When I met Martin Ewi in the summer of 2000, I was a first-year director of the Kroc Institute, he a first-year graduate student newly arrived in the United States from his native Cameroon. He could be forgiven for thinking me “green” and fumbling in my new role; I must be forgiven for wondering how this polite, earnest and seemingly naïve African would ever make it in the uncertain world of international peacebuilding. Martin’s English was adequate; his academic preparation for Notre Dame rudimentary. Personable and relentless, he worked diligently and charmed any doubters. After a year of intensive study Martin seemed ready for the next step. The generosity of Mrs. Kroc enabled the institute to support his postgraduate internship in the Permanent Diplomatic Mission of what was then called the Organization of African Unity. Finding an affordable apartment for him within commuting distance of the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan was a challenge, but the estimable Anne Hayner, then coordinator of the graduate program, prevailed. I have a vague memory of crisis-management telephone conversations with Martin in the final days of his apartment hunting, during which he seemed to confirm my impression that we were sending a veritable babe into the fire.

Today Martin Ewi, a security policy expert, leads the African Union’s campaign to prevent terrorism. In November 2002, the Commission of the AU appointed him to head a new counterterrorism unit at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. In that position he works closely with the Peace and Security Directorate, the equivalent of the Security Council at the UN. Martin’s colleagues describe him as an accomplished analyst whose swift rise to a position of authority is explained by his dedication, drive and discipline.

Martin’s story, while memorable, is less the exception than the rule. The majority of young people, including the occasional forty-something youngsters who gain admission to the master of arts program at the Kroc Institute, are exceptional. Selected from a pool of applicants ten times the size of the class they will enter, most are multi-lingual and experienced in activism, research, politics or all of the above. At Kroc, they sharpen their analytical skills, immerse themselves in the literature on peace research, conflict transformation and strategic peacebuilding, set their field experiences in a broader comparative context and, not least, hone the practice of compassion and relationship-building by living in community with their fellow students.

From 1987 to 2003, each class raced through an intensive, eleven-month program. While rigorous and exhausting, the sprint was effective, if one is to judge by the results—that is, by the careers of, among many examples of distinction, Emil Bolongaita (’89), professional nemesis of governmental and corporate corruption in the Philippines; Cristian Correa (’92), human rights advisor to the Ministry of the Interior of Chile and, previously, executive secretary of the National Commission that investigated political torture and imprisonment during the Pinochet dictatorship; Oana-Cristina Popa (’96), Romanian ambassador to Croatia; Valerie Hickey (’00), Ph.D. candidate in environmental science and public policy at Duke University; and Brian McQuinn (’03), religion and conflict analyst at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Indeed, one could compose a multi-volume epic narrating the contributions and careers of the 388 Kroc masters of peace studies at work in 68 countries as educators, peace researchers, government and intergovernmental officials, leaders of civil society, members of the media, professional mediators, consultants to nongovernmental organizations, security experts, and relief and development specialists. Short of that, one might simply consult the rapidly expanding Kroc alumni web site, which records and extols the efforts of our transnational family of peacebuilders.

Can we claim these remarkable men and women as ours? In truth, no. These students come to the Kroc Institute with gifts, developing those gifts further after their all-too-brief sojourn at Notre Dame. But we have evidence from their own testimony that the Kroc Institute experience was and continues to be formative for a generation of professional peacebuilders.

What a vital resource for peace!

Potentially. In fact, the resource has been largely untapped. Yes, nearly four hundred talented men and women are graduates of the Kroc Institute, and most continue to dedicate their lives to causes such as reducing violent conflict, protecting human rights, fighting poverty and corruption and studying the conditions under which peace processes succeed. But they have labored for peace largely in isolation from one another. Apart from same-class friendships sustained over the years and miles, our formidable graduates have not experienced themselves as a collective, a peace and justice corps, a fellowship of like-minded practitioners and scholars, a network of Kroc- signatured peacebuilders. In a globalized world, where transnational communication and collaboration is taken for granted by successful entrepreneurs in one profession after another, this situation is unacceptable.

