Component Leader: Elazar Barkan, in collaboration with the Human Rights Concentration  

Closely related to the above theme of Human Rights, Religion, and Public Policy, this initiative takes both a scholarly and practical approach to questions of Toleration, Religion, and Democracy in the world. Professor Elazar Barkan, a human rights theorist and activist and a new SIPA faculty member, has been working on projects of Track-Two Diplomacy for the last four years at the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) in Salzburg, which he co-founded. Barkan’s endeavor seeks to create a context where civil society representatives from three different religions in conflict (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) collaborate on a plan for agreed access to a major religious site they all hold sacred.

Civil society organizations can play a critical role in moving away from non-democratic regimes; but equally, such organization, if they are religious and only have members from their religious group, can become repositories of historical memories of grievance which present powerful obstacles to peaceful, democratic policies. Barkan has been working for three years on a four-step action plan to foster religious toleration and cooperation over one project: first, try to generate agreement among the groups on some dimensions of a common history of conflict at the religious site they all consider sacred; second, discuss, with the help of an architect, a design for multiple access routes to the sacred site; third, approach private and public funders for financial support to construct agreed upon, multiple access routes, leveraging this funding for further support from important international actors such as the UN; fourth, have the multi-religious civil society actors present their joint plan, in a classic case of civil society-led, Track-Two Diplomacy, to relevant governments—in this case Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Barkan has been meeting with major civil society groups in Palestine and Israel since October 2004. These groups now intend to move forward with the four-step plan. If civil society religious groups, with legitimacy in their own religions and states, can arrive at a consensual program of action and create tolerance, the “cost” of acceptance by the governments in conflict is diminished. CDTR is involved in this innovative public policy project in the area of religion and international affairs in three ways:

Elazar Barkan will create a new workshop-style policy course, “Human Rights and Conflict Resolution: Case Studies of Access to Holy Sites” targeted primarily to SIPA students and based on his involvement in this unique project.

In 2007/2008, Barkan will hold a conference at Columbia University for researchers and students to examine and disseminate lessons learned from this ambitious experiment.

Barkan will also facilitate internships at the Salzburg Institute for SIPA students to work on this project.