Responding to the accelerated social changes in the world, the University of Basel, Switzerland's oldest university, has founded a new research centre and platform for interdisciplinary dialogue: the Forum Basiliense. The forum aims to foster exchange and collaboration between scholars of the humanities and social sciences, life sciences and the natural sciences. With "Conflict and Cooperation", its theme for 2026, the Forum Basiliense will be addressing the numerous conflicts and crises in the contemporary world.

 
 In the current scholarly landscape, research into conflict and cooperation is of immense importance in a wide range of fields. In this interdisciplinary space, ongoing scholarly engagement with conflicts and their dynamics can establish dialogues with research on exemplary forms of cooperation and the conceptual foundations of cooperative action. This dual focus deliberately combines two conceptual fields in order to reflect on how problems of conflict and cooperation relate to and illuminate each other.