Why does religion in post-conflict societies so often fail to transform even as institutions change, agreements are signed, and violence formally ends? What if the persistence of post-conflict religious divisions, particularly in Christian-majority societies, is not a failure of peacebuilding mechanisms, but a failure to transform the moral imagination within which religions continue to operate? A substantial body of scholarship has demonstrated how religion contributes to ethnonational mobilization, symbolic boundary-making, and the legitimation of violence, yet far less attention has been paid to what happens within religion itself after conflict subsides. How do religious actors reinterpret belonging, responsibility, and suffering once the violence they helped to sustain—or failed to prevent—has passed?[1]
The argument developed here emerges from a Christian theological and post-Yugoslav framework. It asks whether the dynamics it identifies may also illuminate analogous transformations in other post-conflict religious contexts. This post argues that a central dimension of post-conflict transformation remains systematically overlooked. This is because analytical frameworks fail to account for the importance of the internal reconfiguration of religious meaning in post-conflict realities. As a result, institutional change is repeatedly mistaken for moral transformation. To address this gap, I introduce the concept of the ethnocultural empathic turn as an analytical framework for identifying shifts in religious discourse and social practice in post-conflict contexts.
Beyond Reconciliation
Dominant analytical vocabularies for addressing post-conflict societies—particularly within reconciliation studies, transitional justice, interreligious dialogue, and peacebuilding scholarship—have generated important insights into moral repair, institutional reconstruction, and intergroup negotiation.[2] Yet these approaches privilege external arrangements such as agreements, institutional restructuring, and procedures while paying far less attention to the shifts in moral imagination through which communities interpret suffering and negotiate responsibility toward others. This becomes especially significant in religious communities whose symbolic frameworks have contributed to the moral legitimation of conflict. Religion is not only a factor in conflict, but also one of the primary sites where conflict persists beyond its formal end. Without addressing this internal dimension, analyses of religion in post-conflict settings risk not only being incomplete but misrecognizing the success, or lack thereof, of peace settlements.
The Ethnocultural Empathic Turn
The ethnocultural empathic turn names a pattern of transformation in which religious actors, institutions, and narratives shift away from the ethnoreligious production of boundaries and toward practices of public responsibility and forms of intergroup moral recognition that demilitarize identity. This transformation does not require abandoning religious identity or neutralizing theological difference, but, on the contrary, emerges from within religious traditions as a reconfiguration of how they interpret suffering and responsibility after collective violence. At its core lies a shift in moral imagination—from identity as marking a boundary to identity as bestowing forms of responsibility. Within this framework, empathy is not understood as emotional sentimentality but as a structured moral orientation toward the vulnerability of others, including former enemies.
Such an orientation destabilizes ethnonational moral hierarchies and reorders the symbolic grammar of belonging. It introduces alternative logics of responsibility and solidarity that interrupt the reproduction of exclusionary identity. In this sense, shifts in moral imagination are not merely symbolic, for they reconfigure the political field by undermining the moral legitimacy of ethnonational exclusion. Empathy thus functions not as a normative ideal but as an analytical indicator of transformation, marking the point at which religious actors begin to reinterpret suffering and responsibility beyond the confines of ethnonational belonging.
Bowyer Bible print 3720 Christ and the Syro-Phoenician woman Matthew 15:22-28. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The concept of the ethnocultural empathic turn draws on two complementary sources. First, it builds on the notion of ethnocultural empathy in social psychology, understood as the capacity to grasp the historical vulnerability and lived experience of those perceived as ethnically or culturally different. In this context, empathy exceeds individual affect and becomes a reflective orientation with public and political consequences. Second, it engages the biblical narrative of the encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30). In the story, a Canaanite woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter and challenges his initial refusal, thereby challenging long-standing boundaries of ethnic and religious hostility between Jews and Canaanites. The encounter ultimately culminates in recognition across those boundaries and has often been interpreted as a moment in which exclusionary understandings of identity are disrupted. Read sociologically, this episode represents not merely an act of compassion but a reconfiguration of the moral boundaries of belonging, for recognition is extended beyond the limits of communal identity. Here, identity is no longer secured through exclusion but rearticulated through responsibility. Importantly, this narrative functions not as a normative template but as a point of reference for identifying analogous transformations in other post-conflict religious contexts. Such transformations are more likely to emerge when they are articulated from within the moral and theological vocabulary of a given community rather than imposed through abstract universal formulations.
