Universities as Embedded Peace Infrastructures: Lessons from Mindanao

Higher Educational Institutions in the Peace Landscape: An Introduction

This briefing positions higher educational institutions within the broader peace and conflict landscape as key public institutions that shape how peace is produced and sustained over time. Peace is increasingly understood as a social and structural condition shaped by everyday practices, norms, and institutions (Galtung, 1969; Lederach, 1997). From this perspective, universities contribute to peace through shaping political and professional actors, supporting inclusive citizenship, and providing spaces for dialogue across social divides. Existing scholarship identifies several ways higher education contributes to peacebuilding in practice, including social reconciliation, human capital formation, and knowledge production that shapes how societies understand and respond to violence (Barakat & Milton, 2015; Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Cole, 2007). Across these debates, higher education emerges as a peace-shaping institution whose influence operates through social interaction, institutional capacity, and epistemic authority.

Recent work further highlights how universities operate within environments shaped by conflict, political crisis, and social fragmentation. These studies show how higher education institutions engage peace through teaching, research, civic engagement, and institutional resilience while navigating pressures from state authority and fragile governance structures (Millican, 2017). More recent work highlights how universities contribute to peace through community engagement, human rights activism (Gready & Jackson, 2025), and engagement with local knowledge systems in conflict-affected contexts such as Somaliland (Ali et al., 2025), Gaza (Hager et al., 2025), and Syria (Tozan & Mouselli, 2026). Building on these insights, this briefing conceptualizes how universities embedded in conflict environments contribute to peace through everyday institutional practices. In doing so, the briefing shows how universities in conflict environments function as socially grounded institutions whose everyday academic practices generate sustained forms of peace engagement often overlooked in conventional peacebuilding frameworks.

While existing studies often focus on universities implementing formal peace programs or donor-funded initiatives, the Mindanao experience highlights how peace engagement can emerge organically from the everyday functions of universities embedded in conflict-affected societies. Drawing examples from universities in Mindanao, this briefing advances the argument that higher education contributes to peace through a distinctive institutional culture grounded in the trilogy of academic functions: teaching, research, and community extension. Peace engagement is enacted as part of everyday academic responsibilities, expressed through sustained interaction with conflict-affected communities and the provision of practical forms of social support. This orientation is rooted in the historical mandate of Mindanao universities, beyond knowledge production, to promote national integration and address violent conflict in the southern Philippines (see Cali-Pascan, 2026). The region's long history of armed conflict and political transition provides the broader context within which these practices unfold. This briefing maps how universities operate in this unsettled environment and conceptualizes their contribution as institutional proximity peacebuilding, where universities function as embedded peace infrastructures through long-term social presence, relational accountability, and everyday institutional engagement in conflict-affected settings. The Mindanao case illustrates how peace engagement emerges from routine academic responsibilities rather than specialized peacebuilding programs or externally funded projects.

What Universities Do in Conflict Settings: On Institutional Proximity Peacebuilding

One of the less-examined roles of universities in conflict-affected settings is their function as frontline social institutions during periods of violent conflict and mass displacement. During the 2017 Marawi siege, the 2011 Typhoon Sendong, and more recently following the MSU bombing in 2023, university campuses became evacuation centers, temporary shelters, and logistical hubs for relief operations. In Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology, academics, support staff, and students mobilized food distribution, medical assistance, psychosocial support, and coordination with local government units and humanitarian actors. Relief and emergency assistance are understood as part of the university's public responsibility, grounded in its role as a stable and trusted institution during moments of crisis. Here, peace engagement takes the form of immediate care and protection as universities respond directly to emergencies produced by violence and displacement.

Secondly, universities sustain peace engagement through long-term community-based training and capacity building. Faculty members conduct workshops on livelihood development, disaster risk reduction, peace education, governance, health, and environmental management across conflict-affected barangays. For example, Iligan Medical Centre College has been involved in relief operations, feeding programs, and psychosocial activities for displaced communities in Marawi City, while Northern Bukidnon Community College supports community-based learning and reading sessions for children in Indigenous communities in Bukidnon province. Universities also conduct trauma healing trainings for youth leaders conducted between 2018 and 2023 in the Lanao provinces and listening sessions with internally displaced persons following the 2017 Marawi siege. These engagements produce practical skills, strengthened local organizations, and enhanced community resilience. Knowledge is produced collaboratively and circulated through training modules, mentoring relationships, and informal learning spaces. Community engagement is oriented toward generating social value and addressing everyday problems faced by marginalized populations. Peace is enacted through the gradual accumulation of local capacities that enable communities to navigate insecurity, negotiate conflict, and rebuild social life under conditions of structural vulnerability.

