About the Center

The Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution offers a new approach to reducing global violence and terrorism by incorporating the best moral practices of religious communities into policy planning, diplomacy, civil society building and democratization. Providing policymakers and activists with strategies to elicit moderate moral religious expressions in conflict regions can strengthen civil society and democracy. The goal is to create political, religious and social openings that allow international political compromises and vital peace processes to flourish.

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What we do

The Center engages in three main arenas of activity: education, research, and direct action.

Education

Research and Analysis

Action

Current projects include:

The Religion, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution Initiative

This project involves mobilizing resources of religion, diplomacy and conflict resolution to support more effective interventions in global problems. Important citizens across different sectors of society can have a dramatic impact on conflict resolution, especially when these individuals are introduced to influential policymakers and political leaders in the U.S. and abroad. Powerful changes can result when key citizens and policymakers are able to learn from each other and together develop innovative strategies for conflict resolution.

The Religion, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution Initiative includes the following components:

1. Global Dialogue and Networking

Promotion of networks of key citizens stemming from cultural, religious, academic, military and business sectors, who can be the principal change agents in conflict settings. Simultaneously, promotion of networks and relationships between these citizens and policy makers and diplomats in the U.S. and in their own countries.

2. Professional Training

Training and seminars for mid-career and upper-level policy makers, businessman, diplomats and peacemakers, in new techniques of diplomacy utilizing appropriate cultural, religious, and values-based practices that can be adapted to specific conflicts

3. Documentation and Dissemination of "Best Practices"

Development of reports, books, videos, and websites that would document and disseminate the best strategies and practices in regional conflicts involving complex interactions with religion and culture, and which would be specifically tailored to be especially useful to policy makers, diplomats and private sector actors.

The New Diplomacy Project

An interactive world of unprecedented proportions requires the skill to combine official diplomacy with the values-based approach of citizen diplomacy. This would states to pursue their interests in such a way that allows for the possibility of appealing to overarching values between peoples who may be in conflict. This project aims to help generate a creative culture of international problem solving in which a knowledge of values, cultures and religions will play a key role as they are integrated by the participants themselves into new strategies of diplomacy and conflict resolution.

Components of this project include an ongoing set of seminars, workshops, in-depth retreats, and informal dinner/study gatherings, that will be made available on an ongoing basis for mid-career and upper-level diplomats, government officials and select private citizens, initially in the Washington area, but possibly extending to other key cities in the U.S. and abroad.

 

Project on the New Middle East

The purpose of this project is to create cultural breakthroughs between peoples that would set the stage for progress on matters of peace and war and state-to-state relations. We intend to create small but powerful cultural openings and experiences of shared moral and religious values with business leaders, government officials and private citizens, in order to create bridges where official diplomacy is not yet in a position to create a breakthrough or even initiate an official process. This project is modeled on some pioneering work done in Damascus in January of 2005.

Experience suggests that there is a tipping point in the number of relationships created across enemy boundaries that sets the stage for breakthroughs on a broad cultural level when the timing is right. Our purpose is simply to increase dramatically the number of significant citizens engaged in this way, and increase significantly the number of new ideas in the air between adversarial communities, in order to set the stage for breakthroughs and a propitious environment for official diplomacy and negotiations.

The project envisions a series of meetings overseas and in Washington in order to advocate for such an approach to diplomacy, in addition to orchestrating actual meetings, retreats, and private visits.

How We Began

In 2003, a major gift commitment from the Catalyst Fund endowed the The James H. Laue Chair in World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution, and created a center in the same field. The chair is named for James H. Laue, the inaugural Vernon M. and Minnie I. Lynch Professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason from 1987 until his death in 1993.

Dr. Marc Gopin, scholar and practitioner in religious peacebuilding, was appointed to the position. Dr. Gopin brings years of experience and scholarship in the positive and negative roles that religion can play in conflict. His vision for the center includes education in positive resources for conflict resolution in the world's religions, empowerment of religious leaders in the resolution of conflicts, and a transformation in the way policymakers approach religious conflicts.

To join the emailing list and receive information about Center events and activities, email us at crdc@gmu.edu.