Dr Stacey Gutkowski

I am working on three main research projects:

• a new book project on the Syrian diaspora, focusing on how people make meaning in their lives after war, both within and outside of religious tradition
• a 10-year research initiative funded by the Templeton Religion Trust to understand the impact of religions on peacebuilding around the world
• a collaborative project on youth interfaith peace-building civil society programmes and young people’s attitudes towards religion, secularism and sectarianism in Lebanon and Northern Ireland

Post-war meaning-making among the Syrian diaspora

I am writing a book about the Syrian diaspora in English-speaking countries. The book will explore how people have made new forms of meaning in their lives since the Syrian war. This could mean different things for different people: for example, creating art, writing, becoming active in/for the community, working on humanitarian projects, starting a family, becoming more/less pious, working towards a new future for Syria, furthering their education. The purpose would be to try to understand more about being Syrian outside Syria since 2011 and to add to the historical record.

Scholars across the social sciences have recently begun to study religious faith and practices during and after collective and personal crises: illness, natural disaster, bereavement, the Covid 19 pandemic. A much smaller set of empirical studies has focused on the impact of living through war on people’s religious practices and beliefs.

There is, however, a larger set of studies that deals with how people make meaning in their lives, within religious tradition for some but also beyond religious tradition for others (Park 2010). Psychologists have analysed how living through crisis impacts how individuals make life meaningful for themselves over the course of their lives in various ways, through things such as art or family life or community or religion.

This project aims to contribute to a growing academic literature on the Syrian war and migration, analysing how living through this experience has impacted how Syrians in English-speaking countries make meaning in their lives, individually and collectively, within and beyond religious tradition. As such, it studies both forms of religious meaning-making and communal practice (i.e. in mosques and churches, in communities and the home) and forms of meaning-making which are not explicitly religious, such as artistic production, community engagement and education.

Social Consequences of Religion (SCORE) Strand 2: Religion and Peacebuilding (funded by the Templeton Religion Trust)

Are religions part of the problem or part of the solution? What do we really know about the social consequences of religions, and what more can we learn about them? Funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, SCORE is poised to be a multi-decade effort to research and analyse the effects of religious beliefs, behaviours and institutions on a series of crucial domains of human life. This initiative is organised into convergent research strands, beginning with Religion and Cooperation, Religion and Peacebuilding, Religion and Development.

The SCORE Religion & Peacebuilding strand delves into the profound impact of religious beliefs, behaviours, and institutions on peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict and divided societies. This research strand is led by Dr Stacey Gutkowski, an expert in religion and Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of War Studies (King’s College London) and one of the original directors of the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies, an initiative established in 2009 to provide a global focal point for teaching and research on ethno-national problems that divide and unite societies across the modern world. Templeton Religion Trust (TRT) is a global charitable trust chartered by Sir John Templeton in 1984 with headquarters in Nassau, The Bahamas. TRT has been active since 2012 and supports projects as well as storytelling related to projects seeking to enrich the conversation about religion.

 

Varying Perceptions of Religious Faith and Practice

Recent years and decades have seen a persistent argument over whether religion has positive or negative effects on society. This debate takes place across a wide range of academic disciplines, in public arenas, in the media, and in politics and across a spectrum of perspectives.  As a student of world religions, Sir John Templeton was aware that religions fade into extinction when they cease to be relevant or sufficiently adaptive or are become inflexibly dogmatic. He saw the need for efforts to “rescue religions of all kinds from obsolescence.” We are facing a new kind of threat to religion, based on poor or limited information, and this initiative proposes to provide a resource for a more balanced, data-driven debate.

 

Religion & Peacebuilding

Since September 11^th, there has often been a popular perception in the West that religion breeds violence. However, the morality of war-waging and peace-making has been a focus for theologians and philosophers across the world’s religions for centuries of human life. These have been a lens through which to explore ethical behaviour under immense collective pressure as well as humanity’s relationship with God and with each other. Religious leaders and faith-inspired lay people have actively intervened in the cause of peace, including by sacrificing their own lives. They have and continue to develop rich understandings of human life in communion with others and the Creator under the adversities of war and its aftermath. However, it is only since the development of global civil society from the late nineteenth century that individuals and institutions have more systematically translated faith, first into organised peace advocacy and humanitarian relief, and then over the past 40 years into sustained, faith-inspired peace-building efforts in post-conflict societies. The study of this faith-inspired activity has followed suit over the past 30 years.

This timing provides an excellent opportunity. While social science research in this area has developed quickly and cohered in substantial ways, it is still young enough for a well-structured intervention to make a substantial impact, on how research is done and by extension on the lives of those impacted by war and violence.

