Search Results (33)

A sustainable peace process requires more than temporary agreements or the resolution of immediate conflicts—it demands a deep, enduring transformation rooted in the values, perceptions, and interactions of individuals within a society. Traditional peacebuilding often emphasizes events, political power struggles, and leadership, but the collective impact of individual perspectives may be the true determinant of lasting peace. This multidisciplinary study empirically examines the role of wisdom—a fundamental psychological construct—in shaping individual attitudes and its cascading influence on the broader peace process. The findings highlight the profound implications of wisdom for sustainability in peacebuilding. Greater wisdom strongly correlates with a predisposition for peace, reconciliation, and societal reunification, aligning with sustainable development principles. Thus, this study advocates for a sustainability-oriented approach to peace processes, emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual wisdom, collective hope, and the long-term viability of peace. By fostering wisdom, maintaining hope, and addressing systemic challenges, societies can move toward a more sustainable and harmonious future, rooted in reconciliation, equity, and mutual understanding. This holistic approach strengthens peace prospects and advances the broader goal of a just, sustainable world for future generations. Full article

Romeo and Juliet remains one of the most frequently performed plays of Shakespeare in Korea, one reason for which is obvious: the feud between the Capulets and Montagues resonates with the continuing division of Korea into North and South. Indeed, many productions of the play in South Korea since the Korean War (1950–53) have made direct and indirect allusions to the political reality of division. Nothing defines Korea so much as division and the desire to overcome that division. With this context in mind, my essay will examine four representative but unique productions of the play from the War period to the twenty-first century: a women’s musical theater adaptation during the War that was a popular success; a production by the Mokwha Repertory Theatre from the early 2000s that alludes directly to the state of division into North and South, and which has toured the globe; a 2009 musical theater version by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea that emphasizes regional rivalries; and a 2022 production that sets the play in the DMZ. However, while exploring the depiction of division in these productions, I will focus in particular on how marriage is understood in relation to national division and the possibility of reconciliation. I will argue that the productions bring attention to the intersection of the social and political practices that sustain division. Full article

The demise of apartheid as a political policy of institutionalized racism and the advent of the so-called “New South Africa” based on constitutional democracy presented a huge, almost impossible, challenge of forgiveness and reconciliation among the South African people. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others, led the way, but the capacity of the ordinary people of South Africa to forgive their oppressors has been largely responsible for the success of the democratic project. This begs the questions of what political forgiveness is, why it is important for the South African democracy to succeed, and how the people were able to do it. Three leading South African exponents of the topic of forgiveness—Desmond Tutu, Antjie Krog, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela—are put into conversation with a leading European exponent, Hannah Arendt. Arendt uses the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to formulate her understanding of political forgiveness and the others the highly contested but deeply engrained, notoriously elusive, and endlessly prolific African philosophy of Ubuntu, though they each have their different ways of reframing it. Other Western interlocutors are briefly introduced to bring different dimensions to the conversation and highlight the sharp contrast between Western and African ontologies, and the agonistic nature of the new South African democracy is mooted. Full article

The Declaration of Principles (Oslo I Accord, September 1993) was the inaugural groundbreaking agreement in the Israeli‒Palestinian Identity conflict, which revolves around consecrated territory as well as identity components on both sides. This historic accord elicited myriad responses, yet the stances of religious figures are particularly consequential given the profound and intricate religious underpinnings of the conflict. This paper presents the attitudes toward the Declaration of Principles (DOP) held by six religious personages: Rabbi Yehuda Amital, an Israeli Jew supporter of the DOP; Rabbi Shlomo Goren, an Israeli Jew who opposed it; Sheikh Abdullah Nimer Darwish, an Israeli Arab who endorses the DOP; Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli Arab who rejects it; Sheikh ʿImad al-Falouji, a Palestinian proponent; and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian opponent. Based on rulings, statements, and press publications, this paper analyzes their rationales and utilization of religion’s social influencing mechanisms, seeking to understand religion’s capacity to confer legitimacy upon alternative religious values enabling conflict resolution through political means, thereby impacting the conflict toward reconciliation or, conversely, escalation. This paper aims to characterize the discourse and reasoning to propose more efficacious means of attaining broad religious legitimacy for future, sustainable peace accords. Full article

In the current global landscape, characterized by religious fervour, social and political unrest, economic instability, and environmental challenges, spiritual leaders stand as pivotal agents of change. Their role is especially crucial in contexts marred by ingrained injustices and persistent conflicts, such as the Palestinian–Israeli settler colonial context—a reality I have been intimately involved with over three decades of reconciliation work. This paper contextualizes scholarship on spiritual leadership within the Palestinian–Israeli context by integrating it with settler colonial theory. By applying insights about spiritual leadership to this context, three key traits of spiritual leaders—(1) spiritual authority, (2) discernment, and (3) the ethical use of power—are identified as essential for envisioning an alternative future. By embodying these traits, spiritual leaders can effectively guide their communities through the multifaceted realities, advocating a transformative approach to leadership and interreligious work. Full article

