International Development and Religion Unit
Call for Papers: The State of Religion and International Development
We welcome papers on any topic connected to religions and international development. In 2024, we are particularly interested in convening discussions on the state of our field, and including insights from those in both research and practice.
It is now over 20 years since religions and development-specific publications, conferences, and research projects started emerging and collating into a research area. We aim to provoke debate on the state of our field as a whole and interrogate where we should consolidate work or branch into new territory. The following questions can be a guide:
- What is the state-of-the-art in our field? What is the most cutting edge research?
- What topics in religions and development have seen the most significant growth and improvement over the last five years?
- What topics in religions and development are underdeveloped and need more research in the next five years?
- Does religions and development have enough research and researchers working in the area to count as its own field or discipline? What would define the parameters of religions and development as a field?
- How do we represent the “evidence base” in religions and development to policy makers and practitioners? Where have people got the “right” message about the evidence and where do inconsistencies and misconceptions lie?
We welcome submissions on these and any other related topics, including:
- Religion, conflict, and peacebuilding
- Gender, religion, and development outcomes
- Religious motivations and development practice
- Interfaith dialogue and collaboration
We welcome submissions from a diverse range of perspectives, including scholars, practitioners, and faith-based leaders.
Since its establishment as an academic discipline in the 1960's the field of International Development Studies (IDS) has evolved from a fragmented topic, contained within the many silos of different academic departments, into an interdisciplinary field that draws on knowledge from across the humanities and social sciences. Despite this growing trend, until recently, religious and theological studies have found it a challenge to contribute to this growing conversation. The International Development and Religion Unit was established at the AAR in 2009 as one avenue through which religious and theological studies could engage in this emerging constructive dialogue with development studies. The primary objective of our Unit is to use the AAR’s interdisciplinary and international reach as a focal point to gather scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, including those outside the AAR, who are engaged in the study of the space and place of religion in the context of economic, political and socio-cultural development in the global south. We wish to support theoretically robust and practically oriented research that interrogates the post/de/colonial, theological, religious and missionary assumptions and mentalities of the global confluence of international development and religion in the developing world, including, but not limited to the investigations of current faith-based NGO’s and their projects in the field, practitioner-based research and reflection from the field and the encounter between private and public religion(s) in the developing world.