The Global Civic Engagement Lab is a collaborative space within the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery (CISR) dedicated to fostering informed citizenship, public service, and meaningful dialogue to address local and global challenges. Our work is laser-focused on CISR's mission to strengthen responsible global citizenship. The Lab provides students, faculty, and partners an interdisciplinary environment to explore the relationships between civic responsibility, democratic institutions, public policy, and humanitarian action.

The lab's pilot project is Love and War in America, supported by the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame.  Love and War in America addresses the urgent challenge of U.S. political polarization by applying insights from global post-conflict reconciliation to American civic life.

The project begins with the observation that love—whether expressed as familial love, neighborly love, patriotism, humanitarian, or religious devotion—is an abundant yet underutilized resource for repairing fractured communities. Drawing on interdisciplinary research as well as Buddhist practices of loving-kindness (metta) meditation, the project develops and tests a community-based dialogue model that activates civic expressions of love to reduce affective polarization.

The research pursues two core questions: (1) How do Americans conceptualize and enact love in civic contexts? (2) How can dialogue harness love’s motivating power to foster reconciliation across political divides? To answer these, the project will convene a dialogue hub—a living laboratory where community participants engage in structured conversations informed by reconciliation methods. An international facilitator with post-conflict expertise will co-lead the hubs, inspiring participants with comparative insights from contexts such as Northern Ireland and South Africa.