Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace addresses both the problem of religion and conflict and the possibility and practices of peace, giving particular attention to peace. Articles address everything from interpersonal relationships to international politics and draw from any discipline or combination of disciplines that can illuminate the journal's central concerns. While the journal’s first audience is scholars, its aim is to be relevant and accessible to peace practitioners and anyone else concerned about these themes.
The journal is a publication of Plowshares: a peace studies collaborative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges. It is shaped by, but not confined to, the perspectives of the three historic peace churches-Society of Friends, Church of the Brethren, and the Mennonite Church-associated with the colleges that compose the collaborative.
Published twice yearly, the journal is an open access, online publication. All articles are peer-reviewed. Copyrights remain with authors. They have agreed to provide open access to their material provided users give proper credit and do not alter the work in any way.
The problem of religion and conflict is one of the defining and increasingly inescapable features of our age, touching every level of society and politics. The rise of global population and increasing mobility mean that religious difference, too often experienced as religious conflict, is no longer present only in great urban areas, but in regions and towns long-accustomed to religious homogeneity. Learning to live well with religious and other differences becomes a need for everyone, not just for the residents of a few exceptional places. At the same time, the aftermath of the Cold War brought into visibility and stark relief what had long been the case, a plethora of regional conflicts, both inter- and intra-state, involving parties defined by some combination of ethnic, national, and religious difference. Ending such conflicts and healing from them have often proven to be intractable and tortuous tasks, though not without significant success stories.
While religion as conflict-causing problem sometimes seems to predominate, even mesmerize, in both popular and scholarly thought, religion as resource for peace is already a significant theme. In South Africa, both the apartheid ideology and resistance to it drew from religion, as has the post-apartheid recovery. While South Africa provides an especially striking example, many other conflict situations are marked by some mix of religion as source of both conflict and peace. If the need is great, the resources for addressing it are not. Cold War peace priorities left peace advocates ill-prepared to address the problem of religion and conflict, and most social science training in the secular academy leaves academics equally ill-prepared. Certainly some individuals do outstanding work; some journals publish occasional articles on religion, conflict, and peace; the volume of books grows steadily. Nonetheless, the work available at present is on a scale not nearly adequate to the need.
As a contribution to addressing this great need, the Plowshares Collaborative proposes to establish an online scholarly journal dedicated to the themes of religion, conflict, and peace. It will be marked by the following features.*
*We have found no journal that provides such a focus. The journal that comes closest, and makes a very important contribution, is Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, the annual journal of the Colloquium on Religion and Violence. Contagion, however, publishes only work based on the ideas of René Girard, and while the analysis of religion and conflict is the central theme, it publishes work applying Girardian analysis to many areas of culture and scholarship.
Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez
Elizabeth Bounds
Timothy McElwee
Zayn Kassam
Joseph C. Liechty, editor
B. Welling Hall, associate editor
Katy Gray Brown, associate editor
Julie Garber, managing editor
Copyright © 2008. Published by Plowshares: a Peace Studies Collaborative of Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester Colleges