Thirdly, universities function as convening spaces and relatively neutral platforms for dialogue among diverse social actors. Campuses host consultations, conferences, peace dialogues, and multi-stakeholder meetings involving community leaders, civil society organizations, military and police units, religious groups, and local government officials. For instance, the Institute for Peace and Development in Mindanao has conducted dialogue and collaborative sessions with members of the military following the Marawi siege, while Al Qalam of Ateneo de Davao University facilitates interfaith dialogues and peace education programs with Muslim and Christian communities. Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro has also been active in hosting peace forums and community dialogues linked to governance, displacement, and social cohesion. These spaces enable interaction across political and social divides within settings that carry institutional legitimacy and relative safety. Universities facilitate communication and provide intellectual and logistical support for collective problem-solving. Peace engagement is enacted through sustained relational work that supports dialogue, coordination, and mutual recognition among actors embedded in conflict-affected environments.

These practices reflect what we conceptualize as institutional proximity peacebuilding, defined as peace work undertaken by institutions that are permanently embedded within the social and political life of conflict-affected communities. Universities engage peace through everyday academic labor that unfolds within spaces of direct exposure to violence, displacement, and structural inequality. Their proximity enables sustained relationships, long-term commitments, and deep contextual knowledge of local struggles. Peace emerges from continuous interaction, care, and responsiveness to community needs, embedded within routine institutional functions. Institutional proximity peacebuilding captures a form of engagement rooted in physical presence, social embeddedness, and ongoing relational accountability within contested social terrains.

Earlier studies have documented how universities in conflict-affected environments contribute to peace through teaching, research, civic engagement, and institutional resilience. Millican's (2017) volume in particular illustrates how universities respond to conflict through activities ranging from curriculum reform to community engagement and institutional recovery. The Mindanao examples above resonate with these observations by showing how universities participate in dialogue, social recovery, and community support during periods of violence and instability. At the same time, the case presented here draws attention to how such contributions often emerge from the routine institutional responsibilities of universities embedded within surrounding communities. Likewise, the practices described here illustrate how sustained institutional presence shapes everyday forms of peace engagement among universities in Mindanao.

This model differs from conventional NGO-led peacebuilding in both organizational logic and temporal orientation. University peace engagement tends to be shaped by institutional mandates, professional roles, and long-standing relationships with surrounding communities, rather than by short-term projects or externally defined program cycles. Activities often develop incrementally through teaching, research, and extension functions that evolve over time and across changing political contexts. Forms of accountability are primarily linked to public service obligations, educational missions, and local legitimacy, instead of contractual reporting requirements or donor frameworks. Engagement is sustained through the routine presence of universities within conflict-affected regions, where academic work intersects with social and political life. Peace is produced through repeated, long-term interactions between universities and communities embedded in everyday institutional practices, demonstrating how universities become involved in peacebuilding through continuity and proximity, rather than only through formal intervention roles.

Tensions and Institutional Costs

The embedded nature of university peace engagement in Mindanao comes with real institutional and personal costs. Academics and support staff are regularly expected to respond to community needs during crises, facilitate dialogues, run trainings, and join relief efforts, on top of their normal teaching, research, and administrative work. In practice, many faculty members take on multiple roles at once, acting as instructors, researchers, community organizers, and informal peacebuilders. This expansion of responsibilities leads to heavier workloads, emotional exhaustion, and blurred professional boundaries. Peace work is sustained primarily through personal commitment and a sense of moral duty, instead of formal recognition or institutional support. As a result, much of the everyday labor that contributes to peace is carried by individuals whose efforts fall outside what is officially defined and rewarded as academic work.

These conditions place academics in structurally disadvantaged positions within institutional performance systems and help explain why research productivity (particularly in the social sciences) often differs from that of their counterparts in more stable contexts. Community engagement consumes substantial time, energy, and emotional labor, leaving limited space for sustained writing, thinking, publication, and grant development. Fieldwork in conflict-affected settings involves ethical, security, and psychosocial challenges that further slow research processes and disrupt academics’ research routines. As a result, faculty members who are deeply involved in peace-related community work frequently struggle to meet dominant benchmarks of scholarly output, especially those tied to international journals and citation metrics. This produces a structural tension where academics contribute directly to social transformation while being evaluated through performance standards that do not adequately reflect the time and labor required for sustained engagement in conflict-affected environments.

The structural effects of this contradiction are intensified by promotion and tenure systems that privilege research outputs over community extension. In Mindanao State University, for instance, faculty evaluation continues to follow an evaluation system developed two decades ago, where academic rank and promotion are primarily determined by the number of publications and research outputs, similar to many universities globally. While community engagement is formally included in performance frameworks, it carries significantly less weight in promotion criteria, workload allocation, and merit systems. Peace-related activities such as trainings, dialogues, and community facilitation generate limited measurable outputs within prevailing academic audit cultures, especially when compared to journal articles and research grants. This creates an uneven incentive structure where socially valuable labor remains institutionally marginal. Over time, faculty members internalize these hierarchies, facing trade-offs between responding to community needs and meeting career advancement requirements. As Ragandang (2022) noted, these conditions may also reproduce structural inequalities in global knowledge production, where academics working in conflict-affected regions of the Global South are evaluated using research metrics shaped by more stable academic environments.

