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programs

programs

Program Strategies:

ICRDโ€™s programs focus on areas where religious identity converges with challenges to stability. The programs, which are universally co-created with local communities, manifest differently in each context. ICRD collaborates with partners to generate sustainable and replicable resilience that addresses present challenges and empowers communities to effectively respond to unforeseen future crises.ย 

ICRDโ€™s 25 years of peacebuilding implementation in more than two dozen nations include such activities as promoting tolerance in religious education, enhancing and spotlighting the role of women of faith peacebuilders, supporting the reintegration of former combatants, advancing reconciliation processes between former adversaries, supporting formal peace processes, interfaith collaboration on local conflict issues, preventing violent extremism, and advocating for local community concerns within policy-maker priorities.

Objectives

Enhance the Capacity of Religious Peacebuilders

Many formal and informal religious leaders are driven by their faith convictions to promote peace, understanding, and empathy within their community and beyond, but could benefit from enhanced tools to clarify and confront the current conditions that challenge stability in their community.

ICRD convenes networks of support and provides specialized training to enhance peacebuilding skills, including:

- Context Analysis.
- Facilitating Difficult Conversations.
- Conflict Transformation.
- Reconciliation.
- Transitional Justice Processes.
- Early Warning Response Mechanisms.

Remove Religion as a Driver of Violence

While ICRD believes that religious faith can and should be a source of healing over harm, it is undeniable that certain influential faith figures have coopted religion in the past and present to advance conflict, hatred, and even violence. Often, legitimate concerns may lie at the root of damaging identity prejudices; ICRD helps to disentangle them, developing mechanisms for addressing economic or security concerns while dispelling harmful stereotypes.

ICRD supports doctrinal discernment and community building to increase understanding between groups, while disempowering religious narratives that promote violence, providing expertise on such topics as:

- Critical Thinking Pedagogy.
- Tolerance in Religious Education.
- Dialogue Across Difference.
- Religious Literacy.
- Religious Narratives of Social Cohesion.

Increase the Number and Diversity of Religious Peacebuilders

ICRD is committed to identifying and elevating the religious convictions, which are found in all faith traditions, that promote stability through building understanding across differences. The vast majority of religious adherents and faith leaders are not ideologically driven to advocate for dehumanizing violence. Considering the fact that roughly 6.5 billion people (84% of the global population) self-describe as adherents of a religious tradition, this suggests that there is an enormous pool of potential faith-based peacebuilders in the world.

ICRD employs specific methods to build greater numbers of skilled faith-based peacebuilders, including:

- Employing training of trainers and knowledge and skills exchange models.
- Enhancing the role of women of faith.
- Ensuring that marginalized faith influencers (formal and informal leaders) effectively participate.
- Promoting interfaith dialogue that leads to actionable and innovative strategies.

Inform the Field of Practice

The importance of religion in community interactions, including international affairs, has become increasingly recognized in recent years. Many diplomatic and conflict intervention processes are still seeking best practices for religious engagement, however. Additionally, many observers mistakenly assume that religion is only relevant in โ€œreligious conflictsโ€. ICRD has multiple strategies for increasing the awareness of the contributions that religious influencers, communities, infrastructures, and doctrines can provide to peacebuilding efforts, including:

- Analyzing trends and trajectories with a focus on innovative and predictive strategies.
- Conducting qualitative and quantitative community-based โ€œresearch-to-actionโ€.
- Employing unique approaches for impact measurement.
- Advising policy-making structures at the regional and national level.
- Producing field-tested methodological frameworks.
ICRD-GyS-07

Where We Work

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ICRD-GyS-07

Where We Work

We are all over the world!

Middle East & North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Asia

The Americas

Europe

Global Programming