Inter-communal Relations Research Articles

Deliberation through contestation: EU investments in cultural and artistic spaces beyond the EU

ABSTRACT The role of culture in democratization processes has increasingly been emphasized by the EU. Insisting on the value of culture for peaceful inter-community relations, the European Commission argues that cultural and artistic spaces can function as spaces for deliberation facilitating alternative engagement with politics through debate, education and free expression. The need for such spaces has become more urgent in a time in which democracies have come under pressure. This article examines how civil society actors in the Western Balkans create spaces of deliberation by engaging in EU funded cultural initiatives. In the projects that are being developed, civil society actors experiment with different forms of community-based management of resources and co-production, opening up new perspectives for social and political transformation. Their insistence to generate radical imagination through culture and arts and to create instances in which a different world can be prefigured has led to a boost of citizen participation in cultural projects which resulted in the emergence of ‘counter-public’, self-managed, post-Yugoslav spheres. In indirect, unexpected and contradictory ways, the EU funding schemes are both subject as well as facilitators of the discussions held at these spaces adding new dimensions to European democratization processes.

Promoting Intercommunity Relations for Effective Security and Peacebuilding along the Sokoto-Zamfara-Katsina Axis of the Nigeria-Niger Borderland

This article explores the emerging narratives surrounding the persistent phenomenon of armed banditry in the region. It focuses on the factors and actors driving banditry along the Nigeria-Niger borderlands. Using data from both primary and secondary sources, the study reveals that internal strife along the borderlands and the collapse of state control have facilitated the proliferation of small arms, significantly increasing the intensity of banditry in Nigeria's northwest. The research concludes that the prolonged neglect of border communities has deprived them of basic necessities, exacerbating the situation. As a result, Nigeria’s northwestern states—Sokoto, Zamfara, and Katsina, which border Niger—have become safe havens for raiders and bandits, who, in some cases, establish 'informal structures' of control over the borderland communities.

An Overlooked Jewish Community: The Jews of Rodoscuk in the 17th Century

This article addresses the intercommunal relations between the 17th century Jewish community of Rodoscuk and other social groups. It examines the community’s social structure, housing distribution and economic activities, placing particular emphasis on its interactions with Muslims in areas like trade, religious practices and social dynamics. By drawing on local court records, particularly the Qadi Registers, this article reveals how these interactions were shaped by the legal and social frameworks of their day, highlighting the complexities of coexistence in those contexts. In doing so, it evidences not only that Rodoscuk’s Jewish community took part in vibrant economic exchanges with its Muslim neighbors but also that it engaged with common social and religious contexts. Via a detailed analysis of these records, this study offers new insights into the nature of intercommunal relations in Rodoscuk. It challenges the often-assumed narrative of segregation and conflict in Ottoman society by testing existing claims in the literature through the case of the Jews of Rodoscuk. It concludes that Jews in this region in fact lived in relative harmony with Muslims and other groups in their vicinity.

The Israelite Community Council of Sidon 1914–1948: Between the Yishuv and Grand Liban

Abstract The history of the Jews of Lebanon is often overlooked—they are considered victims of the Arab–Israeli conflict, or within the context of the wider Levantine Jewish community. Sidon, a port city of biblical origins, is a distinct case study through which to examine the interplay between Zionism and Lebanese nationalism because of Sidon’s historical background, geographic proximity to Palestine, and subordinate position to the Beiruti Jewish community. I show how the Israelite Community Council operated within a contested national-ethnic sphere, where it effectively straddled the Zionism promoted by members of the Yishuv and the emerging Lebanese nationalism of the newly established Grand Liban. Initially seeing itself as part of the Land of Israel/Eretz Israel, the Jewish community of Sidon asserted itself within the multiconfessional Lebanese state. Sitting at the crossroads of competing ethnonational currents, Sidon’s Jewish community leaders espoused a fluid, local-territorial-based identity, one that was at ease both with Jewish and Lebanese nationalism. We expand our understanding of this now dispersed community through an examination of the evolution of national borders, intercommunal relationships, and engagement with the Yishuv.

