Sacred Spaces – Religion and Conflict Resolution
The IRCPL and the CDTR are happy to announce the continuation of the ongoing project Sacred Spaces – Religion and Conflict Resolution. Since 2009, Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology and History and Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs, have been fostering the examination of particular sacred sites, primarily in former Ottoman Empire areas, to look at historical as well as present-day issues surrounding shared sacred spaces. By delving into the past more carefully they show that we can document the legacy of shared sites and lived experience, thereby informing contemporary events.
What does it mean for a sacred religious site to be shared among different faiths? How do actors at different levels, those who live in direct proximity to the site or who use it every day, national and international governmental figures, religious leaders, and others work together to make a site a functional shared space? How do conflicts develop around these sites, and what can we do to move from conflict to cooperation? These are the questions that the Sacred Spaces project poses.
Following this line of thought, Sacred Spaces presents Sacred Sites: Post-Gujarat’s Hindu-Muslim Violence Reconciliation Workshop on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011. This workshop will seek to enable NGO activists who have been involved in reconciliation work in Gujurat, India, to share their experience and to assess the impact of their efforts.
Speakers will include Christophe Jaffrelot, Research director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and professor of South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, and Rajeev Bhargava, Senior Fellow and Director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Cosponsored by CDTR.
For more information please click here.
Past Sacred Spaces Events:
In April of 2011, Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies, part of the Middle East Institute, hosted a conference very relevant to the work of the Choreography of Sacred Sites project called Locating Tolerance: The Conflict over the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. Details of the conference can be found here.
Explore the May 2009 conference, Choreography of Sacred Space: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution, conducted in partnership with Bogaziçi University, Istanbul and Columbia University’s The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR), Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), and The Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR).
View Conference Program | Read Presentation Abstracts | Read Invitee Bios
Listen to Conference Audio
Religious antagonism and shared sanctuaries in Algeria
Dionigi Albera, French National Center for Scientific Research
Sacred Memories, Plural Realities: Remembering and Producing Shared Sacred Spaces
Anna Bigelow, North Carolina State University
Re-consolidating the borders between self and other and between self and the state: Ethnographic explorations of past memories and present struggles between Syrian Christians and Kurds at the margins of contemporary Turkey
Zerrin Ozlem Binar, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Comparative Perspectives on the Balkans and the Middle East
Glenn Bowman, University of Kent at Canterbury
Tolga Esmer, Central European University
Rabia Harmansah, Doctoral Student, University of Pittsburgh
Three Ways of Sharing the Sacred: Choreographies of Co-existence in Cyprus
Mete Hatay, Project Leader at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Cyprus Centre
Robert Hayden, University of Pittsburgh
Rassem Khamaisi, Department of Geography and Environmental Planning, University of Haifa
Tijana Krstic, Central European University
At the Boundaries of the Sacred. The Reinvention of Everyday Life in Jerusalem’s Al-Wad Street
Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge