Dossier: RELIGIONS AND VIOLENCE IN SOCIETIES IN CONFLICT

Editors
Prof. Dr. Paulo Barrera Rivera (UFJF)
Prof. Dr. Marcos Carbonelli (CONICET- UNAJ Argentina)
Prof. Dr. Maxwell Fajardo (UFJF)
Prof. Dr. Cesar Pinheiro Teixeira (Universidade Vila Velha - UVV)

In the peripheries of Latin America, there is an intense presence of the religious in contexts marked by dynamics of violence ranging from the territorial rule exercised by illegal associations (guerrillas, mafias, drug gangs) to the excessive regulation of state apparatuses on the bodies, passing through the feeling of insecurity and the outrages, symbolic and material, that cross the everyday citizens in different cities of the region, and that are enhanced by the circulation of stigmatizing discourses, by gender, race, religious affiliation or migrant status.
In all these situations, religious agencies intervene, to varying degrees, because of their public vocation and their territorial anchoring. They act as sources of conflict, producers of memory and legitimations, builders of instances of peace, factories of interpretative schemes or simply creators of frameworks of certainty and order in vulnerable contexts. These are some of the roles that religious agencies combine in the Latin American political fabric and that this dossier aims to review.
In particular, we are interested in analyzing how the religious agencies with pastoral work in the urban peripheries of Latin America are positioned against the circuits of violence that unfold there. How they manage the threats to order and the attempts of anomie and dilution of the social bond that have drug traffickers as protagonists, paramilitaries and mafia networks, but also violence exercised by the repressive forces of the state and by patriarchy.
On the other hand, we will delve into the problem of religious (in)tolerance, according to which believers and specialists are positioned as victims and/or perpetrators of cases of persecution and discrimination, according to the context; at the same time attention is paid to the symbolic violence that is always more subtle. Finally we will rescue the intervention of religious groups in the production of memory and thematization of historical and current armed conflicts.
In view of the fertility of these intersections, researchers working on these topics are invited to submit their work to the date indicated. The proposals that collect these triggers will be highly appreciated, putting in dialogue the challenges of empirical work with conceptual debates of the thematic field.

Deadline: August 30 th 2024