We examine how Plato, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R Tolkien responded to tumultuous times that included the ongoing reality of death through wars and plagues and social unrest. More specifically, we draw upon the historical backdrop of Plato’s dialogues, C.S. Lewis’s essay, “Learning in War-time”, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to bring to light important social and psychological dimensions of the learning process that may help students and educators navigate these tumultuous times that cause confrontation with death. We argue for a middle ground between emphasizing the “unprecedented” nature of events like COVID-19, the politically divisive state of affairs in America, the war in Ukraine, the devastation of earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, and the desire to find a new normal in the midst of world-wide turmoil. We first reflect on our experiences with pandemic teaching and learning. Then, we address some contemporary research on pandemic learning. Third, we turn to the historical backdrop of Plato’s dialogues, specifically the Plague, The Peloponnesian War, the rule of “The Thirty”, the restoration of democracy, and the Reconciliation Agreement in Athens. Fourth, we consider some of the effects of the first and second world wars for both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Finally, we suggest that Gandalf emerges as a model of the middle ground we aim for in our pedagogical relationships. Full article

The power of the “moderate” branch of the Islamic Movement (Alharaka al-Islamiyya, subsequently referred to as IM) Southern Faction (IMSF) in Israel stems from its ability to adapt to different situations, reconcile with the complex reality of being an indigenous minority in a state that defines itself a “Jewish state”, and operate within the state structure accepting democratic processes that have long been debated to clash with Islamism. Besides being represented in the Israeli Knesset since 1996, the culmination of this adaptation was the joining of the movement to the short-lived Zionist coalition government on 2 June 2021 (the government collapsed in July 2022). This historic entry of an Arab Party into a Jewish/Zionist government coalition for the first time in Israel’s history was a shocking surprise to many, not only due to the IM being an Arab–Palestinian movement but also an Islamist movement. My analysis shows that despite this reconciliation, the IM continues to emphasize religiosity, binding it to the national political struggle and identity of Israel’s Palestinian minority. For its supporters, the IMSF is seen as a meeting point of spiritual/religious needs on the one hand and material needs in the social, political, and cultural spheres on the other. However, for its opponents, mainly from the other Arab political parties, the IM had deviated from the national consensus and accepted strategies and tools to deal with the challenges facing them as a minority in Israel. And, for some others, the IM had even deviated from Islam itself. I draw on a field study that spanned several years. It is based on qualitative, extensive interviews with senior Islamist and non-Islamist leaders in Israel, as well as primary sources of the IM, including publications, leaders’ speeches, and social media. All quotes in this article are based on the author’s interviews during 2022–2024. Interviews with the following leaders and activists: IM leader Abdul-Malik Dahamsheh, sheik Ibrahim Sarsour, former MK Muhammad Hasan Ken`an, Nosiba Darwish `Issa, IM MK Eman Yassin Khatib, NDA’ chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, secretary general of Abnaa al-Balad (Sons of the Country) Muhammad Kana`neh, and with Kufr Qare` former mayor Zuhair Yahya were conducted by in-person or by phone during summer–fall 2023. The interviews with former IMNF activist Aisha Hajjar, activist Zuhriyyeh ‘Azab, journalist Abd el-Rahman Magadleh, and DFPE member Elias Abu Oksa were conducted via What’s App, Messenger, and e-mail in 2022. The interview with political analyst Ameer Makhoul was conducted in December 2023 via Messenger. Follow-up communication was mainly through What’s App to clarify certain points. The interview questions focused on the reasons for the Islamic Movement’s division into two wings, the religious and political justifications for entering the Knesset and the coalition, the relationship between the southern wing and the main Arab parties active in the Israeli Knesset, the experience of unity with them, and the experience of its members while in the Zionist coalition. This article examines how the Islamic Movement in Israel uses religion as a tool to influence the national, cultural, political, economic, and social lives of the Arab minority in Israel. It asks: How does the Islamic Movement, religiously and politically, justify its involvement in the political game and in a Zionist government coalition, and how do Arab parties perceive this involvement? Moreover, it raises an important question about the nature of the movement: to what extent is the Islamic Movement a political Islam movement, and whether it has abandoned the basic goals of political Islam for the sake of becoming a democratic Islamic party? This article will provide significant insight into crucial aspects of the IM that have been previously overlooked. While being in a Zionist coalition gave hardly any latitude in decision making about policies, budgets were an attractive avenue for the Islamic Movement to guide public opinion and gain political support. The article comes during the ongoing war on Gaza, which will undoubtedly cast a shadow on the political climate and the political map in Israel in general and on the political work of Arab parties and the Islamic Movement in particular. Although it is too early to predict the impact of this war on the Islamic Movement and its political future, it can be assumed that the impact will be profound. Full article

