Coping with religious conflicts

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This article presents conceptual results from the Interfaculty Research Cooperation “Religious Conflicts and Coping Strategies” at the University of Bern. Since 2018, researchers from various academic disciplines—theology, psychology, law, religious studies, social anthropology, jewish studies, islamic studies, political sciences, history, communication studies, philosophy, gender studies and german studies—have been comparatively investigating past and present conflicts with religious dimensions.Conflicts involving religion often intensify, elude resolution or lose their constructive and socializing potential, because strong emotional, factual and interpretive aspects are interwoven. Established strategies of conflict resolution therefore often reach their limits in such conflicts. We show that the concept of coping has the advantage of focusing on the process rather than on the resolution of conflicts. It does not aim at solving a conflict that may not be solved, but it aims at looking for ways to shape and manage conflicts with religious dimensions. Coping as a concept originates from psychologists, who describe individuals as active beings who are able to deal with stressful situations on emotional, factual and interpretative-evaluative levels. The different types of coping correlate with three essential dimensions of religion. Therefore, coping as a travelling concept can be particularly fruitful for the interdisciplinary study of conflicts with religious dimensions. It fosters a context-sensitive and differentiated analysis of the dynamics of religious conflicts and may therefore contribute to develop the approach of conflict transformation. First, this paper presents guiding questions for such a context-sensitive conflict analysis; second, it presents an analytical model that visualizes the relevant conflict factors, dimensions of religion and types of coping and facilitates questions about their interactions.