Editor's Note: This blog was written by Enough Project intern Holly Kallmeyer
With a ceasefire recently signed in Brazzaville and a new U.N. mission preparing to deploy to the Central African Republic (CAR), civil society groups are seeking ways to promote local reconciliation processes and a role in encouraging peace more broadly across CAR. During or in the wake of other conflicts, civil society has helped lay the groundwork for peace in several ways, including by facilitating dialogues to build public support for reconciliation and a lasting peace agreement from a grassroots level. Understanding the different means by which civil society groups have been involved in promoting peace in other contexts can lend insight on civil society's role in developing sustainable peace in CAR.
During Northern Ireland's Troubles, civil society organizations played important roles in reducing religious friction between Catholic and Protestant communities. At the local level, the Community Relations and Christians (CRAC) movement connected religious leaders of different communities to one another during the late 1980s. Maureen Hetherington, the organizer of CRAC, used her civil society connections to bring together leaders of the four main churches in Northern Ireland, which had previously not played an active role in the peace process. She engaged them in workshops to use religion as a tool for overcoming divisions. These religious leaders were then able to bring messages of reconciliation back to their parishioners. At a national level, the Columba Community organized public and high-level repentance services, inter-faith gatherings where people were encouraged to ask for forgiveness for the roles they had played in ...
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