An agreement was tentatively reached on 21 October in Vienna between Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), France, Russia and the US. Details of the deal are still not public and the deal is not sealed yet (the Iranian delegation needs clearance from Tehran). Still, the general elements of the deal are known and they raise important questions and leave some critical matters of Iran’s nuclear dossier essentially unresolved. Iran has agreed to ship a significant share of its Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) stockpile to Russia for further enrichment. The fuel will then be processed into fuel rods and returned to Iran for use in its Tehran Research Reactor, under IAEA safeguards. Pending clarification of what additional elements the deal addresses and includes, here are five questions that presumably remain unanswered.

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Everybody knows it: the EU is a secular institution, which doesn’t have legal competence in religious matters. Moreover, its cooperation with non-state actors is based on the principle of non-discrimination, meaning that the EU should not discriminate any actor on the basis of its secular or religious nature. I was reminded of these two EU fundaments several times during interviews with EU officials last and this year.

In reality, is the separation between the EU and religion that clear? My experience is that while separation seems to be the case on paper and in many policy areas, there are also indications of emerging patterns of timid cooperation between EU institutions and religious actors, both religious leaders and grassroots representatives, in internal and external EU policies. However, this knowledge doesn’t seem to be fully acknowledged, internalised, nor reflected upon in current EU policy-making. Read the rest of this entry »

The importance of the religious factor today from the lives of millions of individuals up to global dynamics does not need to be pointed out any longer. Neither does it need to be argued that our world is affected by many kinds of violence from the domestic to the global level. The link between religion and violence, conflict, extremism and terrorism gets a lot of attention, is extensively reported, researched and increasingly taken into account in policymaking and international relations. However, the other side of the coin, namely the link between religion and peace, gets far less attention. Given the obvious presence of religion on the world scene today and its role in stimulating, supporting or legitimizing conflicts and violence, it is rather surprising that within the international community and the academic world attention is rising so lately and sporadically to the role of religion in peacebuilding.

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