Conflict, Conflict Resolution and Peace-Building: The Role of Religion in Mozambique, Nigeria and Cambodia

Abstract

Confounding the expectations of secularists, religion has a strong – perhaps growing – significance as a key source of identity for millions of people, especially in the developing world. In recent years, religion has made a muted but tangible impact in Western development circles, most commonly reflecting the view that religious hatreds and differences are central to many recent and current conflicts in the developing world. This paper argues that religion can both encourage conflict and build peace, reflecting growing evidence that religious forces can play a constructive role in helping to resolve conflicts. Religious individuals and faith-based organisations, as carriers of religious ideas, can play important roles, not only as a source of conflict but also as a tool for conflict resolution and peace-building, providing early warnings of conflict, good offices once conflict has erupted, and contributing to advocacy, mediation and reconciliation. Brief case studies of religious peacemakers – from Mozambique, Nigeria and Cambodia – demonstrate attempts, characteristically partially successful, to reconcile previously warring communities, thereby helping to achieve greater social cohesion, and providing a crucial foundation for progress in enhancing human development.

Notes

In this paper, the term ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ will be shortened to Africa for reasons of conciseness.

A clan is smaller than an ethnic group, a collection of families of variable overall size often bearing the same family name, under the control of a single chieftain.

Such factors are certainly relevant to the serious civil conflict occurring in January 2008 in Kenya, an outbreak triggered by a very dubious presidential election result.

Often shortened in this section to ‘Buddhism’.

95 per cent of Cambodians are Theravada Buddhists https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cb.html.

Maha Ghosananda, a six-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee who died in March 2007, was Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism, elected by the country's Buddhist monks in 1988. Maha Ghosananda spent 1965–78 in an isolated forest monastery in southern Thailand, devoted to meditation in silence. It was necessary for him to spend time in this environment in Thailand as settings of comparative tranquillity did not exist in Cambodia, where monasteries are located in towns and villages, implying much daily interaction with local people.

Siddhartha Gautama, ‘the Enlightened One’, the founder of Buddhism, who lived c. 563–483 BCE.

Maha Ghosananda described his form of socially engaged Buddhism in this way: ‘I was making peace with myself … I was making peace with myself … When you make peace with yourself, you make peace with the world.’

He said: ‘Listen carefully, peace is growing in Cambodia, slowly, step by step’ (http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=6,3888,0,0,1,0).