Peace Centres can be of many kinds and even be called very different things: centre, institute, association, foundation, observatory, departament, chair... and they can emphasise different objectives: peace, human rights, mediation, the culture of peace, the resolution of conflicts, justice, research into peace... These can all be generically called Peace Centres.

A Peace Centre is a public or private institution; regional, national or internacional, civil, religious, university, social, sectoral or of another type, whose basic aim is to contribute to the objective of peace in its most specific and local expression or in its widest, inclusive and universal sense, but always with a common characteristic: to achieve its objectives through at least one of the following channels: research, disseminiation and/or intervention (understood as any kind of assistance, mediation, or facilitation in a conflict situation).

We thus find Peace Centres that combine these three areas in a balanced way, others that just focus on research and spreading of ideas or those that simply work on direct intervention in a conflict situation. What happens is that all of them deal with the three fields to a greater or lesser extent, but it also happens that each of these institutions tends to specialise in one of them. Institutions of an academic nature or those related to the world of the University carry out research to a greater extent, foundations or other entities that are orientated towards very well-defined objectives mainly work on the spreading of ideas, and different international organisations tend to work in the area of mediation.