scholarly journals Mama, Keep Walking for Peace and Justice: Gender Violence and Liberian Mothers’ Interreligious Peace Movement

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Wonchul Shin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
Structural Poverty ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Forms Of Violence

Focusing on the understudied area of women, religion, and peacebuilding, this essay offers the case study of Liberian mothers’ actions in the interreligious peace movement to address multiple forms of violence in the midst and aftermath of Liberian civil wars. This essay examines three forms of gender violence and their impact on the lives of Liberian women: (1) sexual violence, (2) forced mobilization of child soldiers, and (3) structural poverty. Afterwards, the essay explores the journey of Liberian mothers to peace and justice and analyzes the role of religion(s) in organizing and sustaining the mothers’ interreligious peace movement. Specifically, this essay highlights the concept of motherhood rooted in Pan-African religious traditions as a key moral resource to empower the mothers as peacebuilders and to foster restorative justice in their war-torn nation.

Kenyan girls as agents of peace: Enhancing the capacity of future women peacebuilders

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Zanoni
Keyword(s):  
Peace Education ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
International Instruments ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The role of women in peacebuilding efforts has been recognized through various international instruments that have advanced the ability of women to access the peace table. In order for women to act as leaders, they must possess the capacity to disrupt structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence, engage in peacemaking activities, and employ prevention strategies for sustainable peace to be secured. This paper draws on qualitative research on a leadership program called Women of Integrity, Strength, and Hope (WISH) offered at the Daraja Academy, an all-girls boarding school in Kenya. The case study is situated within the larger global context of the women’s peace movement galvanized by the United Nations to highlight the potential role women may offer as peacebuilders. The WISH program engages Kenyan girls through critical peace education pedagogy to enhance capabilities required for future female architects of sustainable peace in Kenya and in the world.

scholarly journals Religion and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Coastal Communities in Takalar Regency, South Sulawesi

Al-Ulum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
South Sulawesi ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Collection Methods ◽  
Acquisition Technique

This paper focuses on examining the role of religion in improving the work ethic of fishing communities in Takalar Regency. The approach used in this research is the Socio-theological Approach (Social monotheism). The social theological approach is a method or method used to link the sociological level of religious or divine society in order to analyze and reveal data on the reality under study. The data acquisition technique is to use data collection methods in the form of observation, interviews and documentation. The results of this study indicate that religion (Islam) plays a role in building work ethic. Poverty can make a person disbelieve in his Lord. Islam teaches its adherents to share with those who are entitled in terms of the theological concept of zakat as poverty alleviation and as a means of realizing social welfare. Islam does not close the space for its adherents to achieve economic prosperity. The framework of monotheism in Islamic teachings has outlined social involvement for its followers to always care and help others.

Religion and Politics: The Case of Northern Ireland

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Walker
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Independent Factor ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Role Of Religion

This article looks at the role of religion in politics. Northern Ireland provides not only a good case study for this issue but also an opportunity to see how the subject has been approached in academic literature over the last forty years. It is argued here that religion can be a modern day, independent factor of considerable influence in politics. This has been important not only in Northern Ireland but also elsewhere in Western Europe in the twentieth century. This reality has been largely ignored until recently, partly because the situation in Northern Ireland has often been studied in a limited comparative context, and partly because of restrictive intellectual assumptions about the role of religion in politics.

“In My Modest Cell I am Not a Rebel”

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Angela Berlis
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Role Of Religion

The contribution explores the question of how people react to situations and experiences of transition and radical change which have a major impact on their own lives. What kind of mindset do they develop in the process, who are their role models and how do they overcome spiritual hardship and marginalisation? The life and work of Charlotte Lady Blennerhassett, née Countess Leyden (1843–1917), serves as a case-study showing how learned liberal Catholics – in this case a lay noblewoman – dealt with their spiritual homelessness in the post-1870 ultramontanised Roman Catholic Church. Blennerhassett’s historical biographies reveal an interest in people in situations of threshold and transition. Through her writings on historical and cultural issues, Blennerhassett addressed topics as freedom, reconciliation of peoples and nations and ethical action. For her, the role of religion in this context was evident. The writings of Charlotte Blennerhassett, “the last European” (as she was described in obituaries), contributed to saving the non-ultramontane heritage from oblivion.

Studying Human Rights in the Middle East: Lingua Franca of Global Politics or Forked Tongue of Donors?

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Allen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
Women's Human Rights ◽  
Role Of Religion

The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim women's human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

Civil War and Religion: Turkey

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülay Türkmen
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Interstate Conflicts ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party ◽  
Kurdish Conflict ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
The Impact

Out of the 111 armed conflicts that took place worldwide between 1989 and 2000, only seven were interstate conflicts. The others were intrastate in nature. As a result, the last decade and a half witnessed a boom in the publication of works on civil wars. While the percentage of civil wars involving religion increased from 21% to 43% between the 1960s and 1990s, scholars have been rather slow to integrate the study of religion into the overall framework of conflict in general, and of civil wars in particular. Operating under the impact of the secularization thesis and treating religion as an aspect of ethnicity, the literature on civil wars has long embraced ethnonationalism as its subject matter. Yet, since the early 2000s there has been a rapid increase in the number of works focusing on religion and civil wars. While one branch treats religion as a trigger for and an exacerbating factor in conflict, another focuses on religion as a conflict resolution tool. Turkey is an apt case to ponder the latter as several governments have deployed religion (namely, Sunni Islam) as a tool to suppress ethnic divisions for years. During the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule, religion has gained even more visibility as a conflict resolution tool in the 33-year-long armed ethnic conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Yet, the role of religion in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict still remains understudied. Increased attention to this topic could deliver important insights not only for those who conduct research on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey specifically, but also for those who explore the role of religion in civil wars more generally.

