University for Peace – Article sent to Other News by the author
Francisco Rojas Aravena will leave the rectorship of UPEACE on 31 October. Not because he was defeated, but because the Council that is supposed to govern the United Nations’ university was never completed. His farewell letter is an indictment of the paralysis of international institutions.
There is a thread linking the International Criminal Court under pressure, a UN budget in distress and a small university in the hills of Costa Rica. It is called the crisis of multilateralism, and on 19 October it claimed an unexpected casualty: the Rector of the University for Peace, Francisco Rojas Aravena, announced his resignation with effect from 31 October 2026.
Read quickly, the news looks like the end of a term. Read in full, it is something else. Rojas Aravena is not leaving because he lost an internal battle. He is leaving because the body that should oversee him, support him and, at the right moment, replace him, does not exist in its legal composition.
UPEACE was created in 1980 by General Assembly resolution 35/55, on the initiative of Costa Rican President Rodrigo Carazo. Its Statute provides for a Council of 17 members, ten of them appointed by the UN Secretary-General, and an Executive Committee of seven, with representatives of the Secretary-General, UNESCO, the United Nations University and the host country. Today those appointments are pending: in New York because of uncertainty over who will succeed Guterres, in Paris because of the change at the top of UNESCO, in San José because a new government is settling in. Three different reasons, one effect: the Council cannot take decisions.
The consequences are listed by the Rector himself, with a candour rare in institutional communications. Without a Council, “it is not possible to approve budgets, take note of the audits, approve new academic sites or promote emergency measures.” Not even the cuts required in a context of declining international cooperation can be formalised. A rector who can neither spend nor cut does not govern: he administers the waiting.
The paradox is that the succession process had already been written. At its XXVII meeting in Rome on 19 and 20 June 2025, the Council set the procedure for selecting the new rector, due to start in May 2026. That procedure never began, for the same reason: the members who should have run it were missing. Rojas Aravena’s resignation is the way to break the deadlock from the only side still able to move.
Hence the decision to entrust day-to-day management, from 19 October, to Vice-Rector Juan Carlos Sainz-Borgo, and to devote the final weeks to an orderly handover of the management reports. Once the Council is reconstituted, it will fall to it to ratify the appointment of an interim rector and reopen the interrupted selection. Rojas Aravena says he expects this “in full respect of the competences and timelines of the authorities involved.” It is the language of someone who does not want to force anyone’s hand, but has no intention of covering, with his own permanence, a vacuum he did not create.
The Rector also acknowledges that in recent weeks he has met staff, students and alumni, listened to criticism and taken difficult decisions that generated resistance. He does not hide it. He adds, however, that he cannot conceive of exercising the role without the full support of his colleagues. Those looking in this passage for an admission of guilt will instead find a precise conception of leadership: one leads with consent or does not lead at all.
What remains is the record of a decade, which the letter sets out without false modesty. Every master’s programme on the main campus accredited by SINAES and by European institutions. The Somalia campus inaugurated in September 2021, with the current Somali President among the university’s doctoral graduates. The doctorate in Leadership and Sustainable Development in Beijing since 2020. Around five hundred graduates of the Asia Peace Scholar programme with the Nippon Foundation and Ateneo de Manila. The Bucaramanga site in Colombia since November 2021, and a post-conflict master’s with the University of Cali. In Rome, the strand on artificial intelligence and peace, with a message from Leo XIV to the latest AI4Peace seminar; in Turin, the training of lawyers against organised crime together with UNICRI. With UNHCR and IOM, a humanitarian project that allowed hundreds of Central Americans to rebuild their lives.
It is the map of a university that did exactly what its mandate asked of it: bring peace education where conflicts are real. And that is now left without governing bodies, through no fault of its own, because the institutions that sustain it are themselves struggling.
The lesson reaches beyond Ciudad Colón. When the multilateral system stops making appointments, approving budgets and completing councils, the first to pay are the smallest and most exposed institutions, those without a ministry behind them. Rojas Aravena closes his letter with the university’s motto: if you want peace, work for peace. It would be worth someone in the corridors of New York, Paris and San José reading it as a reminder.