Fabricio Rodríguez during his talk.
| © ABIFrom 20 to 25 October 2025, the city of Granada, Spain, hosted the II Foro Internacional de Paz 2025. Violencia y Paz: Tensiones y Oportunidades hacia una Humanidad Común (Second International Peace Forum 2025: Violence and Peace – Tensions and Opportunities toward a Common Humanity). The forum was organized by the Foundation Unamos Culturas and brought together peacebuilders, educators, researchers, and artists from around the world to explore how communication, education, sustainability, and migration can contribute to more peaceful and inclusive futures.
Fabricio Rodríguez, from the ABI and the University of Freiburg, and member of the BMBF-funded competence network "Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict", participated in this international gathering with two contributions. As a keynote speaker, he reflected on transcultural dialogues on ecology, society, and peace, examining how diverse epistemologies and local practices can foster empowering understandings of transnational solidarity and sustainability beyond state action.
As a panelist in the roundtable “Memoria y Silencio: Disputas por el Monopolio del Dolor en la Construcción de Narrativas Colectivas”, he joined an engaging exchange on the politics of memory, silence, and the struggle over collective narratives, drawing on his ongoing research on popular memory and state repression during and after the 2019–2020 social uprising in Santiago de Chile. A recording of this roundtable is available on the YouTube channel of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the University of Granada, alongside other sessions of the forum.
The forum featured inspiring contributions from leading Latin American and European voices in peace and conflict processes and research. The list of speakers included Francisco De Roux, President of the Colombian Truth Commission, whose reflections on reconciliation and community healing resonated deeply with participants. Other distinguished speakers, such as Professor Jenny Pearce (LSE), author of Politics without Violence?: Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and Ashok Swain (Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University), enriched the discussions with their perspectives on conflict transformation, communication, and global peacebuilding. ABI extends its warm congratulations to Julián Ramírez García, Mónica Andrea Cabarcas, (Fundación Unamos Culturas), and Mario López Martínez (University of Granada) for their commitment to fostering dialogue across disciplines and cultures in such a unique setting.
As Fabricio Rodríguez notes, “Un foro lleno de puentes entre ciencia, arte y cultura – intercambios, lazos, (des)aprendizajes, nuevos vínculos, muchas ideas, mucho que hacer.” (A forum full of bridges between science, art, and culture – exchanges, connections, (un)learning, new relationships, many ideas, and much work ahead.)
The event underscored the importance of cross-border collaboration and dialogue across knowledge systems in advancing peace, sustainability, and mutual understanding beyond Eurocentric systems of knowledge production – themes that stand at the core of the ABI's research and engagement.