CIRCLE

Creative Interfaith and Restorative peaCebuilding in artful Learning spaces and placEs

CIRCLE project develops a new model of EU cultural diplomacy that transforms culture and religion from factors of division into tools for dialogue, reconciliation, and peacebuilding. It strengthens Europe’s capacity for conflict prevention, post-conflict reconciliation and security. It has six main objectives. It maps and analyses cultural diplomacy and peacebuilding strategies in the EU, with particular attention to conflicts where religious identities are central. It develops an integrated framework combining Competences for Democratic Culture, Affective Citizenship, Arts-based Learning, Restorative Justice and Digital and Immersive tools. It designs and delivers modular training programmes, building a pool of trained developers/facilitators able to replicate interventions in their contexts. It co-creates and tests hybrid interventions at eight pilot sites that represent post-conflict, frozen, ongoing and underlying tensions. These interventions include restorative interfaith dialogue circles, creative workshops, and VR/immersive components to engage young people, aged fifteen to thirty-five, as active peacebuilders. Through participatory methods, the project engages local communities, cultural institutions and youth in the co-creation of collective artistic outputs such as performances and digital stories that remain embedded in public spaces after the project. It uses a robust pre- and post-evaluation framework and a digital assessment system to generate real-time data on psychological, social and civic outcomes. The results feed a comprehensive cultural peacebuilding toolkit, policy briefs and recommendations for European and national decision-makers. By combining mapping, capacity building, co-design, pilot implementation and evaluation, CIRCLE delivers a scalable and transferable model that enhances social cohesion, empowers young people, and equips policymakers with actionable strategies to promote security and sustainable peace across Europe and beyond.

The project is coordinated by National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and CERTH leads WP7: Shaping virtual worlds and storyliving and WP8: Advanced storyliving virtual world.