Memory, fear, and manipulated sectarianism: Exploring Christian views and intercommunal dynamics in Al‐Hasakah amidst the Syrian uprising

AbstractThe Syrian uprising and subsequent civil war have been extensively studied with a predominant emphasis on sectarianism between the Sunni and Alawite sects. This narrow focus overlooks the profound influence of other religious and ethnic elements within Syrian society. This article aims to broaden the analytical lens by examining the position and attitudes of Christians in the Al‐Hasakah governorate regarding the Syrian uprising and opposition forces. The article addresses two key inquiries: first, the factors influencing Christians' position in Al‐Hasakah regarding the Syrian uprising, and second, the ramifications of these positions on intercommunal relationships in the region. The paper argues that the collective memory of fear experienced by Christians, manipulated by the Syrian regime, has contributed to the emergence of “sectarianism from below” and “sectarianism from above.” The former reflects the construction of sectarian identities by Christians in response to discrimination and marginalization, while the latter pertains to influential institutions perpetuating sectarian identities and divisions. The findings highlight the complex interplay of factors shaping communal attitudes and relations during times of upheaval and conflict.

Can Appeals to Religious Values Mitigate Anti-Refugee Sentiment? Experimental Evidence From Lebanon

This paper examines whether—and if so, to what extent—religious scripture and values can promote inclusionary attitudes towards refugees. Sacred texts across faiths call on believers to embrace foreigners, suggesting that religious discourses can be harnessed to promote refugees’ inclusion in host societies. To test this possibility, I implement a survey experiment in which citizens of Lebanon—a religiously diverse country that has received the most Syrian refugees per capita globally—are exposed to various forms of pro-refugee religious messaging. I find that inclusionary religious messaging can shift refugee-related attitudes towards tolerance, particularly for members of sectarian communities with the highest baseline anti-refugee animosity. The study's findings have important implications for understanding religion’s consequences for both the dynamics of refugee integration and intercommunal relations more generally, especially in the Middle East and North Africa and the broader developing world.

The Influence of Turkish on Cypriot Greek

When Cyprus was conquered by the Ottomans in 1571, the majority of the local population were Orthodox Greek Christians. After the conquest, Muslim Turks who migrated from Anatolia also settled on the island. Thus, Greeks and Turks, who constituted the two largest communities of the island's population, lived together under Ottoman rule for nearly three centuries. As part of this, the phenomenon of bilingualism was inevitable. Because of inter-community relations, there were interactions between the Turkish and Greek languages spoken on the island. Both communities borrowed words from each other's languages. In the studies conducted to date, the general opinion is that Turkish has not had much influence on the Greek spoken in Cyprus, since the Greeks outnumber the Turks on the island. However, it cannot be said that sufficient studies have been carried out on this subject. The present study focuses on Turkish loanwords in the island's Greek language. Words of Turkish origin, the new forms they have taken, and the words derived from them have been identified. In the light of the findings, and using a sociolinguistic approach, the influence of Turkish on Cypriot Greek is discussed.

Resilience Building after Violent Attack on Buddhist Community: The Case of Ramu in Cox’s Bazar District of Bangladesh

This study delves into the analysis of communal violence in Bangladesh, focusing on the 2012 violent attack on the Buddhist community in Ramu, Cox’s Bazar. It examines the extent to which the attack affected the social cohesion of the local Muslim and Buddhist communities and evaluates the efficacy of post-violence responses for strengthening social cohesion and building resilience. We applied a mixed-method approach by using descriptive statistics from a survey of 300 local people and qualitative data from Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews. Based on an analytical framework of communal violence and resilience-building, this paper argues that communal violence is an ideologically motivated phenomenon that endangers inter-community relations, which cannot be fully recouped as various inadequacies undermine post-violence initiatives. The violent attack on the Buddhist community in Ramu was, in this vein, instigated by rumour and misinformation, igniting communal sentiment using a questionable Facebook post/tagging, intentionally used to mobilise locals and outsiders. Besides immediate consequences such as the destruction of property and the desecration of ancient religious places, it damaged inter-community relations by creating trauma, mistrust, and fear, which ruptured social interaction. The authorities could not prevent the attack due to their inability to understand the gravity of the issue. The immediate recovery support was quick and sufficient. However, it remained limited to reinstating the structures destroyed by the attack. Steps undertaken by different authorities for resilience-building were restricted. Therefore, grassroots people remain unattached in social cohesion building and coexist in subtle discomfort, if not anxiety. Social Science Review, Vol. 40(2), December 2023 Page: 143-170

