Breaking cycles of violence: intimate, social, societal

Universally condemned, violent dynamics continue to permeate humanity: from online grooming to schoolyard bullying; from abuse at home to rape on the street; from acts of terror to acts of war. Be them intimate relationships, social factions, or international relations, no sphere in human societies is free from violent acts. Whilst it is a truism that “violence just begets more violence”, there is no obvious answer to the question of what can stop cycles of violence.

The broadest aim of this OSC is to bring us closer to just this answer by bringing together transformative projects at various stages, investigating violent phenomena in a practically, empirically, and theoretically impactful way.

In particular, we are motivated by the following questions:
- What are early predictors or implicit aspects of violent events – possibly at stages when the very existence of evolving violence is unknown even to the human agents themselves involved in it?
- What capacities or skills are required, in turn, to withstand or disrupt cycles of violence?
- What can in-depth empirical approaches, such as phenomenological, psychosocial, or AI-informed socio-computational analysis, contribute to the understanding of cycles of violence?

The various projects within our OSC seek to forge mutually enabling relationships with a variety of stakeholders, with a special regard to transferring models or findings to areas where violent phenomena appear as naturally as the starry sky, such as social media, the police, or forensic psychotherapy.