 

SCORE Religion & Peacebuilding Strand

Over the course of this ten-year effort, we propose to address the following research questions on religion and peacebuilding:

• Under what conditions have faith-inspired peace initiatives helped to facilitate peaceful relationships and social harmony after the end of war, with war’s end understood as outright military victory or the signing of a formal peace accord by elite actors at national or international level?
• Under what conditions has their impact been limited and why?
• How might we best weigh up the social consequences of religious faith, practice, institutions, and ideas in post-war environments and account for their interaction and integration with other social, economic and political dynamics?
• How do actors who have lived through war see the effect of religious faith and practice on interpersonal and social reconciliation efforts in post-conflict environments?

The Review Phase (2023-2025) of this research strand which commenced in October 2023 is made up of two pieces of research which seek to provide a landscape of the existing literature and actor configurations within the subject area of Religion & Peacebuilding. The first piece of research is made up of systematic literature reviews of the existing qualitative and quantitative research on religion and peacebuilding and relevant adjacent literature. The second piece involves mapping the landscape of practitioners engaged in matters of religion and peacebuilding, including those engaged at the grassroots. The goal is to identify a core group of Leading Practitioners who can be engaged with the work of Strand 2 over the course of 10 years, to identify promising pathways to dissemination among peacebuilding practitioners, and to help assess the appropriate format for the New Research Phase, particularly to assess the viability of fieldwork research involving interdisciplinary research teams in case study contexts. Both research dimensions will be guided by punctuated consultations with an Academic Advisory Board made up of leading academics and practitioners.

In the New Research Phase of this strand (years 3-7), which is set to commence in 2026, we will complete and build on the conclusions of the Review Phase to develop and launch an effort to conduct new research. Although the design of this study is still in development, the research throughout this phase will seek to generate novel field or comparative studies to explore and understand when, where, and why religious faith and practice has positive or negative effects in different contexts.

Finally, in the Dissemination Phase (years 8-10), which is set to commence in 2030, we will seek to disseminate the results of the Strand 2 Research Phase among academic and non-academic audiences, for the express purpose of improving people’s lives in post-war contexts.  We envision that this phase will consolidate and transmit the results of the research to key practitioner stakeholders, with a long-term view to catalyzing a generational shift in how religious ideas and institutions are or are not incorporated into the peacemaking, peacebuilding and peace consolidation phases of post-war environments.

This multi-million-dollar investment represents the first coordinated effort to robustly synthesise the empirical research on the social consequences of religion and produce a repository of data on the various interconnected impacts and influences of religion in society. The Religion & Peacebuilding strand represents an original attempt to consolidate the contributions of religious actors on the processes involved in effective peacebuilding in the existing literature and to offer new scientific knowledge for groups such as donors and grassroots peacebuilders, hoping to inform, positively shape and hopefully make more effective their future interventions in post-conflict societies.

Peace-building and Youth Interfaith Programmes in Lebanon and Northern Ireland (with Dr Craig Larkin, King’s College London)

Sectarianism in the contemporary Middle East is often evoked as the predominant explanatory frame, dismissed as an Orientalist phantom, or sought to be reversed for a brighter secular future. This research seeks to explore how interfaith youth encounters chart a path between calls for ‘re-confessionalization’ and ‘de-confessionalization’ of the public sphere in divided societies – as they attempt to foster new spaces for pluralistic encounter and religious tolerance.  While there is a small policy literature and an even smaller academic literature on youth interfaith peacebuilding programmes (Gutkowski, Larkin and Daou 2019 on Lebanon; Duckworth, Albano, Munroe et al 2019 on the US; Liljestrand 2018 on Sweden; Mayblin, Valentine and Andersson 2016 on the UK; Michaelides 2009), the outcomes and impact of these youth programmes have not been assessed in any critical depth. Nor have these programmes been considered as one way point along a lifelong journey of faith, religious practices and ethical and political sensibilities for individuals and therefore must be understood in the wider context of the constant flow and flux of lived religiosity and secularity (cf Tweed 2008). We hold a grant for this research from the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, King’s College London.

The aim of the project is two-fold:

(1) to enable empirical research on specific youth interfaith programmes and outcomes in Lebanon and Northern Ireland

(2) to build towards a large, multi-year research project on youth interfaith peacebuilding programmes in divided societies in the Middle East and Europe and to establish a global network on youth interfaith peacebuilding, under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies, to bring together scholars and practitioners to systematically assess ‘what works’; build a body of dynamic, theoretically-rich scholarship around the topic; and feed into civil society programming.

This project builds on our shared track record of expertise on youth, interfaith dialogue, everyday religious experience, and post-conflict peacebuilding (Gutkowski, Larkin and Daou 2019; Gutkowski 2019a; Gutkowski 2019b; Gutkowski 2016; Gutkowski 2013; Larkin and Parry-Davies 2019; Kerr and Larkin 2015; Larkin 2012; Larkin 2010a; Larkin 2010b). It builds on our extensive experience of ethnographic and sociological research in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine and the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland (2005-2019). It makes use of our existing networks with partner organisations engaged in youth interfaith peacebuilding in Lebanon and Northern Ireland.