Carolina Munin

Driven by a deep personal commitment to social justice, dignity, and peaceful coexistence, Carolina has spent more than fifteen years working at the intersection of humanitarian response, peacebuilding, and human mobility across South America. Born and raised by physicians in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, where inequality and exclusion are part of everyday life, her understanding that oversimplified stories often become a source of fear, exclusion, and violence developed early and has shaped both her personal choices and professional path.

Trained in International Relations and Humanitarian Action with a special focus on international protection, she has devoted the last decade to working for forcibly displaced and stateless people. Her experience in Colombia alongside conflict affected indigenous, rural, and urban communities profoundly shaped her understanding of “how peace is built”: even in the most adverse circumstances, social fabric finds its way to reconstituted itself in the shape of community-based protection networks. These field experiences were closely intertwined with her academic work, as her master’s thesis focused on exploring how communities resist cycles of violence through solidarity and collective action.

Since 2019, Carolina has been part of UNHCR’s Multi-Country Office in Argentina, where she leads community-based protection strategies, supports refugee-led organizations, and promotes meaningful participation and peaceful coexistence between refugees, migrants and their host communities. Guided by the conviction that forced displacement is not only a humanitarian challenge, but also a deep social and political process shaped by conflict, inequality, and power relations, she believes peaceful coexistence and inclusion require the ability to listen to multiple voices, to sit with contradiction, and to remain open to perspectives that challenge one’s own assumptions.

Confronted with the growing limitations and credibility gaps of the international protection system, she is driven to become a Peace Fellow to strengthen her analytical, research, and policy design capacities, particularly in conflict resolution and public policy. Looking ahead, she aspires to combine applied research, teaching, and practice towards more inclusive, critical, and human-centered approaches to human mobility so that community-based initiatives which have always inspire her work can also become more sustainable.