KAICIID’s work in Africa focuses on promoting peace and reconciliation through interreligious and intercultural dialogue, particularly in regions experiencing conflict, displacement, and social fragmentation. Our key initiatives support peacebuilding by fostering dialogue among religious leaders, policymakers, and civil society, addressing the root causes of conflict, and strengthening social cohesion. In countries such as the Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique, and Nigeria, KAICIID’s programmes focus on building networks of cooperation among religious communities, enhancing local peace efforts, and creating inclusive spaces for dialogue. 

The main aim of the Africa Programme is to ensure that religious, traditional, and other relevant actors are fully engaged in supporting sustained peace and security initiatives, working together to uphold Human Dignity and realise the 2063 African Union Agenda. 

Working towards the achievement of the mentioned outcome, the Nigeria and CAR Country Programmes, as well as the Mozambique initiative, are used as anchors to the interventions at the regional level. Specifically, projects piloted and implemented at the national level are then showcased during regional fora for potential replication and upscaling in other countries of the region. 

Central to our work is the engagement of religious leaders and local actors in conflict resolution, with targeted training that empowers communities to prevent violence and build peace. In Mozambique, our initiatives focus on reducing religious and ethnic tensions exacerbated by the ongoing conflict in the Cabo Delgado region. Similarly, in the Central African Republic, KAICIID’s work with journalists and media professionals is aimed at countering hate speech and misinformation, promoting responsible reporting, and supporting peace efforts. Through these initiatives, we are fostering a culture of transformative dialogue that strengthens communities, reduces conflict, and promotes long-term stability across the region. 

In a Europe marked by intersecting crises and growing polarisations, we harness the power of interreligious and intercultural dialogue to strengthen social cohesion and support reconciliation across the 46 countries of the Council of Europe. Our mission is to foster rights-based, equitable and inclusive societies, drawing on shared values from diverse cultural, religious, and humanist traditions. We provide safe and dynamic spaces that explore complex challenges related to identity, discrimination, exclusion and inequalities based on ethnic, cultural and religious factors. Our aim is to build trust, promote mutual understanding and learning, and foster a sense of belonging, paying special attention to marginalised groups, including religious and ethnic minorities, refugees, migrants, youth, and women from fragile contexts. 

By blending policymaking and policy implementation discussions with grassroots actions and research, we engage a diverse range of partners—from secular and religious leaders at all levels to faith-based organizations, civil society, academia, and the private sector. Our interreligious platforms, capacity-development and grant-making initiatives empower individuals and communities, establish networks, and build coalitions committed to constructing the emotional and spiritual foundations needed for fair and cohesive communities that uphold human dignity for all. 

Five years ago, the International Dialogue Centre was inaugurated in Vienna. Since then, we’ve come a long way. We’re proud to exhibit our work and want to thank the organizations and individuals we have worked with in promoting our common mission for peace and dialogue globally.

In five years, we have conducted 28 conferences 31 workshops, 42 trainings, and reached thousands of trainees. We are currently working in four focus areas, which include the Arab Region, Central African Republic, Myanmar & Nigeria. In each of these focus areas, we have established country offices and have experts on the ground. We have also trained 112 Fellows as well as providing support for refugees in our home country of Austria.

This month, we would like to share some of our accomplishments and look forward to many more years of promoting social cohesion and peace through dialogue. 

Dialogue Days is a KAICIID annual campaign to promote awareness of interreligious and intercultural dialogue around the world.  Dialogue Days aims to celebrate interreligious dialogue as a tool for harmony, social cohesion, peace and reconciliation. Dialogue Days may become an annual event during which KAICIID and other organizations can conduct interreligious dialogues at all levels, conduct training and raise public awareness through other events and activities.

The field of interreligious dialogue is growing. More and more people are convinced that the open encounter offered through dialogue is critical to creating understanding and productive cooperation between religious communities.

Our era sees multiple conflicts along lines of religious identity. In many places, the relationships between religious communities—if not between individual members of those communities—are marked by mutual suspicion, fear and distrust. Misinformation about the motivations, beliefs and desires of the Other (people of different cultural and religious backgrounds) persist. Thus dialogue—including dialogue between secular and religious communities--is an essential part of ending conflict, and preparing for a lasting peace and reconciliation.