These tensions point to the need for universities to update how they define and assess university work in conflict-affected settings. When universities are deeply engaged in peace and community work, existing promotion and workload systems do not fully reflect what academics and support staff actually do on the ground. There is an opportunity to strengthen institutional policies by giving community engagement equal recognition alongside research and teaching. This does not require creating new incentives but adjusting evaluation frameworks so that they better match the realities of socially embedded universities. Recognizing community engagement as core academic labor makes visible the time, effort, and expertise invested in peace-related work and helps align institutional governance with the everyday practices through which universities contribute to peace.

Implications for Universities in Postconflict Societies

The Mindanao case offers several implications for universities in other post-conflict societies. Across different contexts, higher education institutions are increasingly recognized as important partners in peacebuilding policy, working alongside non-governmental organizations, development agencies, and specialist peace actors. In the Mindanao case, this role is visible in concrete practices such as trauma-healing trainings, community-based teaching, and university-led dialogues that bring together military actors, civil society, and displaced communities. This is further reinforced through curriculum design. Across the Mindanao State University system, a required three-unit course on Mindanao history and peace education is integrated into all degree programs, alongside a foundational course on peace education introduced in recent years. In teacher education programs, additional coursework further embeds peace education, ensuring that these engagements are not episodic but institutionalized within formal learning.

The Mindanao experience suggests that universities can function as long-term peace infrastructures that sustain engagement across political transitions and shifting conflict dynamics. This points to the need for funding models and partnership strategies that support long-term, continuous engagement rather than short-term, project-based interventions. Integrating higher education more fully into peacebuilding policy supports more relational, context-sensitive, and institutionally grounded approaches to conflict transformation. However, these practices are not one-size-fits-all. Their effectiveness depends on specific historical, cultural, and institutional conditions, including the nature of local conflict, the composition of university communities, and the degree of trust in higher education institutions.

The Mindanao experience also offers critical lessons for researchers from outside conflict-affected and politically fragile societies. Academic research can sometimes treat communities as sites of data extraction, where local knowledge is collected and translated into scholarly outputs that circulate mainly within academic spaces. In contexts of ongoing conflict and displacement, this raises ethical questions about researchers’ responsibilities toward the communities they study. The Mindanao case illustrates an alternative model in which research is embedded in long-term relationships, where outputs include not only publications but also community capacities, training modules, and sustained partnerships. This challenges dominant research models that prioritize data extraction and publication over reciprocity and social responsibility. Research ethics cannot be reduced to procedural approval from institutional review boards. Ethical engagement requires sustained social responsibility, reciprocity, and contributions that address the material and emotional gaps (not only literature gaps) of the communities involved. Scholars working in such environments occupy positions of relative privilege and therefore carry obligations to support local capacities, share resources, and participate in forms of care that extend beyond knowledge production.

Seen from this perspective, the Mindanao case provides useful empirical insights for understanding how peace is sustained in conflict-affected societies. It points to a model of peacebuilding grounded in ordinary public institutions that are embedded in everyday social and political life. Universities illustrate how peace can emerge through routine academic work, institutional proximity to communities, and long-term social relationships. This form of peacebuilding tends to receive limited attention in dominant theoretical and policy frameworks, which often focus on specialized peace actors and externally designed interventions. In this sense, peacebuilding is not limited to formal programs but is embedded in the routine functions of universities, where relational work accumulates over time. For peace and conflict scholars, this invites greater analytical attention to public institutions as sites of everyday peace production. For policymakers and practitioners, it suggests the value of recognizing and supporting institutional forms of peace work that operate through continuity, social presence, and practical engagement within contexts of protracted and unresolved conflict.

Conclusion

The Mindanao experience points to several concrete implications grounded in how universities operate as embedded and routinized peace infrastructures. First, funding frameworks should enable universities in conflict-affected settings to sustain long-term engagement, including flexible, continuous support rather than short-term project cycles. This reflects the reality that peacebuilding in university settings emerges from repeated and sustained interaction, rather than time-bound interventions. Second, promotion and performance systems within universities should formally recognize sustained community peace work as research-equivalent academic labor, particularly where engagement requires significant time, emotional energy, and institutional resources, and should be recognized as part of formal academic responsibilities rather than additional or voluntary labor. Third, research ethics frameworks should move beyond procedural approval and incorporate principles of reciprocity and social responsibility, requiring researchers to demonstrate how their work contributes materially while supporting sustained relationships and local capacities over time. These shifts would better align peacebuilding policy, academic governance, and ethical research practice with the realities of socially embedded universities in conflict-affected societies.

In conclusion, this briefing has shown that universities contribute to peace in ways that extend beyond formal peacebuilding programs or specialized interventions. Through teaching, research, and community extension, higher education institutions engage directly with conflict-affected communities and become embedded within the everyday social realities of violence, displacement, and recovery. These include teaching practices, community engagement, and crisis response mechanisms that bring diverse groups into sustained interaction. The case examined here highlights how peace is produced through routine academic labor, institutional proximity, and long-term relationships with local actors. These practices do not replace conventional peacebuilding efforts, but they complement them by sustaining social stability and practical support over time. The Mindanao case demonstrates that peacebuilding does not always require new or externally driven interventions, but can grow out of the routine functions of universities when these are sustained, relational, and institutionally embedded.