Examining contestation and conflict management within holy cities, this book provides both an overview and a range of options available to those concerned with this increasingly urgent phenomenon. In cities in India, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, we can see examples where religion plays a dominant role in urban development and thus provides a platform for conflict. Powerful religious hierarchies, the generation of often unregulated revenues from donations and endowments, the presence of holy sites and the enactment of ritualistic activities in public spaces combine to create forms of conflicts which are, arguably, more intense and more intractable than other forms of conflicts in cities. The book develops a working definition of the urban dimension of religious conflicts so that the kinds of conflicts exhibited can be contextualised and studied in a more targeted manner. It draws together a series of case studies focusing on specific cities, the kinds of religious conflicts occurring in them and the international structures and mechanisms that have emerged to address such conflicts. Combining expertise from both academics and practitioners in the policy and military world, this interdisciplinary collection will be of particular relevance to scholars and students researching politics and religion, regional studies, geography and urban studies. It should also prove useful to policymakers in the military and other international organisations.

Religious leaders and political actors often use holy places to rally citizens to 'protect' or 'liberate' national territory as 'hallowed land.' The Holy Land, Palestine or Eretz-Israel, is the most obvious case of the process of 'religionizing' ethnic, national and territorial conflicts. This book analyzes fourteen case studies of conflicts over holy sites in the Holy Land, each representing a particular archetype of conflict. It seeks to understand the many facets of disputes and the triggers for the outbreak of violence in and around such sites. It also analyses the effectiveness of the conflict mitigation and resolution tools used for dealing with such disputes.

This book covers the ideological motives and religious perceptions behind travel to sites prescribed with sanctity in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It covers sites that have drawn pilgrims and religious tourists to them for hundreds of years, and seeks to provide an understanding of the complex world of religiously motivated travel. Beginning with contemporary perspectives of pilgrimage across these religions, it then discusses management aspects such as logistics, infrastructure, malevolent behaviour and evangelical volunteers. Written by subject experts, this book addresses cultural sustainability for researchers and practitioners within religious tourism, religious studies, geography and anthropology.

Contested Sites in Jerusalem is the third and final volume in a series of books which collectively present in detail the work of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative, or JOCI, a major Canadian-led Track Two diplomatic effort, undertaken between 2003 and 2014. The aim of the Initiative was to find sustainable governance solutions for the Old City of Jerusalem, arguably the most sensitive and intractable of the final status issues dividing Palestinians and Israelis. This book examines the complex and often contentious issues that arise from the overlapping claims to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, the role of UNESCO, and the major implications of the JOCI Special Regime for such issues as archaeology, property, and the economy. Part I is dedicated to holy sites – ground zero of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a point reinforced by the autumn 2014 disturbances which threatened to spiral out of control and engulf Palestinians and Israelis in yet another wave of violence. Parts II–IV of the volume contain studies on archaeology, property, and economics that were written after the completion of the Special Regime model, specifically to address in depth how a Special Regime would deal with each of these three important areas. Contested Sites in Jerusalem offers an insightful explanation of the enormous challenges facing any attempt to find sustainable governance and security arrangements for the Old City in the context of a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It will therefore be of immense value to the policy-making community, as well as anyone in academia with a focus on Middle East politics, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the Middle East peace process.

Bordered Cities and Divided Societies is a provocative, moving, and poetic encounter with the hearts and minds of individuals living in nine cities of conflict, violence, and healing—Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Beirut. Based on research spanning 25 years, including 360 interviews and over two and a half years of in-country field research, this innovative work employs a series of concise reflective narrative essays, grouped into four thematic sections, to provide a humanistic, “on-the-ground” understanding of divided cities, conflict, and peacemaking. Incorporating both scholarly analyses based on empirical research and introspective essays, Bollens digs underneath grand narratives of conflict to illuminate the complexities and paradoxes of living amid nationalistic political strife and the challenges of planning and policymaking in divided societies. Richly illustrated, the book includes informative synopses about the cities that provide access for general readers while extensive connections to recent literature enhance the book’s research value to scholars.

The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places investigates the role of architecture and urban identity in relation to the political economy of the city and its wider state context seen through the lens of the holy places. Reflecting the broad disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, this book provides perspectives from architecture, urbanism, and politics, and provides in-depth investigations of historical, ethnographic and policy-related case studies. The research is substantiated by fieldwork carried out in Jerusalem over the past ten years as part of the ESRC Large Grants project ‘Conflict in Cities’. By analysing new dynamics of radicalisation through land seizure, the politicisation of parklands and tourism, the strategic manipulation of archaeological and historical narratives and material culture, and through examination of general appropriation of Jerusalem’s varied rituals, memories and symbolism for factional uses, the book reveals how possibilities of co- existence are seriously threatened in Jerusalem. Shedding new light on the key role played by everyday urban life and its spatial settings for any future political agreements about the city and its religious sites, this book is a useful reference work for students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Architecture, Religion and Urban Studies.

"A tour-de-force in different fields of knowledge. It takes world-city and world-history literatures to a higher level of depth and understanding. It is difficult to imagine a more pioneering, in-depth study of world cities." Ramon Grosfoguel, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley "A remarkable and original discussion of three great sacred cities across time, and their transformation by nationalism in the modern world." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University Far from spawning an age of tolerance, modernity has created the social basis of division and exclusion. This book elaborates this provocative claim as it explores the rich but divided histories of three cities located at the crossroads of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Many observers presume that violence is built into these sacred cities because their citizens cling to religious or cultural ideals of some archaic age; only when this history is overcome can citizens enter a new age of brotherhood. Samman persuades us to refocus our attention on modernity, which has instilled troubling dilemmas from the outside. He shows how these sacred places long ago entered the modern world where global political and economic forces exacerbate nationalism and regional divisions. If we are to resolve deep conflicts we must re-imagine the institutional basis on which modernity, rather than religion, is built.

The Politics of Sacred Places is a study of the socio-political dimensions of sacred sites in Israel–Palestine, drawing on over 20 years of in-depth ethnographic research which introduces cutting-edge theories on secularization, struggles for recognition, and diversity issues. This book focuses on contemporary sacred sites and their socio-political meanings for minorities within a hegemonic and a secularizing state-system. It argues that sacred places provide a space that is less scrutinized by the state and where alternative visions of the socio-political may be produced. A plethora of sites and case studies are examined, including the rural shrine of Maqam abu al-Hijja in the lower Galilee, the Mosque of Hassan Bek in the heart of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the most disputed sacred place in the region, the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. These sites are explored through mostly a phenomenological lens and in various contexts, from the individual body to the global. This book offers a critical-analytical study of the socio-political aspects of sacred sites in contemporary societies within the broader understanding of scale and the spatial turn in the study of religion.

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

This book argues that the changing character of Muslim community and their living space in Delhi is a product of historical processes. The discourse of homeland and the realities of Partition established the notion of 'Muslim-dominated areas' as 'exclusionary' and 'contested' zones. These localities turned out to be those pockets where the dominant ideas of nation had to be engineered, materialized and practiced. The book makes an attempt to revisit these complexities by investigating community-space relationship in colonial and postcolonial Delhi. It raises two fundamental questions: · How did community and space relation come to be defined on religious lines? · In what ways were 'Muslim-dominated' areas perceived as contested zones? Invoking the ideas of homeland as a useful vantage point to enter into the wider discourse around the conceptualization of space, the book suggests that the relation between Muslim communities and their living spaces has evolved out of a long process of politicization and communalization of space in Delhi.