AESI UNIVERSITY COOPERATION AND PROCESS OF PEACE 2025
“UNIVERSITY COOPERATION AND PROCESS OF PEACE”
Prof Massimo Maria Caneva MD PhD
The International Community is facing a situation of global crises that are fundamentally due to a lack of strong leadership both at the level of international institutions and organizations, as well as for what concerns the governments of states that previously had an important role in defining common strategies to promote stability, security and peace.
The levels of action that we can identify in the international scenario regarding crisis management and prevention, both regional and global, are fundamentally related to their values of decision-making power of action that relate to them. A first level we can find at the level of the international organizations United Nations and European Union that seem to be organizations capable of directing analysis and action for peace and security in different continents and crisis situations. In reality, this is not true because it is the states that shape the international organizations. The United States, Russia and China among them! They have always been important players and even more so today when these same states are competing with each other to assume global leadership. Suffering from this are institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union that do not have a common policy of good governance of security and peace.
A concrete example of how true this is is how the UN Security Council is currently functioning. We see absurd spectacles in which each state tries to gain the greatest geopolitical consensus and power by humiliating and thwarting the other at the expense of a rule that is fundamental to the discourse of the United Nations and the creation of conditions for peace: honest dialogue and attention to the real issues that lead to a crisis. To have witnessed Security Councils with states that offend others, put up glass and do not care about the consequences of this attitude, neither is a very clear proof.
Another important aspect is the Military Peacekeeping Forces under UN or EU mandates that unfortunately suffer the damage of this lack of true international diplomacy that causes a disorientation of their operational actions in the various crisis scenarios. Just current example: UNIFIL. The soldiers of the UNIFIL peacekeeping contingent are completely disoriented due to the lack of geopolitical financial political strategies of both the states that are part of it at the institutional level and those that make up the realities of the Security Council that should guide their mandate. As a result, they are practically paralyzed in their status as powerless observers who fail to act as they should for example in controlling the accumulation of weapons or creating dangerous contexts in what concerns the confrontation between the two states whose peacekeepers they are.
At this point we have to ask ourselves what role the university can play in this context in which there is a lack of leadership, a lack of knowledge of methodologies to understand the deep roots of crises, a complete absence of adequate diplomacy that lays the foundations of its action on an analysis and effective action on the ground with adequately trained but above all highly motivated personnel. And it is time for the University to come out of its ivory towers and to mix in the needs in crises in international situations not by doing theoretical analysis from the window of its scientific laboratory, but to foster knowledge to train real experts, not like those we now have less and less connoisseurs of real real realities (today many university professors have never been to crisis territories and conform to journalistic knowledge)
Thus we find so-called war journalists at the top of institutions of bodies of associations of academic study realities in the international strategic geopolitical field. Journalists have become the cornerstone of university education because they are the only ones, and this is to their credit, who know the truth on the ground who know the dynamics, and they are joined by our military peacekeepers who know just as much about it. It is no accident that these professional journalists and UN military peacekeeping force commanders are called upon to lecture in our university courses in order to be able to give a minimum of concrete reality to what theoretically lecturers illustrate without knowing the real territorial dynamics of crises.
At this point I would like to elaborate with you on what AESI the European Association for International Studies is doing in this area both at the level of training upcoming diplomats and officials of international organizations and for the promotion of peace of dialogue in the different crisis areas with special reference the Middle East and the Balkans.
Concretely, I would like to start this exposition from programs already implemented not in a year two with theories more or less fu acquainted but with concrete facts in cooperation with peacekeepers with international diplomacy international organizations in the Balkans. Since the Dayton Accords we have initiated an important action of university cooperation which is different from classical international university cooperation (i.e. exchange of faculty and researchers for teaching and research). University Cooperation for Peace is an action and analysis of the causes and easy path of collaboration dialogue between various institutions engaged in resolving post-conflict or conflict. In fact, the University is one of the very few international actors that can promote new strategies and new analysis to be able to address current international crises.
We in Sarajevo thanks to the support of the military peacekeeping forces and the United Nations international diplomacy directed the various institutions to create a course in crisis management and state management in the aftermath of the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina torn apart by the drama of inter-ethnic and religious wars between Muslim Serbs and Croats. This action that is still going on originated from the University: I remember going to the commander of the peacekeeping forces taking it to the representative of the secretary general of the United Nations from the various ambassadors from the various rectors and together we created in the rectorate of the University of Sarajevo a course capable of dealing in depth train the new generations.
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The other example is that related to the Middle East in the practically now broken peace dialogue between Israel and Palestine. We have experienced with great effectiveness the possibility of bringing together the rectors of all Palestinian universities and all Israeli universities in one context of dialogue that is university cooperation for peace, with diplomats and international organizations from the European Union and the UN (UNTSO) to participate in this form of dialogue by supporting our visits and meetings in the various conflict territories. Certainly we are still after a good twenty years in the infancy of an official reality of collaboration however what we are experiencing at this moment especially expanding the discourse to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan we make these Five countries (I repeat Israel Palestine Syria Lebanon Jordan) a unity in a single Course promoted with funds from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that promotes dialogue between the various parties and is called Rome International Seminar for Peace. In its seventh edition next October 2025, it will be an example for many universities in the context of the Rectors’ Jubilee that we are preparing for this great event.
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Basically what I would like to convey to you is that urgent that you students together with the professors have a profound responsibility that the university cannot relegate to the “Third Mission” to be carried out (created to give academic power to some professors) but one and only one omission which is to bring peace international service the common good through the knowledge of truth conveyed honestly and possibly with that adequate training, delicate diplomatic training at the international level. This is not only a responsibility related to the international sciences to diplomacy to cooperation, but also the more technical sciences such as engineering such as medicine such as mathematics and physics. In a very personal dialogue with a Balkan chancellor of a very important university we confided in each other: many professors are closed in their scientific area don’t want to know about international responsibilities they think only about pure research and their own benefits. We can no longer need these lecturers that they stay at home instead of being in universities or occupying urgently needed spaces Lecturers and Students who must open themselves to international crises in the service of society and the international community with strong human motivation and professional competence.
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Photo : AESI President at United Nations in New York