Summary

Ending Violence and Building Peace through Learning The Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (Kroc IPJ) launched in 2001 with a vision of active peacebuilding at the University of San Diego.

In 2007, the Kroc IPJ became part of the newly established Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, a global hub for peacebuilding and social innovation.

The core of the Kroc IPJ mission is to co-create learning with peacemakers — learning that is deeply grounded in the lived experience of peacemakers around the world, that is made rigorous by our place within a university ecosystem and that is immediately and practically applied by peacemakers to end cycles of violence.

Across all of our work, the core of the Kroc IPJ’s mission remains the same: to end cycles of violence in ways that advance justice for all. This mission is inspired by Sustainable Development Goal 16’s call to significantly reduce all forms of violence and to build more peaceful, just, and inclusive societies. The Kroc IPJ focuses in particular on situations where communities are suffering from politically, socially, and economically disruptive violence. This is violence that impacts whole communities or groups within a community, prevents communities from reach- ing other important social goals, and prevents individuals form living lives free of fear.