The intercommunal relations in Cyprus during the COVID-19 pandemic: Towards a fait accompli policy?

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has hit many regions, including the Eastern Mediterranean. It has profoundly affected Cypriot communities and caused political, economic, and social consequences. The profile article aims to investigate the relationship between the pandemic threat on the island and decisions made by the Greek and Turkish Cypriot administrations. What aspects and to what extent has the pandemic affected relations between the two Cypriot communities? How have these changes influenced the bilateral dialogue and political decisions made by the Greek and Turkish Cypriot administrations? Is the pandemic conducive to developing cooperation, or does it extend existing divisions? The profile article argues a relationship between the emergence of the pandemic and the re-isolation of both Cypriot communities, which is one of its consequences, and the initiatives to resolve the Cypriot conflict by sanctioning the existence of two independent states. Such a change is noticeable, especially in the Turkish Cypriots, owing to the presidential election, the government crisis, and interference by Turkish authorities.

Indira Bai: Foregrounding the Community Saga

The first social novel in Kannada, Indira Bai, is an important work not just for literary enthusiasts but also for historians of modernity, communities and communalism. The novel presents the engagements and negotiations of an upper-caste community with modernity. The gaps, presences and absences in the novel have the potential to throw light on the inter-community relations of present-day coastal Karnataka which is constantly bothered by communal disturbances. Corroborating the gaps and absences in the novel with certain historical sources, this article aims to strengthen the perspective that we need to restore literary sources from the regional languages as tools for constructing a more robust historical narrative. Translations help us take those resources to a wider, global audience in this endeavour.

Kepemimpinan Bobot dalam Masyarakat Maybrat Modern

This article focuses on the "bobot" leadership model in modern Mybrat society. The themes and key questions are elaborated in a mixed method of direct living experience with the related community and analysis of literature related to rae bobot and melanesian leadership of Marshall Salins. One prominent aspect of Maybrat culture is the bobot leadership system, closely intertwined with the practice of kain timur exchange. It is found that this leadership structure revolves around individuals possessing a unique set of qualities, including wealth, generosity, knowledge, and authority. The characteristics inherent to the bobot leadership system appear to align with what Marshall Sahlins refers to as the "big-man system." To sum up, in this system, prominence is centered around a mature male whose influence is acknowledged both within their community and in inter-community relations. However, a pressing question arises regarding the sustainability and relevance of this leadership system in contemporary Maybrat society. In the face of rapid globalization, modernization, and social changes, can the bobot leadership system endure? What role does this system still play in the dynamics of present-day Maybrat society?

Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto and a Multiplicity of Rabbinates in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: News that Moses @Hayim Luzzatto (ca. 1707–ca. 1746) was the recipient of heavenly revelations touched off a controversy that engulfed European rabbinic networks for several years. Led by Moses Hagiz, Jewish religious leaders far and wide condemned Luzzatto and his mystical messianic group as heretical. However, the Luzzatto controversy was far more complicated than merely a case of the rabbinic establishment suppressing a heretical thinker. Responses varied in enthusiasm, denunciation, and ambivalence, reflecting a rabbinic culture impacted by age, ethnicity, family, geography, ideology, and social networks. Opinions and alliances shifted, criticism levied at Luzzatto and his group in Padua proved idiosyncratic, and Luzzatto began and ended his short but prodigious career as a celebrated rabbinic author. The broad spectrum of responses to Luzzatto indicates a need to reassess notions of the rabbinate, heresy, and spiritual leadership and consider the interplay between local and pan-Jewish identities. This essay discusses how intercommunal relationships and rabbinic autonomy played a role in the developments, and how variegated responses to the controversy revealed a wide range of social and religious emphases in early modern Jewish culture.

