Is post-war reconciliation determined by individuals’ personal contact experiences with former adversaries, or by the amount of intergroup contact within the region in which they live? Using multilevel analyses among representative samples of youth from ethnic majorities and minorities in five post-war countries, we demonstrate that context-level intergroup contact is a stronger determinant of reconciliation than individual-level contact. This study serves as a proof of concept that forgiveness, trust, social distance and approach behaviors in post-war societies are primarily a function of amount of contact in one’s social context rather than one’s personal inter-ethnic interactions. Evidence from this research critically informs our understanding of the influence of social context, particularly the macroscale potential of intergroup contact, on post-war reconciliation, from both majority and minority perspectives, and provides important guidelines for policies and interventions fostering reconciliation.