International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research

Authors
Emmanuel Chiwetalu Ossai

Abstract
This paper draws on the extensive literature on religion, conflict and peace to challenge three observed common assumptions about the relationship between religious identity and religious peacebuilders or peacebuilding on the one hand, and civil conflict and peace on the other. Highlighting the broadness within the dynamics of civil peace and conflict as demonstrated by previous studies, it argues that both religious identity as a cause or exacerbator of conflict and violence, and faith-based actors and actions as causes of peace, are only parts of the independent variables which could produce conflict and peace, depending on the situation concerned. Consequently, it advises local religious peacebuilders against the tendency to not recognise the compound-ness that typically characterised interreligious relationships in multicultural societies, and the tendency to frame the encounters between peoples in those societies in religious terms hurriedly.