Interreligious dialogue is valuable even in areas where religious groups coexist in peace. Dialogue offers an opportunity for religious communities to identify shared concerns and work together in any field, from the environment to health to education.

DIALOGUE DAYS 2014

KAICIID Dialogue Days were launched in November 2014 in Nairobi, Kenya, and New Delhi, India, to raise awareness of interreligious dialogue as a tool for peace, broaden KAICIID’S service to religious and interreligious dialogue leaders, and pilot new KAICIID training material in the field.

In 2014, as a reflection of KAICIID’s programmatic focus on the Image of the Other in the Media, Dialogue Days activities centered around the theme of how the media impacts interreligious relations.

Dialogue Days in Nairobi was held from 15-18 November in cooperation with Arigatou International—Nairobi (Global Network of Religions for Children), and with the support of KAICIID’s Expert for Africa Programmes, Ambassador Mussie Hailu. Dialogue Days in New Delhi was held in cooperation with Sarva Dharma Samvaad from 22-25 November 2014. In each city, events began with two parallel training courses for religious leaders and dialogue practitioners, Media Wise and Speak Up. These were followed by high-level panel discussions on the impact of the media on interreligious relations, which brought together national figures from the realms of religion, policy, and media.

Nairobi and New Delhi were selected as the locations in which KAICIID would premier Dialogue Days because they are located in regions with complex and dynamic interreligious relations, and because of the presence of trusted local partners in each city.

The initiatives brought together religious leaders, dialogue practitioners, policy makers and media experts for training and discussion on these groups’ roles in shaping perceptions of the religious Other in East Africa.

In Kenya, one senior participant, who had changed his plans last-minute to fly in for the trainings from Tanzania, said in an address to participants that he had definitely found the effort worthwhile: “If I had missed this, I would have missed a lot.”

See Dialogue Days report here

KOCID is being offered as a pilot starting in the Winter of 2015 using a Moodle platform. This pioneer course is the product of an ongoing collaboration between KAICIID and several universities: the University of Montreal (Canada), the Institut Superior de Ciències Religioses de Barcelona as well as the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Using a combination of peer-reviewed and group collaboration approaches with auto-evaluations and online-assessed technics, KOCID aims to enhance capacity-building in the field of interreligious dialogue, train instructors who will tutor KOCID, build expertise in education.

Contemporary debates and discussions about interreligious and intercultural dialogue often suffer from two limitations: they neglect the century-old history of dialogue encounters and they frequently restrict themselves to an exegesis of the major documents emerging from those encounters.

The Talking Dialogue project aims to counterbalance these limitations and seek answers to new questions and place older ones in a new framework of reference in order to generate new information useful to interreligious and intercultural dialogue.

The project examines the major interreligious and intercultural encounters in modern history – from the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, through the 1970 Kyoto World Conference on Religion and Peace, to the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in
2000. By using different and new source materials, Talking Dialogue looks at debates and discussions that were not recorded in official chronicles of these major dialogue encounters.

KAICIID brought together a group of young scholars from around the world to carry out this research. These researchers study interreligious and intercultural dialogue from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The Talking Dialogue project offers an opportunity to examine the archival material of interreligious and intercultural encounters, official records, interviews and other documents.

The resulting analyses will add new perspectives to our present-day understanding, highlighting best practices and identifying repeated mistakes.

As part of the KAICIID Talking Dialogue project on the history of interreligious dialogue, we have been working with the students who are part of the project, Eight of them have kindly provided blog entries.

Zachary Wone: “Talking Dialogue”: Detective work at the archives of the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches

Minjung Noh: “Talking Dialogue”: Exploring the archives of the Universal Peace Federation

Semiramis Del Carmen Vieira Rodríguez: “Talking Dialogue”: The American Unitarian Association, the world’s oldest international interreligious association, opens its doors to historical research

Maryam Mouzzouri: “Talking Dialogue”: Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Maryam Mouzzouri: “Talking Dialogue”: The birth of worldwide interreligious dialogue in 1893

Maria Bargo: “Talking Dialogue”: a first-hand look through the archives of the Oxford International Interfaith Centre

Janna Ditz: “Talking Dialogue”: Exploring the history behind the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Sana Saeed: “Talking Dialogue”: Travelling back in time – the 1936 World Congress of Faiths

Verena Kozmann: "Talking Dialogue": Rudolf Otto and the Religioeser Menschheitsbund (1921-1937)