Cultural Strategies for Peace: culture and creativity as catalysts for conflict prevention and post-conflict reconciliation

Expected Outcome

Projects should contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• Organisations active in diplomacy, culture, research (including SSH disciplines), and education gain insights into the strategic importance of culture, including cultural heritage and the arts, in the contemporary geopolitical context. They understand better how culture can be manipulated, instrumentalised, and even destroyed, to fuel conflict, and how culture, the arts, and tangible and intangible cultural heritage contribute to conflict prevention, reconciliation, preparedness, security and sustainable peace.
• Public authorities, international organisations, NGOs, and society benefit from the empirical knowledge base derived from extensive case study collection, analysis, and evaluation, and from the identification of patterns and best practices, offering adaptable models for integrating culture into sustainable peacebuilding, conflict prevention, preparedness and post-conflict reconciliation.
• Policymakers receive evidence-based recommendations and guidelines for innovative, sustainable peacebuilding strategies working with culture and aligned with EU principles and values.
• Mechanisms fostering ongoing collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are established, to ensure sustained progress in culture for security, foreign policy, and sustainable peace, and to support continuous advancement and integration of knowledge beyond the projects’ conclusion.

Scope

Rapidly evolving geopolitical dynamics place the EU amid escalating conflicts and emergent crises, requiring an innovative approach to security frameworks, foreign policy, and peacebuilding strategies. R&I actions can develop groundbreaking solutions for the future, fostering innovative approaches to security and foreign policy. Integrating culture, including cultural heritage and the arts, into these frameworks could contribute to long term peace and stability by preserving community identity and history, enhancing communities’ preparedness to crises, facilitating dialogue, reconstructive learning, reconciliation, and social cohesion. International cultural relations need to adapt to contemporary and future challenges by leveraging innovative strategic approaches to culture to facilitate dialogue, promote mutual understanding, and address socio-cultural disparities fuelling conflicts. The arts and culture offer unique avenues for expression, communication, and trust, transcending socio-political barriers and fostering non-violent strategies for social change, while supporting the preparedness of citizens in case of major disruptions.

Addressing the innovative role of culture in conflict prevention, security, preparedness, resilience, and post conflict reconciliation calls for a fully interdisciplinary approach, drawing from a rich variety of disciplines.

Since 2016, the EU has established a policy framework for international cultural relations heading towards a comprehensive strategy[1] and initiating pilot projects, preparatory actions, and flagship initiatives alongside numerous ground projects. The European External Action Service Concept and the Council Conclusions on the EU approach to cultural heritage in conflicts and crises (2021) emphasize integrating cultural heritage protection into broader security and peacebuilding frameworks. Proposals should map relevant actions and initiatives led by European institutions, international organisations, individual States, and civil society organisations in Member States and Associated Countries, including those from partnerships in international cultural relations. Analysing these initiatives will build an empirical knowledge base, serving as models and inspiration, and provide insights into different approaches under various circumstances, enhancing understanding of what works best for specific purposes, as well as identifying gaps.

To pursue the expected outcomes, proposals might, by way of example:

• Identify successful approaches to integrating cultural heritage as a strategic asset into foreign policy and security frameworks. Explore the potential of cultural heritage as common ground for conflicting parties, contributing to social fabric reconstruction and long-term stability in conflict-affected regions. Examine intangible cultural heritage and traditional knowledge as sources for peacebuilding strategies, fostering people-to-people connectivity, cooperation, and trust.
• Explore strategies and approaches at the intersection of art and culture, emergency management, and community resilience, with a view to increase preparedness before, during and after crises.
• Collect and analyse case studies of peacebuilding initiatives involving cultural and creative expressions and the arts, including bottom-up practices.
• Analyse current policies to identify gaps and opportunities for integrating culture and peacebuilding into security and development frameworks. Develop policy guidelines and frameworks to help policymakers incorporate cultural strategies into peacekeeping, security and social development agendas.
• Explore digital technologies for enhancing cultural exchange and dialogue in peacebuilding. Explore the imaginaries, narratives, and metaphors currently prevalent in the AI sector, and consider how the development of AI systems could be enhanced to better support cultural diversity, intercultural understanding, and ‘digital humanism’ to promote peace, safety, and fairness.
• Develop metrics for evaluating the impact of cultural initiatives on peacebuilding, preparedness, and conflict resolution. Conduct empirical studies to measure long-term benefits of these programmes on economic stability, social cohesion, and well-being in conflict-affected areas.
• Investigate how culture can be manipulated, instrumentalised and exploited to provoke conflict, including the tactical use of cultural identity and cultural appropriation to incite tensions. Investigate how cultural heritage of troubled pasts can be approached, providing new insights on how co-existence narratives of the past can contribute to reconciliation, reconstructive learning, and mutual understanding. In this respect, complementarities with topic HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-08 might be sought.
• Collect and analyse good practices related to leveraging cultural heritage, culture, and creativity to address societal challenges such as fragmentation, polarisation, rising extremism, migration, the refugee crisis, and regional and local tensions.
• Investigate how intersectional factors such as gender, age, citizenship, and socioeconomic status affect participation in and outcomes of cultural peacebuilding initiatives. Assess the differential impacts on various demographic groups and develop strategies for inclusivity. Evaluate the role of cultural institutions and practices in restorative and transformative justice.
• Conduct longitudinal studies to assess long-term effects of cultural interventions on community resilience, social cohesion, and economic recovery in post-conflict regions. Identify key determinants of sustainability of cultural peacebuilding efforts and consolidate understanding of how to sustain peace once achieved.
• Investigate the link between culture, cultural heritage, and sustainable economy, examining their effects on post-conflict recovery, reconstruction and sustainable peace. Conflicts damage local economies, leading to exploitation of natural and cultural heritage for sustenance. These activities, often illegal, may generate quick profits but undermine long-term economic stability.
• Establish sustainable collaboration mechanisms to ensure continuous engagement among key stakeholders, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, including in diplomacy, promoting robust and long-lasting exchange and cooperation.

International cooperation, as well as synergies with the Jean Monnet project HER-UKR: Challenges and opportunities for EU heritage diplomacy in Ukraine[2] are encouraged.

The Commission encourages projects funded under this topic to seek complementarities for stronger impact. Proposals should, to the extent appropriate, build on existing knowledge, activities, and networks, notably the ones funded by the European Union, in particular under the Horizon Europe framework programme[3].

[1] European Commission, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council “Towards an EU strategy for international cultural relations”, Brussels, 8.6.2016 JOIN (2016) 29 final; Council conclusions on an EU strategic approach to international cultural relations and a framework for action (2019/C 192/04).

[2] https://www.kuleuven.be/her-ukr.

[3] Where applicable, proposals could leverage the data and services available through the research infrastructures included in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and the ESFRI roadmap and those federated under the European Open Science Cloud, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).