Climate change is fuelling violent conflicts. Competition over access to natural resources due to climate-induced degradation has resulted in outbreaks of bloody inter-communal violence in Kenya. The role of sacred beliefs and practices in these conflicts remains understudied. Yet people can engage in bloody conflicts, even sacrificing their lives, to protect what they consider sacred, such as land, water and cattle. The problem this project addresses is that we lack knowledge on how sacred beliefs and practices frame climate change-induced conflicts and how that influences peace and reconciliation strategies. The project’s research question is: How may framing climate-induced conflicts in sacred terms influence the strategies policymakers and NGOs adopt to address the conflicts? Answering this question is crucial to understanding the link between climate change and conflict and developing indigenously-founded peace and reconciliation strategies. Collaborating with Osotua Le Maa, a Kenya-based organisation promoting sustainable development in the face of unpredictable weather patterns and unprecedented conflict, we will conduct research and develop concepts and tools that are sensitive to sacred beliefs and practices to address climate-induced conflicts. The deliverables are a 10-minute documentary, policy brief, three blog posts and two academic papers.

The programme seeks to clarify the history of conjectural emendation and shed light on the role of conjec­tures in the current critical editions of the text of the New Testament. It intends to do so in two complementary ways: proper historical research and data collection. The historical research will develop an understanding of key periods of the history of NT textual criticism and conjectural emendation. The data collection will collect, describe, edit and evaluate important conjectures that have been proposed on the text of the New Testament. It will be of fundamental value for the preparation of the new Editio Critica Maior and is enthusiastically wel­comed by ITSEE and INTF. Collaboration with these institutes is planned and both institutes have responded positively to the idea.

The delicate relationship between religion and secular modernity is an exemplary element of 21st century societies: of their social and cultural ‘super-diversity’ caused by globalization. The many encounters and confrontations within and between groups and individuals refer to what has been coined as their social imaginaries. These are shared implicit sets of assumptions, often involving moral or religious claims about the society one is part of: claims about the values of society and about how it should be organized. Social imaginaries do not refer to explicit doctrines or beliefs but to the concrete and contingent way communities imagine their background assumptions and ideals. Hence, social imaginaries are ‘lived spaces’ in which people share as well as contest the meaning of their existence. The central research question of the project is: What can the concept of social imaginaries contribute to the analysis - in current cultural theory, religious studies and globalization theory - of societies that are interculturally super-diverse and display complex blends of existential frameworks, with both secular and religious features? Starting from this question the project will develop its research along theoretical and empirical lines, focusing on social imaginaries in urban and in virtual environments against the background of globalization. SIMAGINE will develop an international research consortium of ten relevant partners forming an interdisciplinary network, that aims for joint research and academic as well as public interventions and publications, for the organization of seminars and symposia, and for a larger fully elaborated application in 2019.