Forum Basiliense, annual theme 2026: Conflict and cooperation

With "Conflict and Cooperation", its theme for 2026, the Forum Basiliense will be addressing the numerous conflicts and crises in the contemporary world. 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.

As an interdisciplinary research forum, the Forum Basiliense will juxtapose methodologies and results in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, in the hope that this will provide new impulses to explore conflictual and cooperative behavior from an in-depth historical and contemporary perspective. The goal of this annual theme is thus to bring together the widest possible range of distinct approaches to conflict and cooperation research and to generate positive results from the productive tensions between them.

In the current scholarly landscape, research into conflict and cooperation is of immense importance in a wide range of fields, including biology, psychology, medicine, law, economics, sociology, history, political science, and cultural studies. This call for applications for fellowships is thus an invitation to collaborate to scholars in all those fields, as well as to interested scholars in other disciplines.

In addition to the Forum's fellowships at junior and senior level, the planned activities for the 2026 academic year include lectures, seminars, and workshops, as well as the production of podcasts, exhibitions, and other media formats for science communication. New information on events, guests, and cooperative projects will be posted on the Forum Basiliense website on an ongoing basis.