Since the beginning of the new millennium, violent conflicts around the world have contributed to a significant increase in the number of international migrants, reaching nearly 260 million in 2017, including almost 26 million refugees. Many of these migrants have arrived in Europe leading to some countries struggling to handle the substantial need for humanitarian assistance and longterm integration. Civil society actors and organisations, some of which have religious affiliations, have stepped in and provided vital help. The existing academic literature recognises the important contribution of religion and religious actors in integration processes. However, one increasingly pertinent area that has been largely neglected is the issue of multi-religious cooperation. Hence this study examines the potential positive advantages of a 'multireligious approach to integration' from an organisational perspective.Data collected during a pilot project identifies a range of different possible advantages for a multi-religious approach, and is used to critically reflect on existing literature concerning religion's role in integration processes. The study concludes that a multi-religious approach to integration has some distinctive benefits and therefore should be encouraged and supported. The project also identifies a range of important areas for further study which have the potential to make a significant positive impact for migrants, host communities and broader community cohesion and security.
This article explores whether a relational approach to peacebuilding, shared multireligious perspectives and widening networks can bring sources of strength which enable positive peacebuilding and create grassroots, cross-community peace. While religious peacebuilding organizations have become the object of a burgeoning literature, the role of multireligious organisations in peacebuilding has received far less attention. The purpose of this paper is to redress this lack. By examining the influence, challenges and benefits of multireligious approaches to transnational peacebuilding, we hope to develop a sharper and more critically nuanced understanding of the potential role of multireligious organisations in global peacebuilding, and consider what, if anything, distinguishes them from secular and other faith-based organisations. We do so by analysing the impact of a project carried out in Myanmar by Religions for Peace. The project provides three case studies which offer unique opportunities to consider the limits and potential of multireligious grassroots interventions in conflict contexts with very different histories and cultural configurations.
The ‘risk assessment’ in peacebuilding has become a standard, if sometimes slightly formulaic and performative, element of project design and written proposals. Largely driven by donor requirements and organisational procedures, the relatively new discipline and practice recognised as ‘Religious Peacebuilding’ has taken on many of the elements of ‘secular’ peacebuilding, including the risk assessment. This means that organisations increasingly have to attempt to understand the associated risks to projects with a religious dimension often without any specific guidelines, and in many cases, any relevant knowledge or previous experience of working with religious actors in peacebuilding. Consequently, the primary objective of this paper is to propose the first risk assessment framework for peacebuilding projects which explicitly focus on religious dimensions and actors. The framework is based on analysis of case studies and project evaluations from a number of contexts; and has the potential to make a tangible difference to the efficacy and impact of peacebuilding projects in a variety of post-conflict contexts. This paper will also briefly consider how the proposed framework relates to contemporary theoretical debates concerning the instrumentalization of religion, and increasing technocracy in peacebuilding theory and practice.
In recent years scholars working in the area of Religious Studies have increasingly been obliged to acknowledge that the level of methodological rigour displayed in many studies on religious phenomena is unsatisfactory, perhaps particularly when compared to that of some academics operating in related subject areas. Arguably one of the principal areas in which an apparent reticence to engage with contemporary developments in method is evident is that of ‘religious ethnography’. The purpose of this short study is to assess the extent to which ethnographic practices in the study of Tibetan Buddhism have historically responded to methodological developments in ethnography and anthropology, and to briefly suggest ways in which studies in this area may progress in the future.
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