Our strategic focus is on:

– Empowering policy actors to integrate peacebuilding and governance research into policy processes.

– Encouraging communities to assert their agency in transforming relations in divided societies.

– Supporting stakeholders in implementing peacebuilding and transitional justice policies, programmes, and processes.

The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) was launched in the year 2000, in the wake of South Africa´s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The aim was to ensure that lessons learnt from South Africa´s transition from apartheid to democracy were taken into account as the nation moved ahead.

Today, the Institute helps to build fair, inclusive and democratic societies in Africa through carefully selected engagements and interventions. It contributes to post-conflict stability, good governance and human security through programmes that promote political reconciliation and social and economic justice across Africa. With its base and origin in South Africa, it continues to learn from the South African experience of transition and explores projects and partnerships that will deepen the efforts to build fair, inclusive and democratic societies in this country, but also the rest of the continent.

In preparation for its Strategy 2022–2025, the IJR conducted an extensive horizon-scanning exercise to distill existing and emerging drivers of change that will shape the contexts within which we are likely to work in the course of this four-year period. This will ensure that we remain relevant, and help us identify our strategic priorities that will drive our partnerships.