"Population Dynamics, Housing (Land Crises, Education, Communication, Inter-Community Relations, Etc."

"Population Dynamics, Housing (Land Crises, Education, Communication, Inter-Community Relations, Etc."

Iraqi Jewish Immigrants, Palestinian refugees, and intercommunal relations in Tira Transit Camp

ABSTRACT This article discusses the relations between different Jewish migrant communities during the early 1950s in the Tira transit camp (Ma’abara) that was established on the land of the Arab village of Al-Tira near Haifa. The Tira camp was divided into two parts. While the population of the north camp was dominated mainly by Jewish migrants from Romania, the south camp was home mainly to Jewish migrants from Iraq. This article concentrates on the Iraqi Jews, particularly those from Mosul who settled in the south camp, and examines their relations with Jews from Baghdad. The article examines the ways in which the borders between the south camp and north camp influenced the intercommunal relations in this space. It also explores the manner in which the relations between the different Jewish communities in Iraq were reflected in the relations among the migrants in the south camp. During the transition from the Arab village of Al-Tira to the Jewish village of Tira, dozens of Palestinian refugees returned to the lands of the village. Thus, the article also examines the crossing of ethnic and national borders and the relations between Jews and Arabs in this shared space.

The 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms: Phenomenological experiences and perceptions of direct and indirect victims of violence

ABSTRACT Previous literature explores the socio-political contours of Hindu-Muslim violence, with limited attention given to the experiences of victims and the Hindu-Sikh inter-communal relationships. This study specifically examines the 1984 Anti-Sikh pogrom, employing a phenomenological approach to gather insights from Sikh participants who were direct or indirect victims of the violence and aged 20–40 at the time. The findings underscore significant experiences such as the fear of survival, betrayal, and reaction inhibition amidst hostility during the pogrom. Presently, the victims continue to grapple with a sense of loss, hopelessness concerning justice, and a lack of trust in the Hindu community.

The role of Igbo women in peace building during the Nigerian civil war: 1967 – 1970

The salient roles of Igbo women during the Nigeria Civil War were a catalyst in the survival of many dying and suffering children, and the broken and frustrated Biafra soldiers. The roles too were important in the internal security of Igboland in the absence of the men who were on the war front to defend the fatherland. The devastation caused by the war affected the culture and traditional institutions of the Igbo, which in effect, posed a double challenge to the women. Igbo women were not only victims of the war, they were challenged too with roles of acting as heads of their various families and bridge builders in communal and inter-communal relations. The women amid uncertainties embarked individually and communally on peace-building processes. A spectrum of interventions embarked by the women to bring the end to the war spread across the area of health, business, international relations and food security through their salient actions, which enhanced and promoted human security and created positive peace in the land. This paper examines these roles played by Igbo women during the war and how their efforts helped bring about peace and hope during, and after the war period. Looking back and the devastation of that time, the Igbo women today would abhor any wars in Nigeria. We employ the conflict transformation theory in this narrative and conclude that Igbo women are creative peace-builders.

Partisipasi Masyarakat dalam Musyawarah Perencanaan Pembangunan

This This study aims to determine the participation of the community in Kampung Getentiri, Jair District, Boven Digoel Regency in Development Planning Meetings. Observational techniques, interviews, and documentation were used to collect data. The collected data was analyzed descriptively and qualitatively. The study found that although Musrembang had been conducted and generated enthusiasm among most of the community who are mostly farmers, community participation in Musrembang was still lacking. Inter-community relations were not communicative enough, and there was a lack of active involvement in providing suggestions. In terms of tokenism, the community participated in Musrembang to give their input and opinions on development plans, but the feedback provided was only formal and not followed up, giving the government greater control over development programs. This highlights the need to strengthen community participation in the planning and implementation of development, ensuring that their feedback is not merely a formality but also taken into consideration in decision-making. Furthermore, in terms of the community's power in development planning in Kampung Getentiri, the community has power in development planning. They are involved directly in the initial meetings with the village head and Musrembang and are enthusiastic about providing input. The results of Musrembang give the community authority to participate in implementing development programs, although they are still monitored by the village authorities.

