Research Cloud 7 Conflict and Violence
The way people deal with conflicts can both provoke a violent escalation and lead to a containment and overcoming of violence. In this process religious semantics and motivations often play a crucial role and can be used for both aims. Accordingly, studies how conflicts are fuelled or stemmed also by means of religious texts, symbols, and ideas, is a field of research in which the dynamics of tradition and innovation with regard to religion and politics become particularly visible.
The Research Cloud “Conflict and Violence” adopts an interdisciplinary and cross epochal approach by examining conflicts and the way they were dealt with from antiquity until present times.
This broad cooperation therefore facilitates to study in very different configurations how conflicting parties use Holy Scriptures and religious traditions to exacerbate or resolve a conflict. In some cases it appears that some texts, religious patterns, or hermeneutical principles recur similarly in very different contexts. Thus, for example, there are comparable techniques across religious boundaries for the non-violent reception of canonical texts containing violence.
The Research Cloud builds on research carried out in the first two funding phases in the field of research "Violence". The focus however is now on the strikingly differently structured and until now scarcely studied discourses which refer to religious traditions endeavouring decidedly to criticise violence or overcome conflicts.
Coordination of Research Cloud 7: