Religion as a Conversation Starter: Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans.

• Author: Cetin, Onder
• Position: Book review

Religion as a Conversation Starter

Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans

By Ina Merdjanova and Patrice Brodeur

New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009, 194 pages, $130, ISBN 9781441194381.

Religions and religious actors have been the subject of several scholarly works published in the last two decades to examine the outburst and dynamics of the inter-communal conflict in the Balkans. This was primarily due to the role of religions in drawing the boundaries of ethnonational identities in Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular. Some of these works demonstrated the increasing visibility of religious actors in public realm of the post-Tito era; others have interpreted their role as a part of nationalist political strategies (see, Mojzes, 1994, 1998; Perica, 2002; Powers, 1996; Velikonja, 2003). They have also been analyzed in relation to their increasing role in post-war settings within the broader framework of peacebuilding (see, Goodwin, 2006; Little, 2007; Mojzes, 1998; Peric, 1998; Mojzes, Swidler and Justenhoven (Eds.), 2003; Steele, 1994; 1996, 1998, 2003; USIP, 2003). Related to that second body of research focusing on peacebuilding, cultivation of social capital, that is cooperation, social inclusion and trust, has generally been regarded as a crucial element for sustainable inter-communal relations.

In Religion as a Conversation Starter, Merdjanova and Brouder aim to address the gap between scholarly analyses and these practical initiatives of inter-religious dialogue for peacebuilding (IDP) in the Balkans. Although the study is not the first attempt at the analysis of inter-religious relations in the Bal kans, it is based on a more comprehensive set of data than the preceding work of Sterland and Beauclerk (2008) on the state of faith based interventions towards conflict transformation and reconciliation in post-conflict settings of former Yugoslavia. Moreover, the study still has not lost the timeliness of the topic, in contrast to other dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding, (see, Bjorkdahl, 2012; Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Ker-Lindsay and Kostovicova (Eds.), 2013; Farrand, 2011; Juncos, 2012; Kappler, 2013; Martin-Ortega, 2013; Paffenholz 2009, 2010; Pankhurst, 2008) beside recent works focusing on particular aspects of religious peacebuilding (Cetin, 2012; Spahic-Siljak, 2013).

Merdjanova and Brouder provide a detailed exploration of IDP in the Balkans by placing...