Earlier this year, the Sydney Peace Foundation  separated from the University of Sydney after 27 years.

The Foundation existed under the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and awards Australia’s only international prize for peace.

The story of the Sydney Peace Foundation and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney presents a vision for what education for peace with justice could be.

The Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies was established at the University of Sydney in 1988 by Professor Stuart Rees, Dr Mary Lane and Professor Peter King.

At the University of Sydney, Peace and Conflict Studies sits within the School of Social and Political Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

The inaugural director of both CPACS and the Sydney Peace Foundation, Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees, spoke to Honi Soit about the history of the Foundation and the role of Peace and Conflict Studies. Since May 2025, Professor Rees sits on the Advisory Committee of the newly independent Sydney Peace Foundation.

Professor Rees described the unique interdisciplinary nature of Peace and Conflict Studies, saying, “It has to trespass into all sorts of fields of inquiry. So it doesn’t fit into a discipline, paradoxically, it can only be a discipline by not being one.”

Associate Professor Jake Lynch, director of CPACS from 2007-2016, said that Peace and Conflict Studies is a “value-explicit field of study, with a positive value of peace with justice”.

Describing its interdisciplinary nature, Professor Rees said he worked closely with the distinguished nuclear physicist Dr Gordon Rodley. Professor Rees said “Whether it was nuclear physics, poetry, the law, or history, you had to be a bit of a polymath to progress in peace studies.”

Professor Rees points to the scale of work undertaken by the staff and students of CPACS outside the university walls. Students went down to Port Botany during an industrial dispute to learn about worker solidarity.

He said, “Students spent time on the picket line to learn about labour, to learn about the rights of workers, to learn about the consequences of privatisation, to learn about the apparent power of trade unions.

“More was learned in a couple of nights huddled around fires with workers” than from just theory alone. Professor Rees aptly summarises the hollowness in educating students in Peace and Conflict Studies without active advocacy in the field as akin to “pretending you could talk about the slaughter of people in Gaza without confronting the cruelty of Israel”.

The Sydney Peace Foundation was established  in 1998, out of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, as a foundation of the University of Sydney to promote a “ collective voice for peace with justice”.

The Foundation awards the annual Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s only international prize for peace, recognising and promoting leading figures in social justice, peace, and human rights.

The Foundation also hosts events and panels, engages in public debate and partners with advocates in peacebuilding.

Past  laureates of the Sydney Peace Prize include Archbishop Desmond Tutu for his work as chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Xanana Gusmão, first president of East Timor; Irene Khan, secretary-general of Amnesty International; author and journalist Naomi Klein; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

In 2003, the Sydney Peace Foundation  awarded the prize to Palestinian scholar and legislator Hanan Ashrawi.

Ashrawi’s prize citation reads: “For her commitment to human rights, to the peace process in the Middle East, and for her courage in speaking against oppression, against corruption and for justice.”

Ashrawi is a moderate and principled voice. Her record suggests that she is nothing but a dedicated voice for peace: serving as Independent Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine; believing in co-existence between Jews and Palestinians; calling for an end to occupation of the West Bank; supporting the right of resistance; and being sceptical of US-led peace “processes”. Ashrawi served as a minister in Yasser Arafat’s second cabinet from 1996-1998.

Ashrawi was unafraid to challenge Arafat. In an  interview with Robert Fisk after Arafat’s death, Ashrawi said that over disagreements “[Arafat’s] advisers would come to me and say, ‘How can you speak to the chairman like that? How dare you criticise him.’ But someone had to”.

Ashrawi’s award  drew praise from previous Sydney Peace Prize laureates  Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Archbishop Tutu.

However, the Peace Prize jury’s unanimous choice to give the award to a Palestinian drew the ire of the Israel lobby who considered Ashrawi to be an apologist for terrorism. The Foundation and everyone involved in the Peace Prize — including then NSW premier Bob Carr, who presented the Prize — came under intense pressure from the Israel lobby to withdraw their support for Ashrawi.

Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, in his book My Israel Question, observes the vitriolic deluge that sought to vilify Ashrawi and writes about the personal backlash he received in publicly defending Ashrawi’s award.

Loewenstein  writes in Hanan Ashrawi and the Price of Dissent, first published in ZNet then the Sydney Morning Herald, that the concerted attack on Ashrawi was because Ashrawi is an articulate, moderate, Palestinian peace-maker. The attacks were designed “to delegitimise the Palestinian cause”.

Delivering the Peace Prize Lecture, Ashrawi made a powerful proclamation: “I will not be a broken or silenced Palestinian, especially when it comes to the cause of peace and I will continue to speak out against injustice and oppression everywhere and I will continue to relay my people’s message because I don’t believe peace is made by defeated people.”

In the following year, the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize was awarded to the esteemed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy. Roy, being a fierce critic of American imperialism and the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was suggested by American political orthodoxy to be unfit to be the recipient of a peace prize.

Roy wrote in her Guardian pieces  _The Algebra of Infinite Justice_ and  _Brutality Smeared in Peanut Butter_ a scathing rebuke of the US’ devastating incursion into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11: “The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world."

In the lead-up to the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize, Professor Rees  rebutted Roy’s detractors, stating that “to advocate peace with justice you have to be partisan on social and political issues” and that Roy “is painting a vision of justice and showing how it might be achieved”.

Professor Rees wrote that the ideal of peace with justice “is often perceived as controversial".

“The choice of a non-controversial candidate for a peace prize would be a safe option but unlikely to prompt debate or to increase understanding. Consensus usually encourages compliance, often anaesthetises and seldom informs.”

Professor Rees told Honi that after making the award to Ashrawi, while the “Foundation emerged from that year financially poorer, [they emerged] morally much stronger".

“We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘We won’t put up with this bullying. We won’t put up with this intimidation’.”

After 28 years of operation, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies was downgraded into a department in 2016. The University said that the Centre was restructured due to declining student enrolments and financial pressures.

The downgrade was opposed, not just by academics and students within these walls, but by prominent members of the public, including both federal and state parliamentarians from Labor and the Greens.

Labor parliamentarians, including Federal MPs Laurie Ferguson, Melissa Parke and Maria Vamvakinou and state MPs Lynda Voltz, Julia Finn and Shaoquette Moselmane wrote to the then acting dean of FASS, Professor Barbara Caine, saying “It cannot be good for our democracy and academic reputation to attenuate such voices.”

In a similar letter to Professor Caine,  Greens parliamentarians, including Mehreen Faruqi, David Shoebridge, Jenny Leong, Jamie Parker, Jan Barham and Jeremy Buckingham, defended CPACS, saying that it “has been instrumental in bringing to the public agenda many vital and controversial issues which do not make headlines in the mainstream media”.

In 2021, the Department was  closed altogether, with the Masters of Peace and Conflict Studies, alongside both Masters of Human Rights and Development Studies, merged into the Masters of Social Justice with the three specific disciplines offered as specialisations within the new degree.

At the time of the closure, the University said that the intent of the new Masters of Social Justice program was to “expose all students to units in human rights, peace and conflict and development studies” and that the closure of the Department had “no associated losses of employment or expertise”.

In response, Emeritus Professor in Political Economy Frank Stilwell, and former president of CPACS, Erik Paul, wrote an impassioned plea in Pearls and Irritations on the value of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Stilwell and Paul argued that the intent of the Peace and Conflict Studies program was “to be far more comprehensive and educationally imaginative than just crafting courses to generate income, which seems to have become universities’ driving goal”.

They highlighted advocacy campaigns such as Indigenous Reconciliation, Defend and Extend Medicare, West Papuan Liberation, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, and supporting Tamil Liberation.

Recalling what Professor Rees wrote, “to advocate peace with justice you have to be partisan on social and political issues”.

