strategies and share their experiences on the front lines. So it was perhaps fitting that the institute was the site for an international conference last month on gender-inclusive decision-making in regards to world peace. At the conference, officials also announced the formation of the only college in the United States dedicated to peace.
The Kroc Institute, which offers undergraduate courses under USD’s College of Arts and Sciences, will have its own dean by January, making it the first College of Peace Studies in the United States, says Dr. Dianne Aker, the institute’s interim director. The only other school of its kind is housed at Bradford University in England. USD’s institute is named after Joan B. Kroc, who presented the college with a $50 million endowment in 2003.
“It will be an amazing thing, and a great legacy for a woman that really cared,” Aker says.
Last month’s conference featured representatives from Croatia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sudan, Uganda and other countries. The conference was, in part, the result of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which passed in 2000.
“A really essential, basic thing happened,” Aker says about SCR 1325. “The resolution said that women should be at the peacemaking table, where decisions are being made that affect their lives. The women who are peacemakers come from the grassroots. They stayed in their countries and have done something in their countries that is absolutely transformational in giving hope for the people that they work with. They face tremendous odds in this process, whether its’ bombing or gunfire.”
