Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites ─ Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution

This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted -- or not -- by conflict, and the policy consequences.

These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. While religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.

Elazar Barkan is professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, director of School of International and Public Affair's Human Rights Concentration, and director of Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He is the coauthor of No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation and author of The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices.

Karen Barkey is professor of sociology and history at Columbia University and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Her latest work, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, was awarded the Barrington Moore Award in the Comparative Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the J. Greenstone Award in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association.