Peace Under Heaven? Interreligious Dialogue and the Making of Peace

Celebrating the ideal of peace among cultures and civilizations, interfaith dialogue forums gather religious leaders around publicly shared aims and principles: fostering peacebuilding through facilitated encounters and exchanges. However, the very idea of peace as an ideal pursued by all faiths deserves to be questioned. Addressing peace as a thick concept calls for further discussion of the normative conceptions that lie behind the narratives promoted by organizers and participants to these forums. Providing a review of interfaith dialogue initiatives in Western and Non-Western contexts, this paper offers a panorama of this emerging ‘peace through dialogue’ global culture. Based on interviews, participant observation and literature-review, it produces a typology of these international meetings according to the participants’ perceptions, in contrast with the dominant literature, focused mainly on their goals and methods. The results of this research will help determine whether the observed global community of interfaith « dialoguers » tends to produce a convergence of peace concepts, or, on the contrary, a differentiation among views and principles. Finally, our approach will help inform the theory and practice of conflict analysis and resolution by comparing visions of peace predominating in forums of interreligious dialogue and confronting them with local discourses on conflict.