Religion and Nationalism in Iraq: A Comparative Perspective (Studies in World Religions)

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Because the situation in Iraq exhibits some of the standard symptoms of religious nationalism, it seems appropriate to compare it to other cases where the impulses of religion and nationalism have also come together in a highly lethal way. This volume provides a comparative consideration of attempts to manage and resolve nationalist conflicts in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan, and examines how lessons from those situations might inform similar efforts in Iraq. In their introduction, Professors Little and Swearer review current scholarly thinking on the connection of religious and ethnic factors to nationalist conflicts, and they demonstrate the salience of religious and ethnic identity to these conflicts. For each country, two prominent thinkers examine the intersection of religion and ethnicity and the struggles to form a nation-state. The volume also contains a summary of the discussion on each country among 20 scholars, appendices providing background on the three countries with which Iraq is compared, and maps of the countries. The central role of ethnic and religious impulses in forming the identity of a people or "nation" directly ties these matters to nationalism and nationalist conflict.

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xFEFF;David Little is the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice of Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict, Harvard Divinity School, and Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.Donald K. Swearer is Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, and Professor Emeritus of Religion, Swarthmore College.Susan Lloyd McGarry is Managing Editor in the Office of Communications at Harvard Divinity School.Alex de Waal is program director at the Social Science Research Council, a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University and a director of Justice Africa. He is author of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Clarendon Press 1989) and co-author, with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (Zed Books 2005).