Religion and Mobilization in the Syrian Uprising and War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Pearlman
Keyword(s):  
Divide And Conquer ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Conflict Settings ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Syrian Conflict ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Over Time

What role does religion play in mobilization in general, and in mobilization in conflict settings in particular? This chapter explores these questions through a case study of the Syrian uprising and war. Using published sources and original interviews, the author traces the role of religion and sect in Syria’s pre-2011 politics and then in successive stages of the subsequent conflict. She examines the role of religion in the motivations driving protest, the processes generating collective action, the militarization of mobilization, and the transformation of an uprising into war. It is argued that, while religion came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in mobilization over time, its role in the Syrian conflict has been less attributable to religion per se than to the ways religion is entwined with power, privilege, and the dynamics of violence itself. Where religion sometimes appeared significant, such as in the tendency of demonstrations to begin at mosques, the power of religion lay not in piety but in structural constraints. Though religion and sect became increasingly salient as the conflict escalated, this was primarily due to state repression and strategies of divide and conquer, and nothing particular to Islam. Scrutiny of the Syrian experience encourages us to critique assumptions about the distinctiveness of religion in driving protest and conflict in majority-Muslim societies, and instead to examine such mobilization using the same conceptual tools employed in cases of conflict across time and space.

Pathways to Violence in Civil Wars: Combatant Socialization and the Drivers of Participation in Civilian Targeting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc-Olivier Cantin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Civil War Literature ◽  
Violence Against Civilians ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Key Pathways ◽  
Individual Participation

Abstract Recent research has drawn attention to the role of socialization in shaping the behaviors of rebel combatants during civil wars. In particular, scholars have highlighted how vertical and horizontal socialization dynamics can bring combatants to engage in a range of wartime practices, including the use of violence against civilians. This article synthesizes existing theories of combatant socialization and combines them into an integrated framework, which casts the focus on individual pathways toward civilian targeting and specifies the underlying sociopsychological mechanisms through which socializing influences motivate participation in violence. Specifically, the article charts five key pathways that operate through different mechanisms and that are based upon varying degrees of internalization regarding the legitimacy of civilian targeting. In each case, I also identify a number of unit-level factors that are likely to make a given pathway particularly prevalent among combatants. The article then illustrates how these pathways map onto the actual experiences of civil war combatants by examining the drivers of individual participation in violence against civilians among low-ranking members of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. The case study evidence highlights the equifinal nature of violence perpetration during civil wars, shedding light on the different social needs, influences, sanctions, and constraints that may motivate involvement in violence. By analyzing rebel behavior through the prism of perpetrator studies, this article thus seeks to establish the civil war literature on firmer theoretical grounds, providing a synthetic account of the individual experiences, motives, and trajectories that are often left unaddressed in this body of research.

Secrets, Gossip and Betrayal

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167
Author(s):  
Kim Knibbe
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Moral Orientation ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Moral Universe ◽  
The One ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Parish Priests

This article discusses the process of doing fieldwork on the role of religion in moral orientation and then writing about it as a series of small betrayals. During the research it became clear that to gain insight into the ways in which moral worlds are constructed and the place of religious institutions and their representatives in these moral worlds, it was very important to understand how individual "shameful" secrets were produced. Furthermore, it was through gossip that I became familiar with the ways people related to the church as an institution with a moral discourse, and with its representatives, the local parish priests. Both in sociology and in anthropology, gossip is seen as a way of creating a shared moral universe. This article examines the ways in which the researcher becomes part of social processes through the sharing of secrets and gossip, and the ethical difficulties that arise from this: on the one hand, it seems imperative not to betray secrets, not to repeat gossip, not to betray the atmosphere of complicity surrounding this. On the other hand, not analyzing how individual secrets are produced through social and cultural processes and ignoring the role of gossip meant leaving out some of the most significant data. Furthermore, it shows that by paying attention to the ways in which gossip and secrets circulate, one can go beyond the “case study” approach that limits much qualitative research on religion.

It is God’s will: Exploiting religious beliefs as a means of human trafficking

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Erin C Heil
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Case Study Methodology ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Study Methodology ◽  
And Control ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Interpersonal Level ◽  
Level 2

Human traffickers use various methods to maintain and control their victims, including physical, economic, and psychological restraints. Specifically focusing on the psychological aspect of control, this paper seeks to address the role of religion and how it can be exploited as a tool of coercion. Employing case study methodology, this paper will focus on examples of Islam, House of Judah, and Scientology, and how belief systems facilitated victim coercion. The purpose is threefold: (1) to establish religion as a tool of coercion at the interpersonal level, (2) to examine specific trafficking cases in which religion was the method of coercion, and (3) to discuss the challenge of prosecuting cases in which the act was the result of religious coercion.

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