Future 500 Spring Workshop 2026 “Rebuilding Bridges. Dialogue, Trust and Solidarity Post October 7th”
14 – 18 March 2026 | Brussels, Belgium
Sustainable dialogue requires more than mere exchange; it demands robust structures that can withstand crisis. Trust can only be rebuilt when dialogue moves beyond agreement to engage with deep differences – and when people are equipped with the tools to identify misinformation and engage in grounded, informed dialogue.
Europe’s dialogue infrastructure is failing at the moment it is needed most. The 7 October attacks, the war in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — these crises have not only deepened geopolitical fault lines, they have changed the basic conditions of public speech. As Igor Mitchnik of Austausch e.V. put it: “People who used to talk stop, and words that once connected begin to divide.” Spaces built over decades are collapsing in days. Algorithms reward outrage, narratives calcify, and institutions reach for dialogue formats designed for a world that no longer exists. Something has to give — and it won’t be the conflicts.
The Future 500 Spring Workshop started from a blunt premise: dialogue cannot aim at consensus when the ground itself is contested. The goal is staying in conversation despite conflict — moving from “safe spaces” to what participants called “braver spaces.” Sessions examined how framing, disinformation and algorithmic curation drive polarisation; how antisemitism, racism and the Israel–Palestine discourse carry historical weight that current debates rarely reckon with; and how AI-driven systems shape — and might yet reshape — democratic communication. Contributions from the EU-funded TWON project were particularly striking here. Simulations and group scenarios pushed these questions out of the abstract. So did sessions on community work in Eastern Europe’s conflict and post-conflict settings, where civic engagement survives under conditions most Western practitioners have never faced.
The workshop culminated in a public panel at the Representation of North Rhine-Westphalia in Brussels — journalists, academics, educators, civil society practitioners in the same room, working the same problem. The exchange was live, not performed: perspectives were questioned, pushed, developed. The evening’s title, “Voices Rising: Rebuilding Bridges — Dialogue, Trust and Solidarity Post-October 7th”, stopped being a heading and became a description.
For more detailed information on the sessions and speakers, please refer to the full workshop programme.
Next Steps
Building on these insights, the Future 500 programme will take a decisive step further in its upcoming workshop by shifting the focus from sustaining dialogue under pressure to questioning the concept of dialogue itself. It will address a more fundamental question: whether the current concept of dialogue remains adequate – or whether it requires a deeper rethinking of its assumptions, limits and normative foundations. Rather than asking how dialogue can be improved, the workshop will examine whether prevailing approaches risk obscuring the very tensions they seek to address.
5 – 7 July 2026 | Future 500 Summer Workshop 2026 | Berlin
