"Is there an inevitable global violent clash unfolding between the world's largest religions: Islam and Christianity? Do religions cause violent conflicts, or are there other factors at play? How can we make sense of increasing reports of violence between Christian and Muslim ethnic communities acro...ss the world? By seeking to answer such questions about the relationship between religion and violence in today's world, Ziya Meral challenges popular theories and offers an alternative explanation, grounded on insights inferred from real cases of ethno-religious violence in Africa and the Middle East. The relationship between religion and violence runs deep and both are intrinsic to the human story. Violence leads to and shapes religion, while religion acts to enable violence as well as providing responses that contain and prevent it. However, with religious violence being one of the most serious challenges facing the modern world, Meral shows that we need to de-globalise our analysis and focus on individual conflicts, instead of attempting to provide single answers to complex questions." (Publisher)
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"This Guide aims to help practitioners make sense of monitoring and evaluation as applied to inter-religious action in peacebuilding. It aims to support good practice among people who are involved in commissioning or contributing to such efforts, whether they be religious, secular or a combination o...f both, to maximize peacebuilding learning and effectiveness. Therefore, the audience for this Guide is anyone who is involved in the design, monitoring or evaluation of inter-religious peacebuilding programs or initiatives. These users include interreligious peacebuilders, evaluators, practitioners, and leaders who are tasked with commissioning an evaluation or who are managing learning and evaluation processes, as well as donors (public and private) who are involved in funding and evaluating inter-religious action for peacebuilding. Thus, a wide range of people and organizations might make use of this Guide. Throughout the Guide, we indicate which sections might be most useful for which audiences. For purposes of simplicity, we will flag sections for three (overlapping!) overall categories of users: Inter-religious peacebuilding implementers; Internal project managers or monitoring and evaluation specialists; External evaluators." (p.5-6)
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