Finding Peace Through Religious Difference: Healing the Wounds of Violent Conflict Through Interfaith Dialogue

This independent study will examine the effectiveness of interfaith dialogue as a peacebuilding tool in post-conflict settings. Initially, International Relations as a discipline virtually ignored religion and its influence. Instead, it presumed that the world would move towards a state of complete secularism. Beginning in the latter part of the twentieth century, scholars have begun to examine how religion can be incorporated not only into International Relations theory, but also more practically in a wide variety of global interactions. Interfaith dialogue is but one way in which religion can be integrated into the peacebuilding process in a society that has experienced violent conflict. Using a comparative case study method, I examine interfaith dialogue in the peacebuilding processes of Bosnia-Herzegovina, El Salvador, and Lebanon. Because research on the application of interfaith dialogue is still in its early stages, this study focuses on gathering information, and identifying patterns and trends so that more concrete hypotheses can be constructed and tested in future research