Centre director Prof Kevin Clements said the donor, a prominent Auckland businessman, was a very humble man who did not want personal recognition.
''He is really committed to peace and peace education and thinks we need to direct far more of the world's resources to ensuring the 21st century is a century of maturity, rather than a century of slaughter as the 20th was.
''His wife is a graduate of this university and both of them feel that Otago is the right place for this National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies,'' Prof Clements said.
The money was given to ensure the centre had a permanent lecturer in peace education and to support the extension of a postdoctoral fellowship on the economics of war and peace.
The centre had received significant support from donors in its four-year history, which was a ''vote of confidence'' in the work it did, he said.
These donations had allowed the centre to expand from one professor, a personal assistant and no students to five tenured faculty members, one postdoctoral fellow, a centre administrator, 25 PhD students, 13 master's students and 19 postgraduate diploma students.
The centre was always open to further financial support from benefactors and hoped to eventually support a staff member dedicated to arms control and disarmament.
''There is not a single person dedicated to arms control and disarmament in the whole country, which rather puts a question mark on the robustness of our anti-nuclear stand,'' he said.
