24 May 2023, Online - UNITAR’s Division for Peace is excited to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Peace and Justice at Brac University (CPJ) to promote peace and social cohesion in South Asia through tailored capacity building programmes empowering and elevating the voices of youth and women. The many overlaps of UNITAR’s and CPJ’s mandates create many avenues for collaboration and thus the formalisation of this partnership represents a promising opportunity to create impactful joint programming to support the peacebuilding efforts of underrepresented groups. 

Centre for Peace and Justice (CPJ) is a multi-disciplinary academic institute, which promotes global peace and social justice through quality education, research, training and advocacy. CPJ is committed to identifying and promoting sustainable and inclusive solutions to a wide range of global concerns and issues, including fragility, conflict and violence. The centre was established in March 2017 and joined the impressive cluster of other institutes and centres of BRAC University. Under the leadership of its Executive Director, Manzoor Hasan the centre has already achieved vast research, training and advocacy experiences in its three thematic areas (1) Peace and Fragility (2) Social Justice, and (3) Open Society. 

UNITAR’s in-depth understanding of the CPJ’s goals and thematic areas combined with its innovative learning approaches, methods and tools enable UNITAR to be an effective partner in building the capacity of students within CPJ’s network to promote social cohesion and peace in the region. Currently, UNITAR’s Youth and Women Empowerment team is working closely with the CPJ to develop programming in areas such as women’s leadership for peace and youth empowerment as well as the scaling up of some of CPJ’s activities. Building on each other’s strengths, CPJ and UNITAR will work together to increase CPJ’s reach to its core target audience and expand its tailored capacity-building offerings for youth and women. 

UNITAR is optimistic that this newly formalised partnership with CPJ will allow for a multitude of innovative and effective projects and looks forward to a long-lasting and fruitful relationship