In recent decades, intergroup dialogue initiatives have been adopted in higher education as tools for promoting intercultural understanding, inclusion, and social cohesion in divided societies (Bekerman & Maoz, 2005; Zembylas, 2018). Much of this work rests on normative assumptions about dialogue as a space for mutual recognition, and conflict mitigation. Critical scholarship, however, has questioned these assumptions, highlighting how intercultural and peace-oriented educational practices may obscure asymmetrical power relations, structural inequality, and contested political histories (Ahmed, 2012). These tensions become particularly pronounced under conditions of active war, when pedagogical aspirations for dialogue collide with fear, trauma, and heightened political constraint that reshapes what can be said, acknowledged, or withheld.

This paper examines how social justice–oriented intergroup dialogue operates under such conditions. Empirically, it draws on a qualitative study of an intergroup dialogue initiative involving Jewish and Palestinian students at an Israeli university during the Gaza war. The program brought together students positioned within unequal regimes of citizenship, exposure to violence, and political legitimacy. Rather than evaluating the initiative in terms of pedagogical effectiveness or reconciliatory success, the paper approaches intergroup dialogue as a social arena in which struggles over recognition, moral boundary-making, and ethically constrained forms of agency are enacted. Following Lamont (2012), these struggles are understood as embedded in broader social and institutional hierarchies rather than reducible to interpersonal misunderstanding.

The analysis identifies a three-stage process through which these struggles unfolded: In the first stage, structured avoidance, facilitators and participants relied on depoliticized interaction to sustain interpersonal contact while suspending direct engagement with the war. While this strategy enabled the continuation of dialogue, it produced patterned silences that constrained the articulation of inequality, harm, and political responsibility, echoing critical accounts of “safe space” pedagogies in conflict-affected contexts (Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). In the second stage, collision, attempts to introduce political narratives exposed a recognition gap rooted in competing and asymmetrical claims. Jewish students sought recognition of vulnerability, and the trauma of October 7, while Palestinian students sought recognition of collective identity, political presence, and the structural conditions shaping their marginalization. Under wartime conditions, affirming one set of claims was frequently experienced as carrying political risk for the other, rendering mutual recognition increasingly precarious. In the third stage, navigation through internalization, the erosion of collective dialogue gave rise to reflexive forms of agency, as participants oriented toward ethical self-positioning and self-protection rather than mutual understanding.

Drawing on Lamont’s work on moral boundaries and recognition as processes of valuation and exclusion (Lamont, 2012), the recognition gap identified in the dialogue does not merely reflect interpersonal misunderstanding, but points to deeper asymmetries in civic status, political legitimacy, and differential exposure to violence.  Under conditions of war, claims for recognition are not only moral or affective, but embedded in unequal relations of citizenship, security, and public belonging. Intercultural educational spaces are thus less tasked with reconciling difference than with sustaining engagement amid its irreducibility.

Conceptually, the paper reframes the recognition gap not as a communicative failure or deficit to be resolved through improved dialogue, but as a socially and institutionally structured terrain produced by unequal relations of power, vulnerability, and legitimacy (Fraser, 2000; Lamont, 2012). It argues that, under conditions of war, intergroup dialogue functions less as a mechanism of reconciliation and more as a site where the tensions and limits of intercultural education and social justice projects become visible. By centering participants’ situated navigation rather than dialogic resolution, the study contributes to debates in social justice and intercultural education on how agency, recognition, and inequality are negotiated when democratic and pedagogical ideals are profoundly unsettled.

Methodological Approach This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive design grounded in a reflexive constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014), suited to examining social processes under uncertainty, risk, and moral constraint. The analysis treats war as a constitutive condition shaping both the encounter and the research process. Knowledge production is thus understood as situated and constrained, structured by power relations that delimit what can be expressed, observed, or documented. Research Context The study was conducted within a year-long, DEI-led dialogue program (pseudonym: Leaders of Change) at an Israeli university during the Gaza war. The program brought together Jewish and Palestinian students and was institutionally framed as a space for coexistence and student leadership development. Its design combined, in the first semester, interpersonal activities and joint campus-based initiatives, followed in the second semester by facilitated engagement with political identity, the conflict, and the war. As hostilities intensified, the program unfolded amid heightened security, polarization, and institutional scrutiny. Eighteen students participated in the program, evenly divided between Jewish and Palestinian students. Data Collection Data were collected between January and June 2025 and included three primary sources: (1) twenty-six in-depth, semi-structured interviews in two waves; (2) non-participant observations of eleven bi-weekly sessions; and (3) participant-generated materials, including reflective texts. The researcher adopted a non-participant stance, documenting interactional dynamics, silences, and tensions in a detailed journal. Several Palestinian students objected to audio recording, citing concerns related to surveillance and potential repercussions for their academic standing in the wartime context. Interviews were therefore documented via participant-informed methods, including detailed notes, prioritizing safety over standardized recording. Analysis and Reflexivity Data analysis followed grounded theory procedures of open, focused, and theoretical coding, using constant comparison across data sources and time points. Analytic attention was directed to both articulated narratives and patterned silences. Through this process, the analysis developed a three-stage process—structured avoidance, collision, and navigation through internalization—capturing how participants navigated the recognition gap under war. Reflexivity was maintained regarding researcher positionality and the effects of war on access, trust, and knowledge production.

This analysis invites a reconsideration of how intergroup dialogue is conceptualized within social justice and intercultural education under conditions of active war. Rather than assuming dialogue as a stable pedagogical space oriented toward mutual recognition or reconciliation, the findings foreground dialogue as a fragile and contested social arena in which recognition claims, moral boundaries, and agency are differentially constrained. War does not simply intensify existing tensions within dialogue initiatives; it transforms the very conditions under which recognition can be sought, granted, or ethically risked. Tracing a three-stage process—structured avoidance, collision, and internalization—the study demonstrates how participants respond to the erosion of collective dialogue by recalibrating expectations, boundaries, and modes of participation. Agency does not primarily take the form of persuasion or consensus-building. Instead, it emerges as a reflexive practice of ethical self-positioning, self-protection, and managing vulnerability. These forms of agency are cautious and situational, yet analytically significant, revealing how individuals act meaningfully when reciprocity is unattainable. Conceptually, the study advances an understanding of the recognition gap as a socially and institutionally structured condition, not a communicative deficit. Claims for recognition during war are embedded in unequal relations of citizenship, security, and public legitimacy, shaping what can be said or withheld. Intergroup dialogue thus functions less as a mechanism for reconciliation and more as a site where the limits of intercultural education and social justice projects become visible. For social justice and intercultural education, these findings call for more reflexive, modest expectations of what dialogue can accomplish in protracted violence. Rather than measuring dialogue by harmony or consensus, attention should focus on how educational spaces enable participants to navigate irreducible tensions and sustain ethical agency amid structural inequality and conflict.

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