Name: 1st Reconciliation Week
Start: 2025-11-24T09:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-11-29T14:00:00+01:00
Location: Leutragraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany

The JCRS invites you to join its 1st Reconciliation Week from Nov. 24th to Nov. 27th, 2025.
Its main theme is the groundbreaking research that social psychologists from Israel have produced on the subject of reconciliation. The JCRS has succeeded in attracting the founders of conflict and reconciliation research in Israel, Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal and Prof. Arie Nadler, as well as leading researchers currently working there, such as Prof. Eran Halperin and Prof. Boaz Hameiri, as well as Prof. Dr. Yaarah Bar-On, Dr. Iris Dotan-Katz, and Dr. Jossi Pepe Goldman.
This high-caliber thematic focus will be complemented by events that show the institutional development of the JCRS.
On the afternoon of the 24th, the European Centers for Reconciliation Research (ECRR), founded in Jena, will be relaunched. Based on the work of American political scientist Lily Gardner-Feldman on Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation, the ECRR encourages further research on reconciliation processes in Europe. Lily Gardner-Feldman, the Georg Eckert Institute/Leibniz Institute for Educational Media, and Prof. Dr. Karina Korostelina, professor at George Mason University and president of the International Association for Reconciliation Studies, are also part of this group, as are numerous younger researchers from various disciplines and, to date, six different European nations.
On the evening of Nov. 24th, 2025, the sixth pillar of the JCRS, “Religious and Interreligious Reconciliation and Peace", will be officially launched. It takes into account the fact that religious actors and organizations, as well as institutions of interreligious cooperation, have distinguished themselves as very active and promising advocates and shapers of reconciliation processes of all kinds. The vice president of one of the most important organizations of this kind today, Dr. Cesare Zucconi, will give the first Sant'Egidio Lecture on November 24, 2025, thereby establishing a series. Dr. Josef Boehle, visiting scholar at the JCRS from the University of Birmingham, will introduce the topic of the pillar, in which he himself will carry out projects.
The JCRS will address the digitization of war and reconciliation on November 25, 2025, with the official launch of a cross-disciplinary area entitled “Digital Reconciliation and Digital Reconciliation Studies.” The Academic Alliance for Reconciliation Studies in the Middle East and North Africa (AARMENA), founded at the JCRS in 2018, has made particularly good progress in this area thanks to the work of Dr. Iyad AlDajani, which will be presented on the morning of November 25, 2025.
This will be followed in the afternoon by an alumni meeting of JCRS doctoral students.
November 26, 2025, begins with the annual conference of the Martin Buber Research Center at the JCRS, headed by Dr. Francesco Ferrari. Under the title “Between East and West. Martin Buber, Reconciliation and Intercultural Dialogue,” Japanese and Italian Buber researchers will give presentations.
In the afternoon, there will be presentations of current activities from other pillars of the JCRS: Dr. Davide Tacchini will present his further reflections on migration, and Dr. Laura Villanueva will present ecosystem-oriented peace work in Colombia.
Since the beginning of this semester, the renowned Waseda University in Tokyo has been sending pre-doctoral and doctoral students to the JCRS for further training as part of the project “Building Reconciliation Research for East Asia,” which is funded by the Japanese Excellence Initiative. The researchers will present their projects.
November 27, 2025, will then once again be dedicated to social psychologists from Israel.
On November 28 and 29, 2025, a number of reconciliation researchers from Jena will travel to the Bonn Center for Reconciliation Research to participate in the annual meeting of the German-speaking Reconciliation Research Network.
All events from November 24th to 27th, 2025, will be held in a hybrid format and, with the exception of the ECRR meeting and the advisory board meeting, can be attended in person and online without prior registration using the information provided on the poster.