NGOs such as the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative in Uganda, the Inter-Faith Mediation Centre in Nigeria, the Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center, and the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone work with religious leaders to change negative attitudes, modify behavior, and eliminate deep-rooted stereotypes of the other. For all the importance of their work, however, these organizations are struggling financially and need to be supported, encouraged to expand their base, and, if possible, integrated into the wider field of peacebuilding activities in their respective societies. The Edhi Foundation, the Wahid Institute, the Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN), and the Arab Group for Christian-Muslim Dialogue also would benefit immensely from being involved in an international network of peacebuilding organizations. These and many more need to be supported and trained, and their work expanded in the areas of conflict prevention; mediation; violence reduction; and providing emotional, psychological, and spiritual support to victims of war.
Enhancing these organizations needs to be coordinated with local governments to effectively change domestic policies that are harmful and overbearing on NGOs and to support structural changes, such as instituting peace modules in school curricula.
Self-critical problem-solving skills
Islamic peacemaking efforts need to recenter attention on providing real problem-solving skills to religious leaders and constituents, who can analyze their problems, identify reasons for violent conflicts, formulate solutions to complex problems, and use practical mediation skills to facilitate change in their communities. Practitioners need to devise a comprehensive understanding of the context in which they implement programs; an only partial analysis - or an only intuitive understanding of the situation - could lead to negative consequences or costly mistakes.
Islamic peacemakers need to ask crucial and fundamental questions to examine what a conflict is about; what needs to be done to prevent further harm; and what local, regional, and international forces are involved. The answers to these questions will assist practitioners in using peacemaking tools, frameworks, and models in their specific contexts. Since Islamic peacemakers are usually unfamiliar with the analytical tools for conflict prevention, mediation, transformation, and peacemaking, it is good to distinguish between program effectiveness and the effectiveness of peacebuilding. Meeting specific program goals is important, but it should be linked to the bigger picture and its ultimate effect on society. Goals must be outlined with criteria to ensure that specific ends are linked to the large and long-term goal of peacebuilding. Peacemakers must measure their effect on their communities in order for them to quantify, or at least map, the progress or relapse of their work. Specific analytical tools are desperately needed to strategically characterize the situation, create taxonomies, and define new ways to assess and evaluate the problem in order to understand peacemaking activities.
Reducing ideological support for radicalism
Engaging Muslim civil society through a broader conflict resolution framework, and not solely a counterterrorism agenda, will reduce the ideology of radicalism. Terrorism is neither an ideology nor a discrete form of conflict; rather, it is a strategy or tactic of political violence used by actors in a wider context of conflict to achieve political goals. Policymakers and Muslim peacemakers should treat terrorism as a symptom, and not the sole cause, of any conflict. Focusing exclusively on acts of terrorism limits the analysis and understanding of the broader range of issues at work in any given situation.
Using a conflict resolution framework, one can comprehend the broader set of issues, actors, and behaviors involved, as well as the history of a conflict and the grievances that terrorism is tied to - grievances that need long-term political, social, cultural, and economic solutions. To counter ideological support for terrorism, fellow actors within the ideological community must be supported to speak out against radicalism and have continual messages to counteract extremist propaganda. There is a need to focus on citizen-messengers, or those who can affect opinion and attitudes from the bottom up. Opinion makers, scholars, activists, journalists, teachers, parliamentarians, religious leaders, youth leaders, television personalities, entertainers, sports figures, intellectuals, business leaders, philanthropists, and other such citizen-messengers must be employed to spread positive ideas to neutralize extremist ideologies and resist violence.
Peace Education and Curriculum Reform
It is time for a comprehensive Islamic peace education curriculum founded on nonviolence - a nonbiased, human rights–based education. Private and public secondary schools, technical colleges and universities, and seminaries need to institute peace and conflict-resolution studies programs, where students can acquire essential conceptual and theoretical conflict-resolution knowledge. A vigorous peace education curriculum will allow students to study and also practice the art of applying conflict resolution theory to their own lives and communities.
No doubt, much peacebuilding work is needed in predominantly Muslim communities. In addition to expanding the network of peacebuilding work on the ground, we underscore the importance of research by analysts and practitioners and the need to support their efforts to disseminate their work to appropriate policymakers, international peacebuilding organizations, and students of Islamic peacemaking and conflict resolution.
(Concluded)
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