The Praxis of Coexistence: A Comparative and Inductive Approach to the Challenges of Diversity

Project Information

PraxisofCoexistence

Grant agreement ID: 101087502

DOI

10.3030/101087502

EC signature date 13 August 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 968 750,00

EU contribution

€ 1 968 750,00

Coordinated by

TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
Israel

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PraxisofCoexistence (The Praxis of Coexistence: A Comparative and Inductive Approach to the Challenges of Diversity)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Across Europe and its peripheries, societies face what many call a crisis of multiculturalism. Political leaders and publics alike increasingly question whether living together across ethnic and religious lines is either possible or desirable. Despite decades of investment in policies promoting tolerance and diversity, intercommunal mistrust and populist backlashes have intensified. At the same time, countless communities continue to coexist in everyday life—trading, worshipping, and cooperating beyond the gaze of policymakers. The Praxis of Coexistence begins from this paradox. It asks not how coexistence should work according to liberal or institutional ideals, but how it actually does work in practice.

This project pioneers an inductive, comparative anthropology of coexistence across six sites—Israel/Palestine, Turkey, Bosnia, Romania, England, and France—representing ethno-nationalist, post-socialist, and unevenly liberal political contexts. Rather than focusing on state policies or “best practices,” it examines ordinary coexistence: the concrete habits, moral vocabularies, and pragmatic accommodations that sustain social life amid deep difference. The research reverses the conventional direction of inquiry, using ethnography to “reverse engineer” the cultural and ethical logics through which communities maintain civility, even where policy and ideology fail.

By linking ethnographic fieldwork with political and moral theory, the project brings the social sciences and humanities into direct dialogue. It shows that coexistence cannot be reduced to attitudes or legal frameworks; it is also a matter of moral reasoning, habit, and cultural form. Through this approach, Praxis of Coexistence seeks to:

Generate new comparative data on grassroots modes of managing diversity;

Reorient theoretical debates on tolerance, multiculturalism, and secularism toward culturally grounded understandings of coexistence; and

Inform more resonant, context-sensitive policies for plural societies.

The expected impact is both scholarly and societal. The project will open a new field of inquiry—an anthropology of coexistence—demonstrating that enduring peace and social cohesion depend as much on shared practices and moral grammars as on formal rights and institutions. By offering empirically grounded alternatives to dominant liberal paradigms, it contributes fresh insights to anthropology, political theory, peace studies, and sociology, and provides policy makers with an evidence base rooted in how people actually live together with difference

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the reporting period, The Praxis of Coexistence has delivered all core research and theoretical objectives outlined in the Description of Action. The project established and coordinated a six-country comparative ethnographic network examining how plural publics sustain coexistence under conditions of strain. Following the onboarding of researchers across regional hubs, a shared syllabus and theoretical framework were developed, grounding the team in a common conceptual vocabulary of coexistence, ethics, and public reason. Extensive background research was conducted in multiple languages, including policy mapping, local historiographies, and the creation of annotated bibliographies and regional briefs that shaped each site’s ethnographic design.

Between January 2024 and December 2025, sustained fieldwork was conducted in Marseille, Istanbul, Mostar/Bihac, Ramla/Lod, Birmingham, and Timisoara/Beresca. Researchers applied a coordinated ethnographic methodology that identified equivalent social spaces of intercommunal encounter—markets, schools, municipal offices, and religious institutions—to ensure grounded yet comparable data collection. Iterative analysis across sites allowed the refinement of interview guides and research questions, producing cumulative comparative insights. Key conceptual findings include:

Demonstrating that coexistence operates as a practical, embodied form of moral reasoning, not merely as a liberal value or psychological disposition.


Revealing how non-liberal publics reason without consensus (Weiss 2025), challenging normative assumptions in the anthropology of democracy.

The project culminated in several major scientific outputs:

Three landmark publications in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute—Reasoning Without Consensus (Weiss 2025), Peripheral Traditionalism (Everett 2025), and the collective special issue Beyond Public Reason (Boutieri, Everett, Weiss., 2025)—together advancing the anthropology of democracy and pluralism.

Innovative comparative methodology integrating iterative, cross-site coordination and feedback loops across multi-sited ethnographies.

A Toolkit for Coexistence Practice, translating ethnographic insight into applied methods for practitioners engaging traditional and religious communities in diverse contexts.

International workshops in Cambridge (2023), Marseille (2024), London (2024), and Bucharest (2025) that produced cross-disciplinary synthesis and external peer review.

Outcomes: The project has established a replicable model for transregional ethnography, generated new theoretical vocabulary for coexistence as practice. Collectively, these achievements position Praxis of Coexistence as a benchmark for rethinking pluralism, moral reasoning, and interethnic and religious coexistence.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Praxis of Coexistence project has achieved major scientific and methodological results that redefine how coexistence is understood and practiced. Empirically, it produced the first comparative ethnographic dataset on everyday coexistence across six regions—Israel/Palestine, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Romania, and the UK—revealing that plural life is sustained not through consensus or shared values but through concrete habits, infrastructural entanglements, and moral practices. Theoretically, the project advanced new analytical frameworks such as coexistence-as-practice, and vernacular public reason, moving well beyond normative liberal and psychological models.

Its outputs include three landmark publications in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Weiss 2025; Everett 2025; Boutieri, Weiss & Everett 2025), the Toolkit for Coexistence Practice translating ethnographic findings into applied methods for NGOs and educators, and a series of international workshops that created a durable research and policy network around plural publics and democratic ethics. These results collectively establish a new interdisciplinary field bridging anthropology, political theory, and peace studies, while providing transferable methodologies for practitioners working in divided or post-conflict settings.

Expected Impacts:

Scientific: Establishment of a comparative anthropology of coexistence and an empirically grounded critique of liberal public reason; generation of replicable methodologies for transregional, multi-sited ethnography.

Societal: Strengthened capacity for inclusive civic engagement through the Toolkit’s implementation in educational and municipal settings; influence on NGO practice and intercultural pedagogy in Israel, France, and Romania.

Policy and Knowledge Transfer: Evidence-based recommendations for working with traditional and religious communities; integration of local epistemologies into development and diversity programming.