ABSTRACT
Religion is a pervasive aspect of many people’s lives throughout the world, particularly in fragile and failed states. For those seeking reasons to understand why, other than because of the grace of God and pure faith, Norris and Inglehart (2004) have argued that religiosity increases when people are faced with an existential threat. Religious markets theory suggests that as a state’s control of the religious market falters, alternative ‘suppliers’ of religious goods enter the market (Stark and Iannaccone, 1994). Whether through finding faith or due to particular circumstances, the result is that 91 per cent of people in fragile or failed states see religion as being ‘important’ in their daily lives (Dragovic, 2015, p. 9). This stands alongside other indicators of religion’s importance in fragile state contexts, including:
s PERCENTOFPEOPLEINFRAGILEANDFAILEDSTATESSAYTHEYHAVECONlDENCEIN RELIGIOUSINSTITUTIONSCOMPAREDTOPERCENTWHOHAVECONlDENCEINGOVernments (Dragovic, 2015, p. 9);
s PERCENTOFPEOPLEIN!FGHANISTANSAYTHEYHAVEGONETORELIGIOUSLEADERS for dispute resolution (Tariq et al., 2011, p. 140);
s PERCENTOFPEOPLEIN%GYPTSAYTHEYHAVECONlDENCEIN!L!ZHARTHE leading religious university and school network in that country (Hellyer, 2012);
s PER CENT OF PEOPLE IN THE 0ALESTINIAN TERRITORIES BELIEVE THAT RELIGIOUS LEADERS SHOULDHAVEA LARGE INmUENCEONPOLITICALMATTERS ANDANOTHER PERCENTBELIEVETHEYSHOULDHAVESOMEINmUENCE"ELLP
Despite the religious context of the majority of fragile and failed states, and the already documented potential benefits of engaging with religious institutions (Dragovic, 2015), international organisations involved in rebuilding fragile and failed states have largely eschewed engaging with religion. For example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a senior Mufti noted that international officials would only ‘come when there were problems’ (Smajkic´, 2012). A Catholic theologian suggested that they would ‘force’ clerics into talks that were not genuine and in AWAYWHICHWASDEMEANINGTOTHEMANDCOUNTERPRODUCTIVE" #ARDINAL0ULJIC|P WROTE@&ORHOURSTHEYWOULDTALKWITHMEAFTERWHICH
they would continue according to their own ideas.’ In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Sistani was side-lined for months by the US-led Coalition, with efforts being made to find alternative sources of authority when his fatwas were not to their LIKING#HANDRASEKARAN 4HEDESIGNATEDAMBASSADORRESPONSIBLEFORTHE governorate, home to the country’s ayatollahs including Ayatollah Sistani, initially refused to engage with the ayatollahs with the intent of building a secular, centralised governance structure (Dragovic, 2015, p. xiv). At an individual level, the head of the NGO division in the Swiss Agency for International Cooperation described an evident effort to avoid discussing religion as a ‘mental taboo’ after having organised a conference on the topic (Holenstein, 2005, p. 5). Similarly, in my roles as first a practitioner working in post-conflict statebuilding environments and now as a scholar undertaking research, it has been my personal experience that religion is still a topic that is widely avoided. Not only is it a mental taboo, but a social and professional taboo, actively side-lined from formal planning and avoided in any actions. This chapter builds upon the idea of religion as a professional taboo by engaging with the individual aid worker as the subject of study, rather than with the processes of development or aid institutions. Its focus is upon understanding why many individual aid workers struggle to engage across faith boundaries despite working in a profession that emphasises the importance of grassroots development. In particular, the chapter attempts to understand what impedes individual aid workers from reaching beyond the dominant secular cultural norm within international organisations and NGOs to engage with people’s faith and their faith leaders. While these impediments are at times driven by policies, they are also rooted in the social norms of the institutions that shape an individual staff member’s view of religion and in turn their willingness to reach across the secular –faith or faith-faith boundary. In this chapter I draw upon cognitive dissonance theory and apply it to the particular developmental context of postconflict statebuilding, using a case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Statebuilding differs from the broader field of international development in both focus and context. Chesterman defines the focus of statebuilding as being ‘directed at constructing or reconstructing institutions of governance capable of providing citizens with physical and economic security’ (Chesterman, 2004, p. 5). In this way statebuilding is a prerequisite for effective development, but its focus is upon the institutions of governance rather than the community or civil society. This leads to a different approach, including alternative, though often overlapping, groups of actors. Actors prominent in statebuilding often include the militaries, bureaucrats and police forces of foreign states and internationally designated governance institutions such as the United Nations or regional bodies, along with expert consultants and for-profit contractors. The first part of this chapter looks at two competing worldviews on the role of religion vis-à-vis the state. It borrows terminology from the field of anthropology that distinguishes between local (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives. The dominant scholarly etic worldview of the relationship between religion and THE STATE EMANATES FROM THE 7ESTERN %UROPEAN EXPERIENCE OF A HISTORICALLY
diminishing role for religion. It tends to a worldview which sees modernity having developed as the result of an emerging secular rationality in which religion’s role is either an innocuous anomaly (Butler, 2004) or is instrumentalised by geopolitics or realpolitik power struggles. In many statebuilding environments the alternative emic view is replete with primordialist narratives drawing upon myths, traditions and particularistic values within which faith is intertwined inseparably from the concept of the nation and therefore, implicitly in today’s world, the state. Regrettably, many scholars dismiss, sometimes derisively, myths as if they hold no value. For example, Mytja Velikonja comments on Balkan ethnicity ‘myths’ by writing, ‘The most puerile and idiotic of theses and caricatures of history live to see their acceptance because of this searching for or, better, finding ethno-national genealogies which at times resembles the cheapest form of science fiction’ 6ELIKONJA AND 4ARKO P 4HIS CHAPTER DOES NOT ENGAGE WITH THE accuracy of either view, but rather acknowledges them as being competing narratives accessible to aid workers that in turn influence their understanding of the role religion and religious institutions can play. The second section of this chapter focuses on how these competing perceptions of the role of religion vis-à-vis the state affect decision-makers’ engagement with religious leaders and in particular their willingness to engage across faith boundaries. As very little scholarly or policy work has been undertaken on the strategic pros and cons of engaging with religious institutions in statebuilding, the decision to engage with clerics has remained a largely individual choice. Left to the individual, the choice is dependent upon personal values and preconceived notions. As decisions are based upon individual judgements rather than robust research, we cannot rely upon theories from political science to suggest why practitioners involved in development eschew religious leaders (as opposed to why they should or should not) but instead must draw upon the field of psychology. I borrow from cognitive dissonance theory, which suggests that individuals are uncomfortable which concurrently holding conflicting views. The various ways in which the individual responds to minimise such dissonance, once applied to the role of religion in statebuilding, provides a credible conceptual outline of why religion is side-lined.
