The Boston Theological Institute

International Peacebuilding

IRENE - International Reconciliation Network
(A program of the Boston Theological Institute)

IRENE is a program of intermittent activity reflecting the engagement of BTI faculty, and particularly faculty from the BTI International Mission and Ecumenism committee working in different areas of the world in conflict transformation and peace-building.

This program is informed by a number of different sources, including the Conflict Transformation Program of Eastern Mennonite University, Religions for Peace (formerly, WCRP, or the World Conference on Religions for Peace), and the United Religions Initiative.

• Information on the Conflict Transformation Program of Eastern Mennonite University and its STAR Program in Trauma Awareness and Resilience: http://www.emu.edu/ctp/ctp.htm

• Religions for Peace (formerly, WCRP, or the World Conference on Religions for Peace): http://www.wcrp.org/

• United Religions Initiative: http://www.uri.org/

• Contact the BTI office for current activities and projects.

The purpose of the International Peacebuilding Network is to foster conflict transformation, particularly in multi-dimensional conflicts. Religions or religious persons are sometimes classified as: 1) non violent activists; 2) as advocates in support of one or other side of a conflict; 3) as third party functionaries including as advocates of a peace process itself; 4) as neutral observers; or 5) as enforcers or guarantors of political settlements. (See William Vendley and David Little in Religion: The Missing Art of Statecraft [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994] pp. 306-315). Their analysis, drawn from James Laue and Gerald Cormick’s “The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes” in Herbert C. Kelman and Donald P. Warwick edited work, The Ethics of Social Intervention (Washington DC: Halstead Press, 1978) can be applied to peace-making efforts in “identity-based” conflicts, such as South Africa, Bosnia and Serbia, Northern Ireland, and Mozambique. Work in these contexts that is undertaken by non-governmental agents, often religious leaders, is commonly referred to as “track two diplomacy,” This term was developed by Joseph Montville who describes track-two diplomacy in his work, The Arrow and the Olive Branch: A Case for Track Two Diplomacy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990) p. 163.

This is work that the International Reconciliation Network (IRENE) seeks to support. For example, the role of the churches in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been described in Cochrane, De Gruchy, and Martin, eds., Facing the Truth, South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999); Du Toit, C.W., ed. Confession and Reconciliation: A challenge to the churches in South Africa, Conference proceedings from UNISA March 1998 (Pretoria: Research Intstitute for Theology and Religion at UNISA, 1998); and by Audrey Chapman and Douglas Johnston. David Steele, formerly with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Olga Botcharova have written about religious peacemaking in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. Geraldine Smyth has done work on Northern Ireland, and Dr. Andrea Bartoli, Professor at the Center for International Conflict Resolution has written about the role of religious peacemakers in his essays “Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Mozambique Peace Process” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation, eds. Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Petersen (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001) and in “Mediating Peace in Mozambique” in Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World, ed. Chester Crocker, Fen Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Washington DC, USIP Press, 1999). This work is raised up in films produced by Etoile Productions, affiliated with Boston College, together with the Boston Theological Institute. (Information about ordering copies of these films is available on this website.)

Scholar and church leader, Chloe Breyer argues that less work has been done on the role of religious peacemakers in more complex conflicts, especially those involving Christian-Muslim tensions exacerbated after September 11, 2001 and the American military response. How, for example, might the work of a local religious agent seeking to engage in “track two diplomacy” change in conflicts that involve famine or other major humanitarian disasters demanding the intervention of international aid organizations—particularly, when many of the major aid organizations intervening are religious themselves? At a time when the effects of extreme poverty and natural disasters are felt particularly keenly in parts of the world where religious “fundamentalisms” may also be divisive social forces, religious peacemakers and faith–based international humanitarian organizations could benefit from awareness of the impact of one another’s work. (In Iraq, for example, after the removal of Saddam Hussein, it is unclear how the presence of American Evangelical Christian organizations has impacted the peacemaking work between indigenous Christians and Iraqi Muslims) As faith-based and secular international aid organizations grow in number and size, and protocols are developed on response to humanitarian disasters, taking into account identity conflict and the work of local religious peacemakers is an important consideration.

David Little and William Vendley argue that to develop the peacemaking potential, members of the world’s great religious traditions need to reflect critically on the primary language of their traditions’ customs, stories, narratives, and faith claims and be able to translate those claims into a “secondary language” of secular terms comprehensible to other religious traditions and reflecting a mutually agreed-upon set of “shared cares.” Examining the role of aid and aid delivery as an important component of religious peacemaking is important toward an understanding of the “secondary language” that William Vendley and others argue is a necessary step for all religious traditions to fully develop their theological capacity and resources for peacemaking in a religiously plural world. (Points of moral common ground or “shared cares” were articulated in 1970 by 250 senior leaders representing 10 major religious traditions at a World Conference on Religion and Peace gathering in Kyoto, Japan. Homer, Jack A, ed., Religion for Peace: Proceedings of the Kyoto Conference on Religion and Peace (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1973).