Violence and sustainable development: the role of the university

Abstract

This paper is an essay that resulted from reflections on sustainable development and its connections with university extension programs and violence. The paper discusses the four extents of sustainable development - ethical, temporal, social, and practical and the ethical principles of sustainability, essential for a culture of peace. It proposes a new praxis in the university to reevaluate the institution departmentalization, in order to open space for the construction of a cross-disciplinary environment which will produce graduates prepared for a sustainable future. It introduces an extension program of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), which studies violent behavior and acts to decrease the problem effectively. The work concludes that it is the university's role to educate professionals according to sustainable development values, prepared to act in an ethical and responsible way concerning natural and human resources, capable of understanding and interacting with the complexity of problems such as poverty, social inequities and violence, which threaten human rights and the future generations.