Roundtable on Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding: Advances in the Field 

Hosted by Dr Gladys Ganiel and Dr Joram Tarusarira, this roundtable explores insights from a special issue of Religions on ‘Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding: Advances in the Field’.

The relationships between religion, conflict and peacebuilding are contested and complex. Challenges to the “myth of religious violence” have problematised Western secular/sacred dichotomies, prompting reflection on the relationship between the religious and the political in conflicts. R. Scott Appleby’s influential emphasis on the “ambivalence of the sacred” has highlighted how religion can be a source of both conflict and peace, an observation that has been supported by a host of empirical case studies from around the world. John Paul Lederach’s pioneering approach to conflict transformation has highlighted the impact of faith-based actors in peacebuilding, in conjunction with myriad other factors.

The editors of the special issue, Ganiel and Tarusarira, will introduce key concepts, approaches, and empirical insights raised by contributors in the special issue. There will be opportunities to ask authors questions about their contributions, which explore issues ranging from decolonizing the study of religious peacebuilding, the value of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ paradigm, early warning signals of inter-religious conflict, faith-based challenges to injustices, religious and theological responses to trauma, the role of religion in climate-based conflicts, the role of public theology, and the operationalization of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The special issue is open access, with articles published on a rolling basis ahead of the Roundtable (click here and scroll to the bottom of the landing page for links to the published articles).

Gladys Ganiel is a Reader in Sociology at Queen’s, specialising on religion, conflict, and reconciliation in Northern Ireland; evangelicalism; the emerging church movement, and religion on the island of Ireland. She is author/co-author of six books and more than 50 scholarly articles and chapters.

Joram Tarusarira is Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalisation at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has expertise on religion, conflict, peacebuilding, and reconciliation; and religion and climate conflicts.