For the ethnocultural empathic turn to function analytically, it must be empirically identifiable. Such identification can be demonstrated through three clusters of observable change: through a shift in theological language from ethnosymbolic and pronational legitimation toward narratives centered on shared vulnerability and moral responsibility; through a distancing of religious institutions from direct ethnopolitical and nationalistic alignment, accompanied by the emergence of intercommunal and peace-oriented initiatives; and through concrete practices such as joint commemorations and acts of cross-community solidarity that disrupt ethnocultural boundaries.
These dynamics are visible not in established forms of shared commemoration, but precisely in their absence. In the post-Yugoslav space, for example, remembrance remains almost entirely confined within ethnoreligious boundaries, with each community commemorating its own victims in parallel to—and often in implicit or explicit opposition to—others.
What is striking in this context is not the fragility of shared commemorative practices, but their near-total absence. Even gestures that would symbolically cross these boundaries are rare, to the point of exception, and often remain external to institutional religious frameworks. This absence is not incidental, but indicative of a moral order in which recognition remains structured by ethnoreligious belonging. These dynamics do not point to transformation in progress, but to its structural blockage, a condition in which the moral imagination required for shared remembrance fails to emerge, which is evident in commemorative regimes surrounding the Srebrenica genocide, Vukovar massacre, and the post-Storm expulsion associated with Knin, where memory is organized through parallel and often antagonistic narratives rather than shared moral recognition. These indicators do not replace existing methodologies, but rather, render visible what those methodologies systematically overlook. The central question is not whether transformation is occurring, but why it so often fails to take hold within the moral frameworks that sustain post-conflict societies.
From the Balkans to the World
Although the concept of the ethnocultural empathic turn emerges from the post-Yugoslav Balkan context, where the entanglement of religion and ethnonationalism reached particularly intense forms, its analytical relevance is not confined to the region. The post-Yugoslav space functions as a laboratory in which broader dynamics are concentrated, and comparable patterns can be observed in contexts shaped by religious politicization and protracted identity conflict—from the Middle East and South Asia to Ukraine and Palestine/Israel. In contemporary Russia, for example, segments of the Russian Orthodox Church have supported the sacralization of imperial identity and framed the war in Ukraine through the language of civilizational and spiritual struggle. Comparable dynamics can also be recognized in forms of religious nationalism ranging from Hindutva in India and Buddhist majoritarianism in Sri Lanka to certain ethnonationalist interpretations of the “Promised Land” in Israel and currents of White Christian Nationalism in the United States. While these contexts differ historically and theologically, they reveal analogous tendencies toward the sacralization of collective identity and the moral narrowing of empathy across communal boundaries. The ethnocultural empathic turn identifies a missing dimension in current debates on religion and post-conflict transformation, and it connects micro-level shifts in theological interpretation with macro-level political change without reducing religion to ideology or epiphenomenon. By making visible the internal reconfiguration of religious meaning, it allows us to identify the moments when symbolic systems begin to undermine the boundaries they once sustained. Where such transformations do not occur, post-conflict societies do not overcome violence; they reorganize it within moral frameworks that render it more legitimate and therefore more difficult to contest.
[1] “These questions emerged collectively through sustained discussions within the Academy for Politics and Theology in Šibenik (Croatia), an initiative I lead (https://itp.hr/en/academy/). Over time, I have sought to respond to them through my own work, which is, on this occasion, brought together in this essay.
[2] See e.g., John Paul Lederach, Scott Appleby, and Miroslav Volf.
