Welcome to the EuroRare Project
Who we are
EURORARE is a collaborative social science and humanities research project, an interdisciplinary network of excellent researchers and institutes worldwide.
Abstract
One of our future challenges is to create a comprehensive understanding of actions with religious justifications. This raises crucial questions: How do religions contribute to violence and/or reconciliation? Do they have an impact at all? In the last decade there has been increased focus on the destabilizing impact of religiously based thinking and acting. Academic research and media portrayals of religion have emphasised its violent manifestations. Much less attention has been paid to the peaceful side of religion in reconciliation processes during or in the aftermath of a conflict.
EuroRARE will explore these questions by analysing the connections between religious traditions, religiously justified actions, violence and/or reconciliation. Its scientific aim is to develop a framework for a better understanding of the role of religion in conflicts and post-conflict societies.
This will be achieved through investigations in different main areas. First, the empirical basis of the analysis will be a series of social scientific case studies. Political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars from other disciplines will conduct research that will provide the broadest possible perspective in terms of different religions and geographical areas. Second, theologians and scholars in religious studies will provide philosophical and ethical perspectives through close examination of the core texts, doctrines and theologies of various religions. Third, scholars will investigate how religions are portrayed in the public sphere during and after conflicts. Finally, philosophers will attempt to clarify and systematise different concepts of reconciliation.
EuroRARE requires an approach that is systematic, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. The project can rely on an already existing unique collaborative research network, which will lead to major scientific breakthroughs within the next years.
Furthermore, our proposal invites multidisciplinary research since the theological work is going to be related to psychological, historical, political, sociological and juristic research, including case studies from Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia.
For the very first time this proposal brings together theologians from different religions and scholars from other disciplines in a large common project of research. We expect that the European and global collaboration will lead to new and outstanding results that would be most relevant for politics and the study of humanities.