Community-based social recommendation under local differential privacy protection

Social recommendation refers to recommendation technology taking social relations as additional input to improve merchandise sales and user satisfaction. It has been widely used in various social networking services. Social recommendation requires the collection of each user's social relations to build a social graph, posing the risk of user privacy intrusion caused by untrusted servers. Local differential privacy is a widely adopted approach for providing privacy protection while allowing acceptable utility of the protected data for analytics. Growing research interest has been applying local differential privacy protection to social graph analysis. However, local differential privacy is suitable for analyzing coarse-grained statistics from perturbed user data, and it is difficult to obtain the fine-grained user relations needed for social recommendation. This paper proposes a novel locally differentially private social recommendation method. It first perturbs the degrees of users in a given interval and discovers coarse-grained communities from them, then generates a fine-grained social graph according to the features of intra-community and inter-community relations, thus ensuring the accuracy of the recommendation results. Experimental results show that the social recommendation accuracy of our proposed method improves by about 20% compared to existing methods in a community-structured ego-network dataset, and by about 10% in two non-community-structured page-page network datasets. The experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art methods such as LDPGen, LFGDPR, and AsgLDP, the social recommendation accuracy of our proposed method is improved by about 20% in one community-structured ego-network dataset, and 10% in two non-community-structured page-page network datasets.

Conflict sensitivity/Do No Harm (DNH) through an everyday peace lens: analysing a Rohingya–Rakhine program in Myanmar

ABSTRACT This paper examines conflict-sensitivity/DNH through the lens of everyday peace. It draws on data from a local non-government organisation program working on development and peacebuilding between Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar. That program is framed around the everyday peace concept, the social practices commonly adopted by ordinary people as they seek to get on with daily life in ways that minimise risk, and perhaps work to deepen inter-communal relationships. Everyday peace thus has obvious overlaps with the DNH concept of “local capacities for peace” (LCPs). This paper analyses this program to make several contributions to the understanding of conflict-sensitivity from this framework, including expanded conceptions of LCPs and new warnings of potential harm inherent in what are often perceived as LCPs, unless power imbalances are concurrently addressed. These findings aim to improve conflict-sensitivity/DNH practice.

Проблема статуса Косово на современном этапе: нормализация отношений без урегулирования конфликта?

The article analyzes the dynamics of the new escalation in the Kosovo conflict, including the agenda for dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina and the agreements achieved in 2023. The impact of the European security crisis and Russia’s confrontation with the West on the Kosovo negotiation process is evaluated. It is concluded that escalation of the crisis in the early 2020s is linked to attempts undertaken by the Pristina authorities, with the support from the European Union and the United States, to finalize the statehood of the partially recognized republic and to establish Pristina’s sovereignty over the entire territory of the Kosovo region, while avoiding guaranteeing safety, civil, and political rights of the Serbian population residing there. Currently, the key issues of the negotiations are the ways to normalize relations between the Kosovo and Metohija Serbs and the authorities in Pristina, the return of the Serbs to the unified Kosovo police and administrative and political institutions, as well as the establishment of the Community of Serbian Municipalities. The agreements reached in February and March 2023 under the EU auspices outline a long-term perspective for conflict resolution, linking success in establishing inter-communal relations with the progress of Serbia’s and Kosovo’s European integration, but do not offer a clear path to achieving substantial agreements on the region’s status in the short term. The growing confrontation between Russia and the West (including the EU, the United States, and NATO) negatively affects the reconciliation process by intensifying confrontational rhetoric and enhancing the risk of escalating violence.