I recently attended a webinar presenting the preliminary findings of the “Social Consequences of Religion” (SCORE) project. The project, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is assessing research on religion’s role in conflict and peace and is meant to provide a foundation for integrating future research in this area.

This is something I’m connected to in various ways. My research is on religion and politics. My early work focused on religion and conflict, before shifting to look at religion and statecraft. I’ve now begun working on religion and peacebuilding. I know a lot of the people involved, as religion and IR is a small world. And I was part of some of the early discussions. I attended a workshop at Uppsala University last summer that was supported by this project, where I and others presented their latest work on religion, conflict and peace. I also organized a workshop with Jason Klocek as part of the BISA-ISA conference in Newcastle, UK last year where we brought together junior and senior scholars working on religious peacebuilding.

There’s also an optimistic take on apparent setbacks in the research program

So I was excited to hear this presentation. The quantitative portion, presented by Isak Svensson, looked at work on religion and conflict. And the qualitative portion, by Stacey Gutkowski, focused on religion and peace. They highlighted some important patterns, and ways to move the research forward, while also discussing new resources. The presentation was recorded, so if that becomes available I’ll update this with the link.

Progress in the research program?

But I wanted to provide a brief reaction to the state of the research program. On the one hand, the takeaway could be pessimistic. The quantitative research doesn’t seem to have solidified behind religious identity or ideology driving conflict. Often other, intervening factors matter more (much of my work focused on religion-state connections). And the qualitative research tends to be illustrative case studies rather than rigorous analyses, something I noted with frustration when I began working on and teaching religious peacebuilding.

There’s also an optimistic take on this, however.

It would be a problem if quantitative research on religion and conflict just kept repeating a simplistic causal argument. It’s a good thing that the research program has moved to more complex relationships and interactive factors. This can cause issues, but there are ways to address it; I discussed some of this in a review essay calling for a relational approach to religion and international relations.

On the qualitative side, the lack of rigorous, systematic analyses does undermine our ability to demonstrate religious peacebuilding’s effectiveness. And I’m not just talking about adopting quantitative methods; there’s a lot qualitative work can tell us on this issue, as I’ve discussed in a few different pieces. But the impressionistic works on religious peacebuilding have a lot of value. I recently re-read Appleby’s classic Ambivalence of the Sacredand was taken aback by the depth of insight it provides into how and when religious peacebuilding works, even if it doesn’t test these insights. Our job is now to draw those out and expand on them.

As Duck readers may know, I am a fan of Lakatos when it comes to assessing scientific progress. And despite these issues with the study of religion, conflict and peace, I think it counts as a progressive research program. The core assumptions—that religion leads to an effect on politics that is unique from non-religious motivations and conditions—remains, while new research has expanded what that means and produced novel facts in the process.

So I’m very excited about this project, and will be following it closely.