By: Hafid Abbas
Honorary Doctor, Hartford Seminary (2008) and Co-Architect, Indonesia Study Center, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace (since 2025)
For decades, international university cooperation has often begun and ended with a memorandum of understanding. Universities exchange delegations, sign agreements, organize seminars and occasionally send students or professors abroad. Such partnerships have value, but many remain episodic. The real question for higher education today is whether international cooperation can move beyond exchange toward something more enduring: the creation of shared knowledge, shared capacity and shared responsibility.
The emerging alliance between Hasanuddin University (UNHAS) and Hartford International University for Religion and Peace (HIU) offers an opportunity to explore that possibility. Rather than becoming another conventional bilateral partnership, it could develop into a new model of Indonesia–US academic cooperation, focused on three closely related concerns that have become inseparable in today’s world: human rights, peace and conflict resolution.
The timing is important. Armed conflicts, forced displacement, religious polarization, climate insecurity and social inequality increasingly cross national boundaries. Universities cannot solve these problems alone, but neither can they remain observers. Their distinctive contribution is to educate people who can understand conflict before it becomes violence, defend human dignity when institutions fail and build dialogue where societies become divided. In this sense, the university is not only a place where peace is studied; it can also become a place where the capacity for peace is cultivated.
The proposed HIU–UNHAS cooperation could begin with a three-semester master’s program in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Resolution, offered online, in hybrid form and face-to-face. Its significance, however, would lie beyond the creation of another academic degree. Properly conceived, it could bring together law, politics, religion, culture, human security, mediation, reconciliation and peacebuilding, while connecting academic learning with the realities of conflict.
HIU and UNHAS bring complementary experiences to such an undertaking. HIU contributes an American and international tradition of peace education, interreligious engagement and conflict transformation. UNHAS brings the experience of Indonesia and the wider Global South, where questions of pluralism, reconciliation, development and social cohesion are lived realities rather than merely academic subjects. The relationship should therefore not be understood as one institution teaching another. Its greater promise lies in creating knowledge neither could produce alone.
A second component would be an International Certificate Program in Conflict Resolution for professionals who cannot commit to a full master’s degree. Diplomats, government officials, educators, community and religious leaders, journalists and civil- society practitioners often require practical skills in mediation, negotiation, dialogue and reconciliation while continuing their professional responsibilities. The proposed learning hubs in Jakarta, Bali, Makassar and Hartford could give this program an unusual character: Jakarta for policy and diplomacy, Bali for intercultural dialogue, Makassar for regional peacebuilding, and Hartford for international and interreligious engagement.
But the most consequential idea may be the third: using the alliance to build an international academic network.
Here the experience of the Cintana–Arizona State University model offers a useful lesson. Its significance is not that Indonesia should reproduce an American model wholesale. Rather, it demonstrates the potential of a network in which universities can share academic resources, faculty expertise, curriculum development, research and institutional capacity without losing their own identity.
HIU and UNHAS could adapt that principle to human rights, peace and conflict resolution. Instead of simply exporting their programs to other universities, they could help selected institutions strengthen their own curricula, faculty, research, digital learning and quality assurance. The objective should be capacity-building, not dependency.
This distinction matters. A successful international network should not make universities alike; it should make them stronger. A university in Indonesia should remain rooted in Indonesian society, just as a university elsewhere should retain its own cultural and intellectual identity. What the members share is a commitment to academic quality and a common purpose.
Such a network could begin in Indonesia and, over time, connect with universities across ASEAN and eventually the wider OIC, Non-Aligned Movement and global academic communities. But its success should never be measured simply by the number of institutions that join. The more meaningful measure is whether knowledge actually circulates, whether faculty learn from one another, whether research becomes collaborative and whether participating universities become more capable of serving their societies.
This points to a larger question about the meaning of internationalization for Indonesian higher education. Internationalization should no longer be understood simply as sending Indonesian students abroad or bringing foreign academics to Indonesia. It should become a two-way process in which Indonesian universities are both learners and contributors in global knowledge.
Indonesia has considerable experience to contribute. Its history of pluralism, democratic transition, community reconciliation and interreligious dialogue offers lessons that deserve international attention. The world should not come to Indonesia only to teach. It should also come to learn.
This is where Makassar and UNHAS can assume a distinctive role. Indonesia’s academic voice should not be concentrated only in Jakarta or in the traditional centers of global knowledge. Universities in the regions can bring different experiences and perspectives into international debates. UNHAS can become a bridge through which knowledge from Indonesia and the wider Global South enters a genuinely global conversation.
There is also a diplomatic dimension to this idea. Indonesia and the United States have developed extensive government-to-government, economic and people-to-people relations. Universities can add another layer: academic diplomacy. Unlike formal diplomacy, academic relationships are built through classrooms, research, intellectual curiosity and personal trust. They can endure political changes because they connect people before they connect institutions.
The deeper promise of the HIU–UNHAS alliance, therefore, is not the master’s degree or the certificate by themselves. It is the possibility of moving from bilateral cooperation to an international academic community. The master’s can educate scholars and professionals; the certificate can strengthen practitioners; and the network can strengthen universities. Together, they create a continuum from knowledge to practice and from individual capacity to institutional capacity.
At a time when the world is becoming increasingly fragmented, international academic networks have become more than instruments of higher education. They can serve as bridges of understanding between societies. They allow local experience to become global knowledge and transform universities from isolated institutions into communities connected by shared intellectual and human purposes.
The lesson of HIU and UNHAS may therefore be simple but profound: the future of international higher education will depend less on how many agreements universities sign than on how effectively they build lasting networks of trust, knowledge and cooperation.
From two universities to an international academic network; from shared knowledge to shared capacity; and from shared capacity to shared peace.
