INTRODUCTION

One of the persistent challenges in post-conflict peace-building is negotiating the multiple frameworks out of which actors are working as they try to reconstruct societies together. Sometimes the differences are proper to the people who have been engaged in the conflict; indeed, differences in cognitive frameworks can be one of the causes of conflict itself. But alongside the participants in the conflict are those outside actors who enter the post-conflict zone to help build peace: international peacekeeping forces, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, expatriates, and other international institutions. Finding a way to translate principles and policies from one framework into another is now recognized as a major task that needs to be undertaken if peace-building is to be a successful and sustainable operation.

This chapter focuses on one such zone for translation; namely, the space where secular and religious frameworks meet in the post-conflict peace-building process. On the one hand, it has been widely recognized that such key concepts as forgiveness and reconciliation have – at least for the West – significant religious roots. But on the other hand the principles, policies and actions that flow from these concepts are not entirely congruous or even compatible with one another. There has developed a spectrum of positions regarding how – or even whether – secular and religious approaches to peace-building can work together. Some would argue that in rebuilding after conflict religion is as much the problem as it is the solution, and therefore should be excluded from the process. On this view, religion is seen as intrusive, coercive, and indifferent to certain matters of justice and of human suffering. On the other end of the spectrum, religion is seen as the most important component of peace-building. Attitudes toward Archbishop Desmond Tutu's deliberate use of Christian concepts and symbols in the sessions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission are evidence of the array of opinions on the relation of the secular and the religious in peace-building.