Tokyo Peace Roundtable – Beyond War and Towards Reconciliation: Convening Multi-Religious Peace Roundtables

Our world is mired in the Covid pandemic, and a number of simultaneous armed conflicts ranging from non-state actors in Nigeria and Western Africa to the Middle East, as well as actual state-implicated conflicts in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Yemen, to name but a few. All taking place at the height of a climate change-related series of natural disasters in too many corners of the world – including the developed world.

Already in 2016, at the World Humanitarian Summit, the predictions were that the majority of crisis the world is likely to confront would be humanitarian in nature. And this was before Covid, more wars, fires and floods rampaging our universe. COP 25 affirmed that as far as climate is concerned, we have already passed the treacherous percentage milestones.

As if that were not enough, we are regaled with astounding figures of rising violent crimes – even in many developed countries – racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate speech, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments (when the immigrants are non-white to be clear). Elections, when they are genuinely and properly held, are contested. Democratic legitimacy and human rights have never been so egregiously threatened as they are today. Hundreds of thousands of people are being killed.

All national and international development, humanitarian efforts and civic engagement are effectively busy responding – most against all odds. And most of the responses, whether from governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental sides, are piecemeal, focused on a specific effort, initiative, or engaging only secular policy makers.

This is why we need a series of Peace Roundtables, which convene, on an equal footing, multi-religious leaders experienced in serving their communities in times of both war and peace (and doing so together), alongside secular policy makers. The Roundtable(s) would look beyond the immediate moments and cycles of violence, finger-pointing, and apportioning of blame. Instead, the focus would be to assess, together, how to emerge from the ongoing conflict(s) towards a post-conflict reality. The conversations would focus on exchanging practical narratives of building social cohesion as well as diverse reconciliation efforts, based on different conflict settings.

Religions for Peace, as the world’s oldest and largest multireligious movement, has decades of experience in facilitating mediation efforts, general interreligious dialogue, as well multi-religious critical service provision, through its Interreligious Councils and its member faith leaders. In many cases, Religions for Peace faith leaders work not only with one another, but also with secular civil society organisations, as well as well as with governmental and intergovernmental entities. The dialogues take place with expert moderation from among seasoned members of Religions for Peace leadership, many of whom have participated as hosts and/or as protagonists in various conflictual and peace-making contexts.

In line with this legacy, in 2021, Religions for Peace, with the support of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, hosted the first global conference on “Faith and Diplomacy: Generations in Dialogue”. The conference format, wherein religious leaders (men and women), were convened with secular diplomats and academics, and hosted in a hybrid format, provides a good template which the herein proposed Peace Roundtables will follow, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Lessons learned from decades of Religions for Peace experience, together with the latest global convening in 2021, affirm the need to create ‘safe spaces’ where religious leaders can come together to discuss, assess, reflect critically, and inspire one another, as well as others struggling to cope with (re)building broken infrastructure, healing social divisions, and redressing trauma. The unique roles which diverse religious leaders bring to the same experience tables cannot be underestimated.

As the war in Ukraine continues to lead to thousands of deaths and multiple sites of destruction not limited to the boundaries of the countries involved, basic commodity prices (fuel and food) have skyrocketed, leading to serious food insecurity around the world. The moment to act upon the recommendations and lessons learned in service of socially cohesive peace making, is now.

This event is now over.

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