This article employs the LIM method, complemented by publications and interviews conducted during the ongoing war in Ukraine, to explore the shifts in attitudes toward war and peace within Ukrainian evangelical communities. This shift involves a transition from a pacifist mindset previously predominant among Ukrainian evangelicals to questions about their responsibility and involvement in Ukraine’s state and society amid the war that Russia has launched against Ukraine. Interviews with leaders and active church members hint at a possible alignment with Stassen’s alternative model of transformative initiatives that might provide potential guidance. While reconciliation initiatives amid the ongoing war may be premature, the article highlights the role of Christian communities in transformative peacebuilding within Ukraine. It is necessary to address tensions within Ukraine. This also entails aiding war-affected individuals, ensuring care for soldiers and civilians, and confronting power abuse and corruption. Ukraine’s unity, freedom, peace, and reconciliation must include diverse political and social groups. The article recommends that Ukrainian evangelicals embrace a contextual public theology that advocates for peace, justice, and reconciliation. Ukrainian evangelicals, while supporting soldiers engaged in active combat against Russian invaders, are also contemplating strategies for active participation in peacebuilding and post-war reconstruction. Full article

Russian interference and invasion in Ukraine have transformed that nation’s historical practice of mural painting. A traditional art form with deep religious and political resonance in Ukraine, murals have become an instrument for patriotic mass mobilisation against the Russian military threat. From the mid-2000s, spraypaint graffiti underwent a gradual process of professionalisation and reconciliation with mainstream culture as Ukrainian municipalities pursued urban beautification initiatives and city-branding strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges of postsocialism. It was this legacy of apolitical, privately funded street art that provided the foundations for patriotic muralism following the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Amidst the post-Maidan search for a postcolonial understanding of Ukrainian culture disentangled from Soviet and Russian influences, professionally produced murals in central urban districts proposed new visions of national identity. The war’s intensification since 2022 has resulted in a decentralisation of mural production. No longer reliant on international festivals in urban centres, conflict murals are now made by Ukrainian artists in large cities and small towns across the country. The newest murals represent a blending of the physical and digital—with a subject matter often inspired by viral conflict memes; artworks are, in turn, shared with worldwide audiences via social media. Full article

Indigenous peoples’ perceptions of wellbeing differ from non-Indigenous constructs. Thus, it is imperative to recognize that Indigenous peoples will conceptualize wellbeing from their perspectives and set their own wellbeing priorities. In keeping with this viewpoint, the aims of the present study were to conceptualize wellbeing and determine what was (and is) important for wellbeing from Canadian Indigenous peoples’ perspectives. In this paper, we take a partnership approach based on the elements of respect, equity, and empowerment. One primary data source and two existing data sources were examined and analyzed thematically utilizing a combination approach of deductive and inductive coding. Indigenous leadership and organizations viewed wellbeing holistically and conceptualized wellbeing multidimensionally. From across Canada, wellbeing was communicated as physical, economic, political, social, and cultural. The scaling of wellbeing represented a collectivist perspective, and land was the connecting thread between all types of wellbeing, being a place to practice cultural traditions, reassert one’s Indigenous identity, find solace, and pass on Indigenous knowledge and languages. Although wellbeing was discussed in the context of the individual, family, community, and nation, wellbeing was most often discussed at the cultural level by regional and national Indigenous leadership and organizations. Even in acknowledging the great cultural diversity among Canadian Indigenous nations, four concordant themes were identified regionally and nationally, with respect to what was important for cultural wellbeing: land and water, sustainability, and inherent obligations; being on the land, and indigenous languages and knowledge systems; sustainable development; and meaningful involvement in decision-making, and free, prior, and informed consent. Taking into account these themes is foundational for any interaction with Indigenous peoples, especially in the context of land, culture, and development. There needs to be a new beginning on the journey to reconciliation with land and cultural wellbeing at the forefront. Full article

Political secularism can be defined as a kind of political philosophy that sees the secular state as setting the terms of encounter between the secular and the religious. However, religion and religious organisations are not necessarily seen as oppositional to the secular state; there can be myriad forms of coexistence between secular and religious authorities. The argument forwarded in this article is based on ethnographic research focussing on the presence and social significance of religious materiality in the region considered to be one of the most secularised worldwide—the north-eastern part of contemporary Germany. I investigate the strategies of actors socially recognised as either religious or secular towards each other, looking at how secular actors assign a place to religious symbols, materiality, theological concepts, organisations, and communities; on the other hand I investigate strategies that religious actors adopt in a context of political secularism. Even if political secularism presupposes supremacy of the secular state over religious actors and the right of the former to make legally binding decisions concerning the latter, those religious actors are not passive—they react to secular initiatives and they try to carve for themselves a space in a public sphere, while at the same time the secular or rather nonreligious actors mobilize religious elements for a variety of reasons. Full article

The Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants of the southern Israeli desert region share a common desert vista. However, they are diverse, multicultural communities who suffer inequity in access to valuable resources such as water. Between 2019 and 2021, Common Views art collective initiated a socially engaged durational art project with Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants entitled Common Views. The art collective seeks to enact sustainable practices of water preservation as a mutually fertile ground for collaboration between the conflicted communities, by reawakening and revitalizing rainwater harvesting, as part of traditional local desert life. Their interventions promote new concepts of Environmental Reconciliation, aiming to confront social-ecological issues, the commons, and resource equity, grounded in interpersonal collaborative relationships with stratified local communities. Their site-specific art actions seek to drive a public discourse on environmental and sustainable resources, while reflecting on the distribution of social and spatial imbalance. They take part in contemporary art discourse relative to socially engaged practices, yet their uniqueness lies in conflictual sites such as the discord arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their proposed model for resolution linking politics with environment. It utilizes renegotiation with histories and heritage, as a vehicle to evoke enhanced awareness of mutual environmental concerns in an attempt at reconciliation on political grounds. Full article

The reconciliation of societies in negotiated transitions from civil war to peace represents a practical challenge. While the political dimension concerns the construction of socio-political relations, the interpersonal dimension focuses on intergroup relationships. Empirical evidence shows that reconciliation should not assign primacy to one dimension over another; rather, it should address the interaction between them. However, research on this topic is scarce. There is a need to develop an instrument to assess the political and interpersonal dimensions of reconciliation in peacebuilding contexts. This study developed the Political and Interpersonal Reconciliation Scale (PIRS) and assessed its psychometric properties based on a sample of Colombian population after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group. The results show the validity of a factorial structure for two components as well as an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha. Concerning external validity, in line with the existing literature, the scale under study was positively related to confidence in the peace agreement, trust in the ex-combatants, willingness to share with the adversary and community identification. This study provides evidence that the Political and Interpersonal Reconciliation Scale is a valid and reliable instrument for evaluating reconciliation in peacebuilding contexts. Full article

This study focused on how rural communities adopted consociational mechanisms to organize collective entrepreneurship, addressing the conflicts across the divergent social groups toward a convergent process that allows different entrepreneurs to fold into a grand coalition. It extended the theory of consociation from political science to the field of social entrepreneurship and inductively theorized the dimensional mechanisms based on the collective entrepreneurial effort of Yuan village in Shaanxi province of China. The results demonstrated four streams of consociational mechanisms: (1) emancipation to empower the vulnerable groups, (2) reconciliation of divergent interests, (3) reflection learning to generate reciprocity, and (4) proportional participation to institutionalize a hierarchical order in the community. These results advance the consociation theory and the organization of social change literature with strong policy implications. Full article

This article reviews the first twelve months of the civil disobedience movement in Myanmar following the 1 February 2021 coup d’état and its many dynamics and manifestations. Myanmar’s ‘Spring Revolution’ generated a shared sense of national unity—overcoming gender, ethnic, religious and class boundaries, but raising questions about the long-term sustainability of nonviolent civil resistance in a state where the military has for decades wielded political and economic power. Since the coup, Myanmar has been in turmoil, paralysed by instability which escalated after the military’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy activists. The article charts the growth of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), its multiple methods of strategic resistance and non-cooperation, and the radicalisation of the resistance agenda. It analyses the formation of the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), the creation of the interim National Unity Government (NUG), the founding of the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) and the inauguration of the People’s Defence Force (PDF). It examines the implications for Myanmar when the crisis reached a more complex phase after the military’s open use of force and terror on the broader civilian population prompted the NUG to declare war on the junta, and to urge ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) and newly formed anti-junta civilian militias (PDF) to attack the State Administration Council (SAC) as a terrorist organisation. The NUG now opposes the military junta by strategic and peaceful non-cooperation, armed resistance, and international diplomacy. This paper considers whether the predominantly nonviolent civil resistance movement’s struggle for federal democracy and inclusive governance is laying the foundations for eventual transition to a fully democratic future or whether the cycles of violence will continue as the military continues to control power by using intimidation and fear. It notes that the coup has destroyed the economy and expanded Myanmar’s human rights and humanitarian crises but has also provided the opportunity for Myanmar’s people to explore diverse visions of a free, federal, democratic and accountable Myanmar. It finally examines the possibilities for future peaceful nation building, reconciliation, and the healing of the trauma of civil war. Full article