Inter-Religious Communication, Religious Radicalization and Security Issues

Abstract

The object of the research in this study is the inter-religious communication, religious radicalism and their impact on security issues. The study undertakes to answer the question of how inter-religious communication and religious radicalization impacts on security. The study is of interest at the national, regional and global level. The lack of communication and inter-religious dialogue as well as the religious radicalization, have often led to inter-religious and inter-ethnic hatred, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorist acts, becoming thus a serious threat to regional and global security. The Srebrenica massacre, the former Afghanistan under the regime the Taliban, today's ISIS, and also today's trends of the radicalism of Balkan Islam prove this perfectly. The study argues that the Albanian efforts to establish their own national state were never religious reasons. They were not only set up out of the religion framework, but they also stripped off religious divisions from their political raiment. Whereas the religious radicalization shifted the religious affiliation as a priority compared to the national affiliation. But for the Albanians, religion is not the defining feature of their national identity. Defining religion as a priority before the nation, the radicalization of religious beliefs, can become a danger for our national identity, and not being able to secure it, can turn it into an existential threat for our national security. This study applies the methods and instruments of the basic scientific researches, quantitative and qualitative, like the methods of analysis and synthesis, comparative analysis, historical, legal, comparison and confrontation ones, as well as the case studies. In the end, this study concludes that the curb of religious inter-religious communication weakens religious tolerance, and creates space for the radicalization of religious beliefs. Not being able to secure the religious beliefs can turn it into a risk and a threat for our national identity and the very foundations of the Albanian state themselves. This requires the state not to be just a neutral guarantor for the freedom of religious beliefs, but to act as a promoter of these freedoms and pass from passive neutralism into active secularism.