Religion, Martyrdom and Global Uncertainties 1914-2014

The leadership programme proposes a focus on concepts of religion as a pivot for bringing together wider issues in the Ideologies and Beliefs strand of Global Uncertainties itself, and in related AHRC and ESRC programmes. Since 9/11 religious issues have been prominent both in popular and journalistic perceptions of security and in academic enquiry, but informed synthesis regarding the importance of religion relative to other factors remains in short supply. The leadership activities will seek to integrate key insights from relevant projects, exploring both the various understanding of religion and quasi-religion (in relation to ideologies such as nationalism and Islamism), and weighing their importance against other non-religious factors. The programme will achieve an authoritative pooling of substantial and diverse expertise, distilled and presented in an accessible and engaged manner to users in religious leadership, public and NGO policy and practice and the media.

Work will proceed in three phases. First, there will be telephone interviews with researchers designed to highlight key insights from their work and to elucidate complementary and contrasting perspectives. The outcomes from these interviews will be summarized in an initial working paper. Second, the working paper will be disseminated; user responses gathered through two seminars and the project website; and selected researchers will attend a symposium intended to distil insights and implications for users and to present them in an accessible form. Third, a widely-circulated hardcopy summary of the outcomes together with online video resources will be made available to users, who will be invited to attend one of a series of seminars to be held at various locations around the UK at which the implications of the work will be further discussed and developed.

The research project will examine the development of the concept of martyrdom and sacrificial death in Britain and Ireland since the outbreak of the First World War. Such an enquiry will help to balance the preoccupation of researchers since 9/11 in 2001 with Islamic views of martyrdom/suicide attacks by a focus on the Christian and culturally Christian context, which remains under-researched in this period.

There will be two main methods. First, there will be archival, library, and web-based research on historic sources, including books and pamphlets, newspapers and online databases, supplemented as necessary by site visits. Particular focal points will be the First World War, including the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and the 1920 interment of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey; the Second World War, including Nazi persecution of European Christians, and the early 1980s, including the IRA hunger strikes and the Falklands War.

Second, there will be a series of semi-structured interviews with political and religious activists, carried out in partnership with the Institute for Conflict Research in Belfast, in four contrasting locations in Britain and Ireland - Belfast, Bradford, Dublin and London. They will explore contemporary perceptions of historic 'martyrdom' events in the run up to the centenaries of 1914 and 1916; recollections of the early 1980s; and responses to present-day suicide attacks, sectarian murders in Northern Ireland, and casualties in Afghanistan.

The outcomes will feed into the programme of leadership activities outlined above, and will be publicised through the website and discussed in the programme seminars. They will also result in journal articles, an academic monograph, and articles contributing to public debate. The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War (4 August 2014) will occur in the final months of the project and offer particular opportunities for dissemination and media interest.

The programme will be guided by an advisory group which will offer wide experience of public engagement and strong networks for securing non-academic impact.

Non-academic beneficiaries of both the leadership activities and the research project will fall into three main categories:
1. Religious organizations and their leaders. Initial soundings suggest that there will be strong interest in the project from senior figures in organizations such as the Church of England, the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and the East London Mosque. A particular link has been established with the Christian-Muslim Forum (to be represented on the Advisory Group by Dr Philip Lewis) and we would anticipate further interest from groups operating in inter-faith relations. Previous work by the PI and by ICR has established strong networks with religious practitioners especially in London and in Northern Ireland, and we would expect further to build on these as work proceeds.
2. Policy-makers and practitioners in central and local government and in NGOs and community groups, concerned with issues of security and community cohesion. The project will build upon the networks with this category of users being developed in the seminars to be held during 2012 under the PI's current Global Uncertainties project 'Protestant-Catholic Conflict: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Realities'.
3. The media, and through them a wider public interested in or concerned about religion and its diverse effects on the security and stability of society, and/or the sensitive and well-informed commemoration of the centenaries of 2014 and 2016. These anniversaries may also give rise to interest from practitioners in the arts.
In relation to all these categories the expectation is that a circle of existing contacts, arising both from the PI's prior GU work and his AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship on London's religious history, will be multiplied during the course of the programme through drawing on the enthusiasm and networks of the individuals initially involved.

Respective anticipated benefits will be as follows:
1. Religious leaders and organizations will be enabled to view their activities in constructively critical perspective, seeing themselves as others see them in well-digested concise academically-informed analysis. Existing experience in dialogue with this group of users indicates that such contributions will generally be warmly welcomed in strengthening a valuable objective middle ground of discourse between partisan advocacy of religion and polemical secular or atheist attacks. It is therefore realistic to look for consequent medium-term behavioural change reinforcing the potential of organized religion to be a force for stabilization rather than insecurity.
2. Policy makers and practitioners - for whom the religious dimension is one among many - will be provided with an accessible digest of high quality recent research that will help to inform their thinking and decision-making. Those with a stronger interest will be able to participate in user seminars thus further developing their understanding of the issues and the project team's awareness of further potential impacts.
3. The quality of journalism and broadcasting on relevant subjects will be enhanced by the availability of a concise integrated summary of Global Uncertainties and related research on religion, thus leading to improved wider public understanding of the issues. Media interest in marking the 2014 and 2016 centenaries will be met by the provision of insight and analysis grounded in detailed research data.

While some benefits will be immediate, it is recognized that others will be medium to long-term ones, resulting from the continued dissemination and permeation of the outcomes.