This comparative study explores the relationship between political and personal religious attitudes and their impact on reconciliation and tolerance in conflicts. Using survey data from 2,171 respondents across Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, the research highlights the mediating role of religious conflict perception in shaping attitudes toward reconciliation. The findings challenge deterministic views of religion’s role in protracted conflict, showing that while political–religious attitudes correlate with a rejection of reconciliation, personal religious attitudes do not. Rather, the interplay of religious attitudes, justice perceptions, and conflict narratives shapes these attitudes. In internal political conflicts, the adoption of religious attitudes does not always correlate with intolerance. The study integrates constructivist and instrumentalist perspectives, demonstrating that the role of religion in conflict is context-dependent. It also shows that, regardless of religious affiliation, political and personal religious orientations similarly influence attitudes toward reconciliation and tolerance, offering important insights for intergroup and conflict resolution strategies.

The continued applicability of international human rights law in situations of armed conflict entails that the right to mental health also applies. It is therefore crucial to examine how human rights supervisory mechanisms engage with this right in such contexts. Building on this premise, the present paper investigates how United Nations treaty bodies address mental health in conflict and post-conflict settings in their Concluding Observations. The study is based on a textual analysis of these documents conducted through the Universal Human Rights Index database. The findings reveal that most recommendations contained in the Concluding Observations call for particular attention to the mental health of children, especially child combatants, and of women, particularly those who are victims of sexual and gender-based violence. In terms of action required, they emphasize the need to ensure the availability and accessibility of mental health and psychosocial support services to persons affected by conflict.

The world faces an era of ‘permacrisis’, marked by overlapping challenges such as climate change, conflicts, economic instability, and recurrent disease outbreaks, which disrupt health systems and deepen inequalities. Primary Health Care (PHC) is vital for addressing immediate health needs and social determinants, fostering resilience, and promoting equity during such crises. This opinion piece highlights PHC’s unique role in ensuring essential services, reducing barriers to care, and integrating health with broader social and environmental policies. In conflict-affected and climate-impacted regions, PHC supports community resilience, promotes health equity, and adapts to systemic shocks. Investing in PHC infrastructure, empowering community health workers, early disease detection, promoting climate-adaptive health practices and delivering integrated care can advance health for all. PHC offers a sustainable pathway to resilient health systems capable of navigating the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

This paper argues that the current academic debate about global civil society has reached a point where some assessment or reflection could be useful for informing the course of future research in the field. Behind this call for an assessment is the very nature of the debate and emerging gaps and weaknesses that together produce a potential slow-down in generating new knowledge and understanding of global civil society. There are several shortcomings to the current research approach: the failure to take account of other civil society traditions; the failure to address the relationship between global civil society, conflict, and violence; and, most critically, the neglect of the notion of civility, both conceptually and empirically. The balance of the paper then explores the implications of this new assessment of global civil society research.

Non-profit organizations (NPO) for mental health are becoming significant actors. Here, their roles in welfare society as understood in research are identified and analyzed. Results from recent research publications on the mental health field are synthesized and categorized in order to find out their origin, theoretical orientation, and view on mental health NPO’s in relation to the public welfare systems. Relevant publications are primarily from the US, empirically oriented, and addressing surveys on both individual and organizational level. NPOs were most often seen as consensus-oriented service organizations, while very few (4%) were seen as conflict-oriented advocates (i.e., anti-professional). It is concluded that these NPOs are most often studied as complements or alternatives to existing public welfare services rather than on their own terms, and that research on the topic lacks more complex theoretical attempts.

In today’s Latin America, governments implementing public policies for development and against poverty and inequality meet with social movements that engage in practices for social change, poverty reduction, and empowering. In this context, we analyze the interplay between both processes, describing its conflicts in three specific dimensions: the material, the democratic, and the environmental. Social movements are permanently contesting and challenging public policy when they autonomously appropriate public policy resources; yet, governments respond with criminalization and cooptation strategies. In a setting where social conflict takes place in response to existing poverty and inequality levels, movements challenge development and poverty reduction projects of an ‘assistentialist’ and extractivist nature, and propose an integral understanding of development and the emergence of new relationships among individuals, society, and the environment.

Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of a deliberatively forged consensus as a hegemony and her assertion that adversarial politics best nurtures the conditions of freedom have had a profound influence on contemporary democratic thought. This article takes a critical view of this trend, arguing that a norm of consensus is a very precondition, rather than impediment, for the kind of pluralistic democracy Mouffe and other agonists wish to promote. It is asserted that Mouffe's dehistoricized refutation of consensus lacks causal or explanatory relevance to how concrete actors embedded in empirical situations relate to one another and that the very preparedness to find something acceptable about another is at the heart of what it means to treat others justly.

A Ph.D. is not a qualification to decide a country's foreign policy, but it should not be a disqualification from communicating with people whose choices are not entirely rational. Founders of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) learned to do this in occupied Europe during the Second World War. I learned it in libraries and working on newspapers. So, instead of talking about Iraq in an Oval Office meeting with President Bush I offered a parable about Northern Ireland, supported by quotations from Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin.

The Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award is a triennial prize to honour scholars, who have made exemplary contributions to the scientific study of militarised conflict. This essay presents the third winner of the award – Nils Petter Gleditsch – and commemorates on his scholarly achievements over the last four decades.

What does a democratically-productive form of mourning look like in America? David McIvor’s Mourning in America and Simon Stow’s American Mourning argue that it entails the embrace of ambivalence about self and other. Democratically-productive mourning pushes against the tendencies toward idealization and demonization. Embracing ambivalence enables us to move to more effective political engagement in the context of both collaboration and conflict. It allows us to understand that the process of mourning must be ongoing both to protect us from political excesses to which we are prone and to push society toward justice.

This article examines the consensus-conflict divide within contemporary democratic theory as manifested in the works of Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and John Rawls. It relates the democratic crisis diagnosis to the presence of this conceptual divide and suggests overcoming it by focusing on the work of Michel Foucault, especially his concept of the “rectangle of the good parrhesia.” Foucault's analysis goes beyond conflict-consensus through its positive and creative reconceptualization of political authority featuring a transformative capacity linked to the idea of telling the truth.

Both armed groups and civilians have evoked historical memory in the Katiba Macina and Boko Haram related conflicts. Although not a cause of the conflicts, historical memory informs the perceptions and choices of both fighters and civilians. Based on interviews with members of the armed groups and local civilians, the authors demonstrate that how an individual perceives their own positionality within society and how they perceive their ancestors’ positionality affects how that person reacted to the armed groups’ evocation of historical memory, how they interpreted the source of greater threat, and their own self-protection strategies.

Afro-Colombian adolescents in Tumaco face high mental-health risks due to armed conflict and structural marginalization. We tested the short-term efficacy of the 3C program to strengthen resilience, compassion, and prosocial behavior and to reduce anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Mixed-methods cluster RCT with concurrent triangulation; multilevel mixed-effects models with multiple imputation; assessments at baseline, 6, and 9 months. Resilience increased by 13.14 points at 6 months (large effect, d = 0.89) and remained elevated at 9 months. Anxiety and PTSD screenings were lower in the intervention group across follow-ups. Compassion and prosocial behavior improved at 6 months but attenuated by 9 months. Depression screenings decreased at 6 months and rebounded at 9 months. Qualitative data aligned with these patterns (students reported sustained use of stress-management skills and peer support). 3C demonstrated short-term efficacy for resilience, anxiety, and PTSD but showed limited durability for compassion, prosociality, and depression without ongoing reinforcement. The pattern of effect attenuation—particularly the complete depression rebound—indicates that 3C provides a foundational component requiring integration with booster sessions to sustain socioemotional gains.