International Development and Religion Unit
Co-sponsored panel with Religion and the Social Sciences Unit:
Religion and Development 2025-2030
The next five years will be a momentous and potentially tumultuous time for development agendas. In the run up to the end of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030 and the incoming Trump administration in the US and its effects on international development funding and practices, shifts in our understandings of faith-based development, localization, the role of local faith actors, freedom of religion and belief, and strategic religious engagement are likely to evolve. We are interested in papers that speak to these evolutions:
- The effects on FBOs of shifts in development policy between US administrations
- The effects of religious freedom framings on development as a priority area of interest under Trump administrations
- A focus on local faith actors and localization in humanitarian and development work
- How strategic religious engagement is being conceived and implemented in development practice
- Planning for 2030 and how to include faith actors in the post-2030 agenda
- Reflections on faith actor roles in advocacy for an implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and what should be learned for post-2030
Co-sponsored panel with the Religion and Migration Unit:
Religion and Climate Migration
Changes in environments – often a consequence of rapid and radical anthropogenic climate change – are an increasingly important driver of migration. Despite a consensus among scholars that the environmental impact on migration is difficult to measure, its significance for the movement of people across the globe needs to be studied. This co-sponsored session seeks proposals that explore the nexus between religion and climate migration from both empirical and explanatory angles, including normative questions. We are interested in
1. case study examples of religious beliefs and practices affecting and being affected by climate migration;
2. the collaboration of faith-based organizations in humanitarian and development interventions for climate migrants;
3. the contribution that different and diverse faith traditions make to emerging normative frameworks that aim to address the governance of climate migration; and
4. the challenge that climate migration poses to discourse about people on the move, both locally and globally;
5. definitional and conceptual debate on the parameters of this emerging area of research on intersections of religion and climate migration.
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.