Can religious groups help to prevent violent conflict?

Young men at Tabalia in Solomon Islands, home of the Melanesian Brotherhood
which works for peace. Credit: Laura Payne. All rights reserved.

A glance at the daily news confirms that religion is
regularly complicit in violence. In early January of 2015, Boko
Haram killed up to two thousand people in Baga, Northern Nigeria. As this massacre
unfolded, two men stormed into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris
and murdered 12 people. Hijacking a car, they
told the driver “If the media ask you anything, tell them it’s al-Qaeda in
Yemen.” Both before and after these events the so-called Islamic State (IS) drip-fed
films showing the beheadings of civilians and hostages in territory it
controls.

We are all too familiar with the idea of violence in the
name of religion, and not just Islam. Other faiths have been complicit in
violence throughout history, from the Crusades in the Middle Ages through to
the recent brutalities of the Lord’s
Resistance Army in Central Africa. In July 2014, Israel’s massacre in Gaza killed nearly 2,200
people, virtually all of them Palestinian Muslims.

But to recognize that violence often involves religion is
not the same as saying that religion is the driving force of violence.
Conflicts normally have their causal factors firmly embedded in the material
world. Politicians and armed groups use religion to divide neighbour from
neighbour, call people to arms, and raise the stakes in their pursuit of power.
Religious identity and ideology matter, but they tell us more about how
conflicts are set in motion than about their causes.

Debates about religion and violence have raged for years and
intensely so now. But one area that’s underexplored is how people of faith can
help to prevent violence—not just to
manage or mitigate it, but ensure it doesn’t take hold in the first place.

I work with religious groups in the thick of violent
conflict in places as diverse as Nigeria, Zanzibar and Solomon Islands. Sometimes
these groups have had a hand in exacerbating violence, directly or indirectly. At
other times they have played a peacemaking role. And sometimes they have done both,
even simultaneously.

In Rwanda, for example, several hundred clergy
were killed during the genocide of 1994, some for being Tutsi and others
for refusing to stand by as Tutsis were slaughtered. But priests and nuns have also
been convicted as génocidaires, and church
groups have been accused of failing to bear witness to atrocities or call those
responsible to account.

Wars are never simple, and neither are religious
institutions. But always, and even in the most desperate of places, I’ve come
across people working to prevent violence who are inspired by their faith. They
are remarkable not only in their conviction and commitment, but also in their
foresight. To prevent violence one must anticipate it. This is what separates conflict
prevention from response.

To anticipate violence is rarer than one might think. To
organize in advance of it is rarer still. Sitting politicians have little
incentive to raise the alarm in case it reflects on their competency. As is
clear in Syria, the international community doesn’t always welcome warning calls
to intervene in internal conflicts, however high the levels of atrocity.  And ordinary people are buried in the
everyday, trying to keep body and soul together and the wolf from the door.

But some donor governments and international organisations
are now investing in conflict prevention. They sponsor election-monitoring
missions, early warning systems, dialogues, and programmes to counter
extremism. Groups like Ushahidi
(or “witness” in Somali) crowd-map data during crises through text messaging
and email, and use it to provide real time information and lay the groundwork
for truth telling and accountability.

These initiatives appeal to the technocratic base notes of
policymaking—where every problem can be hacked and social conflicts are just another
bug in the system. This is ironic, because working with religious groups has
taught me that preventing violence is more of an art than a science.

For all their readiness to build technocratic prevention
mechanisms, most donor organizations have a blind spot when it comes to recognising
the work that’s already being done by religious groups. I can’t blame them. Donors
have their paymasters too. They are expected to show value for money and steer
clear of controversy. They are risk averse, and working with religious groups
is fraught with risk.

But this stance represents a huge missed opportunity. In the
Nigerian cities of Jos and Kaduna, for example, church-led and interfaith groups
are helping to tip the balance in favour of non-violent responses when crises
emerge. They have the local access and real time information to intervene at
critical moments. And they have the trust and influence required to build
bridges between decision-makers, working over the long term so that these
relationships are more resilient.

One interfaith group formed of ex-combatants in Kaduna literally
counts the costs of conflict with communities, bringing home how destructive it
really is. How much does a dead cow cost? A dead child? A burnt house? It can
be harder for agitators to mobilise communities when they can put a figure on
what will be lost.

Another group in Jos organises local peace committees.
Comprised of men and women, young and old, from different religious and
political creeds and backgrounds, these committees are the eyes and ears of
their towns and villages. They look for indicators of violence like irregular
vehicles on the road at night, a tipped-off neighbouring tribe packing up and
moving on, strangers asking questions, dialed-up political rhetoric.

When trigger points are hit the committees can take action
quickly. There’s often a gap between raising the alarm and effecting a
response, but experience shows that the more localised the responses are, the
quicker and more effective they’re likely to be. 

Other forms of prevention work try to tackle the underlying
causes of conflict. In the Democratic Republic of Congo for example, the church-supported Baraka
Academy teaches orphaned children whose parents were killed during successive
conflicts in the Ituri district.  Why?  Because the founders had the foresight to know
that today’s street children, soaked in violence, are likely to become tomorrow’s
child soldiers, or the machete-wielding, glue-sniffing enraged young men who politicians
can hire for $20 a time to go on the rampage. This is conflict prevention on a
generational scale, attempting to halt the powerful dynamics that propel
violence into the future.

Many of the characteristics that are vital for prevention
work—like trust, local knowledge and navigation, and foresight—might apply to
non-faith based organisations too. But the pastoral support that faith groups can
provide and their closeness to people at life’s most important moments mean
they can often form relationships of a different quality.

Sometimes the importance of spirituality in guiding behavior
is explicit, as in Solomon Islands where the hands of ex-combatants are symbolically
washed when they turn over their weapons.  

Also in Solomon Islands, a prison chaplain told me how in
the reconciliation ceremonies he hosts, “The offenders say something and then they
ask the victims to forgive. I hold out my stole and everyone holds [a part of
it] to show that they are connected. I say a prayer and the victims and
perpetrators hug each other. The perpetrators stay in prison because that it is
the law of the land, but they are now brothers and sisters again.”

Sometimes the link to spirituality is less overt but still
pervasive. Worldviews are underpinned by religious philosophies from which
people draw strength to persevere with relationship building in testing
circumstances. And sometimes, as with non-faith based organisations, it is
simply being a local, permanent, trusted presence that bequeaths legitimacy and
the mandate to act.

Of course these are success stories. What about the dilemmas
involved in working with religious groups? They can be complicit in violence, and
oppressive of women, minorities, young people—most people, in fact.  But governments can be oppressive too. They
can discriminate, abuse, mismanage, torture and kill. And if isn’t possible to
change society without engaging with governments, the same goes for religion.
In contexts where large parts of the population are religious (which
means most of the world), religious groups are simply too big to
ignore. 

Even if they weren’t, there is a lot to learn from them.
When conflict prevention is examined through a faith-based lens, a different
set of factors come to the foreground. Technical fixes seem less important,
faddish even. The importance of relationship comes into focus. The approach to
time changes. The slow, steady approach I’ve witnessed in many places can yield
real results. The tortoise can overtake the hare.

Working with faith groups to prevent conflict may not be
easy, but it is important. Ultimately we have to work with societies as they
exist, not as we would like them to be. Where communities are held together in
large part by religious institutions, that means coming out of the comfort zone
of secularity.

Faith-based approaches are
a provocation. They turn some of the conventional wisdom that has grown up
around conflict prevention on its head. And that is badly needed—never more
than now.