Stilwell and Paul called on USyd to reconsider and bolster the “continuation of existing research, advocacy and praxis projects, not to amalgamate it into eventual oblivion”.

After 27 years of operation, Auspiced under USyd, the Sydney Peace Foundation was separated from the University in May 2025, and became an independent legal entity. The University cited “growing separation between the objectives of the Sydney Peace Foundation’s mission” and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

The University said the Foundation’s Council voted to separate and the University would continue to support the work of the Foundation.

This drew fierce criticism from the Medical Association for the Prevention of War. In a letter to the vice-chancellor, Mark Scott, and dean of FASS, Lisa Adkins, president of MAPW, Sue Wareham, expressed strong concerns over USyd’s “waning commitment to peace”.

Wareham described the disengagement as an “ill-timed decision” at a time when Australia should be promoting peace and the importance of upholding international law. In Scott’s reply to Wareham, as seen by Honi, Scott said that changing governance requirements and priorities led to the eventual separation of the University and the Foundation.

This year’s Sydney Peace Prize is awarded to eminent jurist and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, “for a lifetime of advocating for fundamental human rights, peace with justice, and the rights of women”.

Judge Pillay is currently chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Commission handed down a report in September 2025 concluding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Judge Pillay said she is “deeply honoured” to accept the Peace Prize. She said: “This award is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who, across decades and continents, have stood up against injustice – often at great personal cost. It belongs to every survivor who found the courage to testify, to every human rights defender who remains steadfast in the face of threats and hostility, and to every young person who dares to believe in a better, more just world.”

In her career as jurist, Judge Pillay  defended anti-apartheid activists in apartheid South Africa until she was appointed as the first woman of colour to the High Court of South Africa in 1995 by Nelson Mandela. Shortly after, she sat as judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after the Rwandan genocide from 1995-2003, where she was president judge for the last four years.

Judge Pillay set an international legal precedent in the case of The Prosecutor v Jean-Paul Akayesu, where the ICTR ruled that rape and sexual assault is a component crime of genocide.

Judge Pillay served on the International Criminal Court from 2003-2008 before becoming UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2021, she was appointed as chair to the aforementioned UN fact-finding commission investigating war crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In an  interview with Politico, Judge Pillay emphatically states that “the international community need not wait for the report from a UN body like the commission. Third states have a duty under international law to not just punish genocide, but also to prevent genocide”.

Judge Pillay will accept the prize from Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore on 6 November at the Sydney Peace Prize lecture and award ceremony at Sydney Town Hall.

In conversation with Professor Rees, we reflected on what education for peace with justice means. Professor Rees views the closure of the Sydney Peace Foundation and downgrade of the status of Peace and Conflict Studies, as linked to the “[mis]treatment of students and the casualisation of the labour force” and symptomatic of a wider crisis in our universities.

Professor Rees described a vigorous atmosphere of student engagement and debate when he served on the University Senate, the highest governing body of the University.

“When the idea of introducing fees came up, there were huge student protests the same night as the Senate meeting. So there was a kind of open chemistry of questioning, of debate, to hold university management accountable.”

Professor Rees says the atmosphere of vigorous debate has declined over the years. In the end, he said that there is “no real place for an institution like peace studies or the Sydney Peace Foundation”.

Despite this change in atmosphere of the university, Professor Rees pointed to the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the USyd Quadrangle Lawns as an uplifting example of vigorous debate. He described the Encampment as “an encouraging feature of university life” and an example of a practical study in “peace and human rights”.

While the Foundation is now formally separated from the University and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies long gone, they both reflect a vision for what education for good could be like.

Judge Pillay says that while our world is in crisis, “marred by war, poverty, racism, and inequality”, she acknowledges the “voices for justice are louder, more connected, and more courageous than ever before".

“The path ahead is neither easy nor short, but it is a path we must walk together: with integrity, with compassion, and with determination,” she says.

There can be no retreat from peace with justice in our world in crisis.

Republished from the University of Sydney student magazine Honi Soit, 28 October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.