PARTICIPANTS

Cecelia Lynch
UC-Irvine

Cecelia Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, as well as Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS) at the University of California, Irvine.  She works at the intersection of international relations theory, social movements and world politics, religion, ethics, peace and security, and is part of the Working Group on Religion, Secularism, and International Affairs of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). She is the author of Strategies for Research in Constructivist IR, with Audie Klotz (M. E. Sharpe, Feb. 2007); Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell University Press, 1999), winner of the Edgar J. Furniss Prize for best book on international security and co-winner of the Myrna Bernath Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations; and co-editor, with Michael Loriaux, of Law and Moral Action in World Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).  Her articles concern religious perspectives on multiculturalism, religion and public spheres, liberationist and humanitarian ethics, peace and anti-globalization movements, and interpretive methods for empirical research in IR.  She has been awarded fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and MacArthur Foundation, and is completing a book on tensions in Western religious ethics on violence, funded also by the AAUW and Huntington Library. Most recently, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon “New Directions” post-doctoral fellowship for a book project on “Islamic and Interfaith Religious Ethics in World Crises.” She obtained her Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York City and taught previously at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Paragraph Statement

Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

It is interesting that specialists in world affairs have finally discovered the importance of both nongovernmental organizations and religion in the past 15 years, and extremely appropriate that this workshop brings both together.  There exist an ever-growing number of NGOs, local, national, and transnational, with varying goals—democracy-building, emergency relief, human rights, environmental protection, ethnic identity solidification, religious proselytizing, secular proselytizing, economic development, and economic justice—to name a selection.  There also exists a range of belief, including multiple secularisms, world religions and their derivatives, and various forms of syncretic ideologies.

Over the past year I have interviewed representatives from approximately 75 NGOs, most of them faith-based, in New York, Cameroon, Kenya, and Jordan/the West Bank/Jerusalem.  I believe the most critical aspect of the intersection of NGOs with religion is the dual problem of coping with a) the multiplicity and range of religious/secular ethics present in the world today, and b) the ways in which neoliberal logics work to produce similarities of discourse (e.g. "capacity-building," "training," etc.), issues and programs (e.g., HIV, malaria, FGM), and goals (e.g., self-maintenance and increased funding as well as more altruistic goals). Thus far I have found that the intersection of these processes of diversity and homogenization create both possibilities and problems for both faith-based and purportedly "secular" NGOs, which I would like to discuss at the workshop.

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