By the time the panel closed, George A. López had been in Mexico City for a little over 24 hours—just long enough to start recognizing faces in the room at Universidad Autómoma de México’s (UNAM) Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (CISAN). But López has spent a career learning that peace work rarely starts with a grand gesture. It starts small: one conversation, one shared room, one day, sometimes just listening.
The Notre Dame professor was in Mexico City for the first edition of a seminar meant to become permanent: "Transnationalization of the Culture of Peace in North America.” This event was organized by UNAM's Coordinación de Humanidades together with CISAN, the Institute of Social Research, the Faculty of Psychology, the National School of Social Work, the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos UNAM in Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.
López participated in the panel, “University of Notre Dame: Years of Experience in Academic Peace Culture,” moderated by María Mercedes Salmon, Notre Dame Mexico’s director. Beside him, on a screen, was Erin Corcoran, executive director of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. This logistical arrangement reflects something about the work itself: peacebuilding across a border rarely happens only in one place at one time. Sometimes it requires meeting halfway and showing up however it’s possible.
Corcoran opened with the institute's origin story. Kroc was founded nearly 40 years ago, inspired by the shared vision of Father Theodore Hesburgh and its principal donor, Joan Kroc, in the shadow of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear proliferation. The earliest idea was to bring students from Cold War countries to Notre Dame to study alongside Notre Dame's own students, and see whether living and learning together could do what treaties alone could not. Peace, in those years, mostly meant the absence of violence. It took decades—and, Corcoran said, the accumulated experience of some 2,200 alumni now working in more than 100 countries—for that definition to widen into something more demanding: not just the absence of violence, but the presence of justice, reconciliation, and accountability.
López's own memory of the institute's first year carries the same lesson. In 1986, newly recruited to help build something that didn't yet exist, he ran an open workshop for any faculty member curious about the peace institute. An architecture professor came up to him afterward, delighted to have found what he called “people of the wicked problem”—his own field's term for questions with no clean solution. He explained to López that he taught students to build houses that hold on a hillside, houses that hold in sand, and houses that survive a hurricane. What nobody teaches is how to build a house that has to do all three at once. It was at that moment that López realized that peace studies was a wicked problem. The discipline dealt with injustice, violence, and militarism, all at once, and there was no clean solution. Nevertheless, this was no excuse to stop trying.
Peace studies, both López and Corcoran made clear, is not what it was when Kroc began. It now reaches into migration, corruption, the violence that crosses the US-Mexico border in both directions—problems too tangled to solve one discipline at a time. López offered the frame the Keough School now teaches under: integral human development, in which peace depends as much on economic and justice systems as it does on the absence of conflict. Universities, he said, tend to think in straight lines, but peace refuses that shape. It has to be built inductively, as you go, with a lot of trial and error.
The same issues apply close to home. What does a university owe the community just outside its gates, at a moment when violence is everywhere? Corcoran was unsentimental about it: Notre Dame doesn't sit on a hill in South Bend. Students don't need to travel abroad to see conflict or poverty—they can walk two miles down the street. López's answer was smaller still, and somehow more hopeful: tell whatever small stories of peace you have, and say them out loud. A reconciled friendship. A council that finally agreed to talk. Peace, he said, is not waiting to be found. It has to be created, one small anecdote at a time.
It is exactly that widened understanding of peace—built across disciplines and in every aspect of our daily life, tested against real violence—that Notre Dame brought into the room in Mexico City. And it is exactly what UNAM has been striving towards through PUCPAZ, UNAM's Programa Universitario sobre Cultura de Paz y Erradicación de las Violencias (University Program on the Culture of Peace and the Eradication of Violence).
The program, launched by UNAM's Coordinación de Humanidades, aims to counter the violence experienced across the country, particularly within the high school system. PUCPAZ rests on three pillars: mediation, gender perspective, and human rights. According to the director, peace is not the absence of conflict but a different way of resolving it, one where social violence is not the only option communities reach for when they disagree.
The Kroc Institute has spent nearly 40 years learning exactly what PUCPAZ is only beginning to discover: not just how to teach peace, but how to build an institution capable of teaching it well, semester after semester. Under López's own direction, Kroc's Summer Institute on Teaching Peace spent over a decade helping more than 100 universities across five continents go from wanting a peace studies program to actually having one. That is the collaboration this first seminar was quietly built to start.
María Mercedes Salmon closed the panel by thanking Corcoran and López for sharing not just their expertise but also their struggles. What had happened in that room, she said, was the start of exactly what PUCPAZ had asked for: two universities agreeing to keep teaching each other. The next exchange is planned for the end of the year. For an institution built on the conviction that peace moves forward one step at a time, the seminar had the only kind of ending that made sense. It was not a conclusion, but the first step of a much longer road the two universities will walk together.
Originally published by at mexico.nd.edu on July 29, 2026.