Cultural Strategies for Peace: Culture and Creativity as Catalysts for Conflict Prevention and Post-Conflict Reconciliation

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.

Funding Information

• Budget (EUR) – Year 2025: 12 000 000
• Contributions: 3000000 to 4000000

Expected Outcomes

• 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.

Eligibility Criteria

• Entities eligible to participate:
  • Any legal entity, regardless of its place of establishment, including legal entities from nonassociated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations) is eligible to participate (whether it is eligible for funding or not), provided that the conditions laid down in the Horizon Europe Regulation have been met, along with any other conditions laid down in the specific call/topic.
  • A ‘legal entity’ means any natural or legal person created and recognised as such under national law, EU law or international law, which has legal personality and which may, acting in its own name, exercise rights and be subject to obligations, or an entity without legal personality.
• To become a beneficiary, legal entities must be eligible for funding.
• To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the following countries:
  • the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions:
    • Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.
  • the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States:
    • Aruba (NL), Bonaire (NL), Curação (NL), French Polynesia (FR), French Southern and Antarctic Territories (FR), Greenland (DK), New Caledonia (FR), Saba (NL), Saint Barthélemy (FR), Sint Eustatius (NL), Sint Maarten (NL), St. Pierre and Miquelon (FR), Wallis and Futuna Islands (FR).
  • countries associated to Horizon Europe;
    • Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Tunisia, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

For more information, visit EC.