About

The Reconciling Conflicts and Intergroup Divisions (RCID) lab works to empower conflict resolution and reconciliation practitioners with evidence-based tools and approaches for reconciling identity-based conflicts and societal divisions.

The Lab defines reconciliation as a transformative process that involves improvements in relationships between conflicting groups and changes to the social identities of each group, including their values, norms, and behaviors, to promote a peaceful and just society. We do this by focusing primarily on five thematic areas: social boundary, threat perception, social norms, multiplicity of collective memories, and difficult heritage.

More specifically, we see reconciliation as the transformation of conflicting intergroup relations to reduce violence and promote peaceful, equal, and constructive interactions. Reconciliation requires intragroup changes on all sides of the conflict, from values, norms, and attitudes about engagement with outgroups, to unconstructive, hostile, or violent ideologies rooted in radicalized narratives about the past. It also requires changes in intergroup relations, including the alteration or removal of social boundaries, reduction in perceptions of outgroup threat, and shifts in the intergroup axiological balance and collective generality. This process may involve various types of activities and mechanisms, such as trust-building, forgiveness, trauma healing, restoration of justice, and cooperative collective action.

Our Areas of Research & Practice

The RCID Lab seeks to advance evidence-based practice primarily in the five thematic areas identified in the image below. The questions outlined in this agenda provide a basis for the development of theories of change and other resources for reconciliation practitioners.

Theories of change provide a useful tool for operationalizing scholarly theory in practice. Too often, however, theories of change in conflict resolution and reconciliation consist of simple “if-then” statements that are not rooted in theory or evidence and do not adequately account for contextual assumptions and risks. The RCID lab seeks to fill this gap by developing narrative theories of change, rooted in rigorous scholarship and evidence, that provide a basis for the design of innovative and effective approaches for reconciling societal divisions and contested histories.

RCID Lab Hypothesis of Change