Women in Religious Peacebuilding

Katherine Marshall, Susan Hayward, Esther Breger

May 1, 2011

To recognize and understand better the role of women in religious peacebuilding, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs launched an initiative with a symposium on July 7-8, 2010, at Georgetown University. It focused on the ways in which women inspired by or linked to religious ideals and institutions worked for and maintained sustainable, positive peace. The symposium brought together practitioners, academics, and policymakers from several distinct fields and backgrounds. The investigation also involved a series of in-depth interviews with invited participants and other leaders in the field and drew on the experiences of several programs, such as the University of San Diego’s Women Peacemakers Program and the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, that seek explicitly to honor the peace work of women inspired by religious ideas or communities. Part of USIP's Peaceworks series, this report highlights the initiative’s main findings to date, building on the major themes that emerged from the interviews and from the July 2010 exchange.

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