Lebanon Religious Freedom Roundtables

Search for Common Ground (Search) is implementing the “Religious Roundtable” project that aims to promote religious tolerance and human rights in the Middle East and South and Central Asia regions through the inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable engagement of diverse religious actors. The 36-month project, closing in 2023, targets key stakeholders through religious coexistence and tolerance in Lebanon, in addition to engaging online and social media audiences through collective advocacy campaigns.

Context

With 18 officially recognized religious communities, Lebanon is home to the most religiously diverse society in the Middle East. With a lack of a clear religious majority, the country has long since relied on a system of confessionalism, where power is distributed among its three largest religious communities. As demographics and influence shift, each of these groups fear becoming a smaller minority compared to their counterpart, stoking fears of repression and the loss of rights. Highly aware of their minority statuses and having fought bitterly against one another, Lebanon’s confessionally divided populations uphold a culture of tribalism – defending the rights of members of their communities while distrusting the other. The mistrust, in turn, leads to conflict as communities are predisposed to respond to tensions and disputes through the use of violence. Trust building between religious communities is necessary for the country to achieve genuine stability and avoid slipping back into a state of civil war. This requires greater engagement between the various communities which simultaneously illustrates how their prosperity, security, and rights are in fact intertwined.

Approach

Our theory of change holds that IF diverse and influential religious and community leaders and civil society regularly engage to discuss their concerns, analysis, and common priorities about religious freedom, AND they have opportunities to collaborate in advocacy initiatives, THEN actors of all faiths will be better placed to promote inclusive religious freedom BECAUSE they will have consolidated and coordinated their societal and governmental influence to advance religious freedom that accounts for the diverse needs of different faith communities.

The project’s overall goal in Lebanon is to promote religious freedom through the inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable engagement of diverse religious actors. Search’s Global Religious Engagement unit leverages Search’s Common Ground Approach to Religious Engagement to convene roundtables of religious actors, civil society, governmental stakeholders, and other key leaders to recognize their shared concerns and priorities to strengthen religious freedom in Lebanon. As a locally rooted, neutral, and faith-literate but not a faith-based organization, Search is implementing a program that enables a diverse coalition to develop working relationships and launch joint advocacy projects in some of the world’s most complex and sensitive contexts including Lebanon.

This goal will be achieved through the realization of two specific objectives:

Objective 1: Enabling  a greater understanding of the ‘other’ through the identification of shared needs and rights of different religious groups, including minorities in Lebanon; and

Objective 2: Promoting peaceful collaborative relationships across sectarian and religious dividing lines to advance religious freedom in Lebanon.

This will be achieved through the implementation of these key activities:

1. Identification of initial Religious Freedom Roundtable (RFR) participants;
2. RFR kick-off meetings;
3. Workshops on the Common Ground Approach to Religious Engagement (CGA-RE);
4. Joint analyses of religious freedom and shared concerns;
5. Development of RFRs’ Strategic Engagement Frameworks; and
6. Implementation of the Strategic Engagement Frameworks

Expected results

• Community leaders have increased capacity and opportunity to build collaborative and sustainable partnerships with representatives of majority and minority religious groups, civic leaders, and civil society in their countries.
• Community leaders have an increased understanding of the societal and governmental barriers to religious freedom for diverse faith actors and those of no faith.
• Roundtable participants have regular platforms to conduct joint advocacy to shift local, national, and /or regional policies to better enable religious freedom.
• Government officials and key community leaders have access to new analyses and recommendations on how to protect and promote religious freedom.