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Read the Signs: Detecting Early Warning Signals of Interreligious Conflict
Version 1
: Received: 10 February 2022 / Approved: 17 February 2022 / Online: 17 February 2022 (11:02:09 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Ochs, P.; Fahim, E.; Pinzon, P. Read the Signs: Detecting Early Warning Signals of Interreligious Conflict. Religions 2022, 13, 329. Ochs, P.; Fahim, E.; Pinzon, P. Read the Signs: Detecting Early Warning Signals of Interreligious Conflict. Religions 2022, 13, 329.
Abstract
Building on recent directions in religion-related social and political science, our essay addresses a need for location-specific and religion-specific scientific research that might contribute directly to local and regional interreligious peacemaking. Over the past 11 years, our US-Pakistani research team has conducted research of this kind: a social scientific method for diagnosing the probable near-future behavior of religious stakeholder groups toward other groups. Integrating features of ethnography, linguistics, and semiotics, the method enables researchers to read a range of ethno-linguistic signals that appear uniquely in the discourses of religious groups. Examining the results, we observe, firstly, that our religion and location-specific science identifies features of religious group behavior that are inevident in broader, social scientific studies of religion and conflict; we observe, secondly, that our science integrates constative and performative elements: it seeks facts and it serves a purpose. We conclude that strictly constative, fact-driven sciences may fail to detect certain crucial features of religious stakeholder group behavior.
Keywords
religion; interreligious conflict; science; constative; performative; peacemaking; ethnolinguistics; semiotics; behavioral signals; group behavior
Subject
Social Sciences, Religion
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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