Profile

The Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, Berlin, was established by the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies. The work of the Center is aimed at identifying constructive procedures and models for dealing with ethnopolitical conflicts. This includes coordinated activity in the areas of action oriented research, innovative conceptual work, support for local peace initiatives and policy advice.

The Center's key concerns are

• to promote peace constituencies in ethnopolitical or identity-related conflicts, fostering and enhancing horizontal and vertical networks of agents and institutions with the potential for peacebuilding and conflict transformation


• to generate strategies for changing structures which sustain violence, and for improving processes which build peace


• to contribute to the understanding of long-term peacebuilding after violence


• to increase knowledge and promote joint learning processes in the field of peace work, development, human rights and humanitarian assistance.

Our work is based on participatory action research approaches and aims to analyse the conditions and characteristics of the long-term, macro- and micro-level, social processes involved in conflict transformation. We also assess the effectiveness of particular concepts and methods of intervention in current conflict transformation. The Center has delivered research and policy studies on a wide range of topics, including a) civil society contributions for conflict transformation; b) the influence of social structures and the importance of cultural factors and cultural change in politicised inter-group conflicts; c) the peace-development nexus (i.e., integration of peacebuilding tools into development cooperation work); and d) the potential and limits of the concept of "reconciliation" and constructive approaches for dealing with the past.