Fortunately, the situation is changing. Financial resources are enabling Kroc’s human resources to flourish. Three recent steps forward offer encouragement for the longer journey toward the dream of a fully functional Kroc global network—an unofficial but unmistakable practice and pattern of professional collaboration for peace across agencies, foundations, governments, universities and national boundaries. Such a network would represent the integration of local, national and transnational expertise in nonviolent conflict transformation that stands at the heart of strategic peacebuilding. Kroc can and will play a part—and perhaps lead the field—in this creative unfolding.

Our first step in realizing this aspiration was putting our own house in order. The appointment of Anne Hayner, longtime coordinator of the graduate program, as director of alumni relations signaled the seriousness of our intent. In her meticulous manner, Anne has set about the task of network-building by gathering information from and about our alumni across the world, posting it on our web site, creating a database, constructing charts, graphs and tables analyzing the data, putting people in touch with one another, recommending alumni award recipients and alumni visiting fellows, and planning events to bring graduates together in regional meetings. Before you know it, we will know ourselves.

As we get to know ourselves better, we are changing, not least by defining and communicating a Kroc “school” of strategic peacebuilding. The alumni network is one foundation of the emerging school, the expanded master’s degree program another. The two-year program was launched in 2004-05 to enhance Kroc’s capacity to integrate theory and practice, and to develop local expertise at several international sites. The program also provides students and faculty a living laboratory for observing and enacting multi-level peacebuilding, which is the strategic recruitment of partners and tapping of resources wherever they exist, from the local church to the global bank.

Defining our distinctive niche in peace and justice studies requires the development of Ph.D. studies at the Kroc Institute, a goal being explored by our senior peace studies faculty. Educating our successors in the professoriate and assisting them in securing faculty appointments is the way to plant the seeds of strategic peacebuilding in the United States and around the world. You will hear more about this initiative in the coming months.

Enlarging the circle of the “we” is the third step toward realizing Kroc’s peacebuilding potential, and we are just beginning to conceptualize the process. How do we reach beyond our graduate students, faculty and alumni further to broaden our influence? Whom do we invite to the peacebuilding party?

Over the past four or five years, Kroc has formed strong alliances with Catholic Relief Services, one of the world’s leading relief and development agencies. The benefits to CRS include the incorporation of our faculty into the agency’s growing peacebuilding education and training programs for bishops and country representatives; the benefits to Kroc include the incorporation of our students into the hands-on practice of conflict transformation, community building, social reconciliation and economic development “on the ground.” Not least, our students, as well as a number of our graduates, are introduced to, and some employed by, CRS operations in troubled spots from Nigeria to the southern Philippines.Other potential partners and participants await cultivation. As we think more critically about the shrewdest application of our resources, however, it will become increasingly necessary to make difficult choices about the expenditure of time and energies.

One choice seems clear: incorporate our undergraduates. Martin Ewi, here standing in for 387 of his fellow peace studies masters, would be delighted, I know, to be introduced to Tona Boyd. Tona, like Martin, stands out in my memory as the cream of the cream of the crop. As a junior she enrolled in my course “Introduction to Peace Studies” and immediately demonstrated both her uncanny knack for the subject and an iron will that would allow her to overcome any obstacle, including a first-time teacher of the subject. She survived that experience to become one of a perennially self-replenishing core group of undergraduate peace studies majors or minors whose talent and drive literally take our breath away. (You can read about a few of the current dazzlers—Quaranto, Collado, Corrigan, et al—elsewhere in this report.)

After graduating from Notre Dame in May 2003 with a degree in political science, Spanish and peace studies, Tona excelled in an internship at the Carter Center’s Human Rights office. In that capacity she traveled to Guatemala to help coordinate the establishment of an office for the center’s Human Rights and Elections Monitoring project; facilitated a conference on ways to apply international human rights norms in domestic courts; and assisted in planning a Human Rights Defenders Conference co-sponsored by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Last June, Tona came home to the network. She is a research assistant to the Kroc Institute’s renowned Sanctions and Security Project. Working with George Lopez and David Cortright, Tona masters a range of responsibilities, from editing chapters and articles and compiling reports on counter-terrorism and sanctions, to researching topics such as the effectiveness of United Nations sanctions. Her own work centers on the role human rights might play in formulating compliance standards for international counterterrorism norms.

When Tona becomes an international human rights lawyer, she will be an invaluable human resource for peacebuilding, Kroc style. By that time, Anne, Martin and colleagues surely will have the international Kroc network humming.

— Scott Appleby

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