Research on conflict and peacebuilding identifies youth mostly as perpetrators and/or victims of violence. It is often assumed that youth are easily inflamed and mobilized by religious arguments. This assumption neglects the role of religious youth in peacebuilding processes on the ground. Taking Jos, Nigeria, as a case study, this project aims to identify how Muslim and Christian youth envision and work towards peaceful co-existence between religious communities after interreligious violence. The research takes a post-secular perspective, meaning that it will critically analyse how various (secular and religious) views on religion, conflict and peace(building) impact possibilities for peaceful interreligious co-existence.

Current research on secularity no longer understands the secular as the decline of the religious. Rather, secularity refers to a particular configuration of religion, state, society, and science. By retracing configurations of secularity in contemporary India, the proposed research will contribute a much needed empirical and cross-cultural perspective to a largely theoretical debate focused on Europe and North America. Taken as an analytical category, secularity permits to uncover the cultural foundations of contemporary forms of religion and non-religion alike. For this purpose, anthropological fieldwork in the environment of a south Indian centre for atheism will be combined with philological analyses of the as yet hardly researched literary genre of Indian spiritual non-fiction. With recourse to new institutional theories it will be possible to fathom not only the ideological, but also the pragmatic and material aspects of secularity and retrace how they translate into concrete practices of individuals.