The Scope of Opportunities for Religious Peacebuilders

Steen-Johnsen applies Brewer et al.’s understanding of scope of opportunities as access to strategic social spaces, when assessing what religious peacebuilders can do in various political contexts. She outlines how Ethiopian religious leaders are only able to engage in peacebuilding activities which are acceptable to the regime, such as proffering a coexistence discourse. The religious leaders cannot, however, launch ideas which can be understood as challenging the political strategies of the EPRDF regime. Steen-Johnsen suggests that this renders the contribution of religious actors to peace much weaker in this type of political context as they fail to address important political contentiou…

State and Religion in Ethiopia

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen presents a study of religious peacebuilding in Ethiopia to depict how religious peacebuilders are affected by the political strategies of state authorities related to civil society. She outlines how Ethiopian politics have been historically dominated by an Amhara-Orthodox elite. This dominance persists in contemporary political life in Ethiopia. Steen-Johnsen also presents the current political strategies of the Ethiopian authoritarian regime aimed at controlling political mobilization in the civil and religious spheres. She outlines how religious and civil actors in the country have historically been submissive to state authorities and suggests that this form…

State Control over Religious Peacebuilding

Steen-Johnsen argues that it is necessary not only to consider the political strategies of a state related to the civil sphere, but also to study the enactment of these strategies in state–religious relationships. By drawing upon empirical data from Ethiopia, Steen-Johnsen shows how the political authorities in this context exert subtle and more open strategies to control political mobilization when religious actors engage in peacebuilding. This underscores the possible double nature of political strategies, as some forms of control are open and others more subtle. Steen-Johnsen outlines how the religious actors adapt to these forms of state control and develop an understanding of their own…

Har vi for stor tro på religiøse lederes mulighet til å bygge fred?

Author's accepted manuscript Mange av verdens voldelige konflikter har religiøse dimensjoner. Religiøse toppledere går ofte inn i disse konfliktsituasjonene for å forsøke å redusere volden mellom religiøse grupper, for å forebygge nye voldsutbrudd og for å støtte pågående fredsprosesser.1 Men har slike prosjekter god nok effekt? Skaper de fred?

State, Politics and the Legitimacy of Religious Peacebuilders

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen shows how the failure of religious leaders to challenge the political strategies of the Ethiopian regime affects their legitimacy as spokespersons for peace. Steen-Johnsen shows how this makes the religious leaders appear as accomplices of the state among groups that they try to address with their message of peace. Steen-Johnsen acknowledges that conflicts which appear religious almost always have political dimensions. She shows how retorting to toothless messages of coexistence and appearing alongside government officials, the Ethiopian religious leaders lose legitimacy as spokespersons for peace. Steen-Johnsen suggests considering how relationships between s…

Lived Religion and Nonreligion Among Humanitarians in South Sudan

A Social Capital Perspective on the Peace Work of Religious Women

State and Politics in Religious Peacebuilding in Kenya, Zanzibar and Rwanda

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen argues that the question how do the political strategies of the state to regulate to the civil sphere and the enactment of these strategies influence the scope of opportunity for religious actors to build peace is relevant in contexts beyond Ethiopia. Steen-Johnsen presents three different African contexts: Kenya, Zanzibar and Rwanda, where political strategies to regulate the civil and religious spheres exist in different forms. Steen-Johnsen outlines how state authorities in these contexts, through different means, have launched political strategies to curb, or to some extent control, conflicts with religious dimensions. This, she argues, prompts the questio…

The lamination machine and laminating as thing-power in early childhood pedagogical practice

This article considers the different ways in which the lamination machine influences early childhood practice. By using Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘thing-power’, we focus on how preschool teachers an...

Religious Peacebuilding and State Context

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen outlines how academic debates on religious peacebuilding have moved from focusing on opportunities toward being increasingly critical of the potential of such initiatives. A few theorists, like Brewer, Higgins and Teeney, have acknowledged that religious peacebuilding initiatives must be considered as interlinked with, and influenced by, the political context in which they are situated. In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen expands the discussion of how political context affects religious peacebuilding. She suggests that understanding how the political strategies of state authorities aimed at regulating the civil sphere are affecting religious peacebuilding initiativ…

Theory on State and Politics in Religious Peacebuilding

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen offers an overview over theoretical perspectives which allow us to consider how the political strategies of a state to regulate civil society influence the opportunities of religious peacebuilders. Drawing upon theories of state–civil interactions, she suggests that religious actors engaged in peacebuilding can be considered as being affected by political strategies aiming at regulating the civil sphere. Steen-Johnsen argues that the state and civil spheres are interlinked and mutually influential but warns against viewing actors in the civil sphere as dictated by the political strategies of a state authority. Religious actors should rather should rather be co…

The rhetoric of love in religious peacebuilding

Religious leaders involved in peacebuilding initiatives often refer to the religious value of love to encourage groups in conflict to live peacefully together. In this article, I suggest that references to love as a religious value might contribute to bridging social capital, meaning social bonds between groups who have experienced conflict. However, without simultaneously addressing questions of justice, which is often necessary in violent conflicts, creating social bonds through references to love constitutes a weak contribution to peace. The article uses the study of a religious peacebuilding project in Ethiopia as an example and illustrates how religious leaders failed to make a substan…

Erratum to: State and Politics in Religious Peacebuilding

State–Religious Relationships in Ethiopia

In this chapter, Steen-Johnsen depicts how the Ethiopian regime uses fear tactics in order to keep the religious peacebuilders in accordance with their political strategies. She presents rich empirical material describing how religious leaders engaged in peacebuilding fear sanctions if they do not adhere to the strategies of the regime. She finds that processes of securitization as well as historical patterns of state–religious interactions affect how political strategies are enacted in Ethiopia. She argues that these findings make a strong argument of considering how the enactment of political strategies influences the scope of opportunities of religious peacemakers.

The politics of emotion in a parenting support programmes for refugees in Norway

Enhancing social skills among citizens who are considered at risk is one of the ways in which a welfare state handles marginalised groups (Prieur et al, 2020). Universalised programmes represent a common way of strengthening the social capabilities of groups deemed in need of such skills (for example, Pettersvold and Østrem, 2019). In this article, we show that emotions perform a political role in such programmes. We proffer our arguments on the basis of data from five training sessions in the International Child Development Programme (ICDP) in a mid-sized Norwegian municipality. Mentors who are teaching the ICDP course use emotions to signal the superiority of the ICDP as a parenting ideal…

The early childhood care and development mission and the institutional circuit of evidence

Early childhood care and development has increasingly become a part of the global development agenda. Fueled by a threefold rationale, rooted in development psychology, social economy, and human rights, the arguments for investing in early childhood care and development are virtually unassailable. However, this rationale is somehow at odds with insights developed within the sociology of childhood, emphasizing childhood as a social construction amendable to context and children’s own agency. Inspired by the methodological approach known as institutional ethnography, we explore how development aid workers respond to and enact the early childhood care and development mission. Building on inter…

Conclusion: Reconsidering State and Politics in Religious Peacebuilding

In the concluding chapter, Steen-Johnsen suggests that the conceptual framework of Brewer et al. on religion and peacemaking goes a long way in explaining how state–religious relations can mediate opportunities to build peace. She underlines, however, that including how the political strategies of state authorities regarding the civil sphere and the enactment of these strategies in state–religious relations affect religious peacebuilding strengthens the analytical capacity of Brewer et al.’s framework. She underlines that in order to understand the full complexity of how the political strategies of state authorities impact on religious peacebuilding, we need to study these state–religious i…