Evidence of Positive Intergroup Perceptions About the Role of Religious Belief in an Intractable Conflict

Diversity of religious belief and identity is widely believed to be a source of intergroup conflict. Yet, emerging research challenges the notion that belief in God promotes parochialism. Because inaccurate and negative intergroup perceptions often underlay conflict, we theorized that negative perceptions about outgroup members’ religious beliefs may represent an independent source of discord. Contrary to this prediction, three preregistered experiments demonstrate that religious Muslim Palestinians and Jewish Israelis believe that the other understands their God to be an entity that encourages intergroup prosociality and benevolence. Muslim Palestinians (Study 1, N = 314) and Jewish Israelis (Study 2, N = 394) predicted outgroup members would give more money in intergroup contexts when asked to think about God. Study 3 (N = 373) extends this to a more conflict-adjacent domain; Jewish Israelis predicted that Muslim Palestinians believed God would prefer them to value the lives of Jews and Muslims more equally.

The calculus of peace and conflict: a contractualist perspective

Purpose Intractable conflict is a long-time violent and self-perpetuating crisis. The peacemaking revolution has the potential to stop the destructive dynamic of the conflict. The purpose of this paper is to present a contractualist model of a peacemaking revolution and its theoretical foundations. It analyzes the revolutionary peacemaking process in Northern Ireland during the 1990s in light of the contractualist model. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a contractualist model to describe the interplay between leaders (policymakers) and people (public opinion) and its impact on the strategy to cope with situations of intractable conflict. The paper includes theoretical background and a case study analysis. Findings The peacemaking revolution is a process of dynamic equilibrium between peacemaking policy and public expectations for change. It progresses from one point of equilibrium to the next. Originality/value The paper intends to add a fresh perspective to the study of the peacemaking revolution, in general, and the interplay between peacemaking policy and public support in particular. It points out that a consensus-building process, which combines political-elite diplomacy and public diplomacy, has the potential to create the conditions for a peacemaking revolution. Political-elite diplomacy offers diplomatic channels for leaders to begin a peace process, support it and conclude agreements. Public diplomacy offers instruments to involve the people in the peacemaking efforts, prepare them for a change and motivate the leaderships to conclude agreements.

Regional-Based Conflict and Confidence-Building Strategies: The Case of the Union for the Mediterranean

This study considers the challenge of operating a regional association that includes combatants and adversaries as members, and the response to such challenges. Conflict type, defined by intensity and duration, is located on the vertical axis, and engagement level (international, regional and bilateral) is fixed along the horizontal axis, to distinguish the conditions supporting confidence-building (one of many peacebuilding approaches). The utility of this framework is examined by applying it to the Union for the Mediterranean – a 42-member association operating in a region where conflict is prevalent (Syrian war, Arab – Israeli conflict, Greece – Turkey conflict, and Algeria – Morocco conflict). The study concludes that confidence-building has relevance to hot and cold intractable conflict but not to contemporary war. Curiously, the intractable conflict literature rarely discusses confidence-building and the Euromed literature does not characterize EU behavior in a confidence-building context. The study builds a research agenda to further examine the confidence-building framework.

Contextualizing Discrimination of Religious and Linguistic Minorities in South Thailand

This article explores how scholarship can be put to work by specialists penning evidence-based policies seeking peaceful resolutions to long-standing, complex, and so-far intractable conflict in the Malay-Muslim dominated provinces of South Thailand. I contend that more is required than mere empirical data, and that the existing analysis of this conflict often lacks theoretical ballast and overlooks the wider historical context in which Bangkok pursued policies impacting its ethnolinguistically, and ethnoreligiously diverse citizens. I demonstrate the utility of both interacting with what social theorists have written about what “religion” and language do—and do not—have in common, and the relative importance of both in sub-national conflicts, and comparative historical analysis. The case studies that this article critically introduces compare chapters of ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious chauvinism against a range of minorities, including Malay-Muslim citizens concentrated in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. These include Buddhist ethnolinguistic minorities in Thailand’s Northeast, and Catholic communities during the second world war widely referred to as the high tide of Thai ethno-nationalism. I argue that these revealing aspects of the southern Malay experience need to be contextualized—even de-exceptionalized.