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Religion features prominently in many of the major foreign policy challenges facing the new Obama administration, notably in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and of course, the Middle East as a whole. Yet beyond the experts, most government officials and implementing partners still do not have the requisite tools nor necessary understanding of the issues to factor religion into policy and practice in an appropriate manner. This chapter discusses U.S. engagement with religion in two parts. The first outlines the difficulties and challenges in conflict zones, and discusses the legal issues that arise. The second proposes concrete recommendations, which are intended to help clarify guidance and harmonize practice. Because conflict zones are complex and fluid environments, and religion can be interpreted very differently in each situation, it is not possible to develop a generic framework that can be applied in all contexts. Aid workers, soldiers, diplomats, and other practitioners need new tools, but they must also be prepared to work with ambiguity and to rely on their own judgment.

This chapter explores the refugee camps as conflict zones and the operations of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in particular. It contends that no gender approach to humanitarian operations is viable without consideration of the contingencies of political geography and history. Then, it turns to politics in the Horn of Africa to situate the refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya, within a larger geopolitical context. UNHCR's gender policies provide a grid of intelligibility for field officers and other staff working with displaced populations. Furthermore, a different strategy for assisting refugee women who face threats of sexual violence is evaluated. The Women Victims of Violence (WVV) project is not the only UNHCR initiative that aims to identify vulnerable segments of the refugee population. This project highlights the dangers of subscribing to or unintentionally reproducing categories of difference without attending to their practical implications.

This chapter describes a program initiated in 1992 that brought together Muslim and Jewish researchers to document the cultural assets of their communities in Jerusalem. Though this work did not materialize into a Folklife Festival program, it laid the groundwork for several innovative and ongoing projects. The author chronicles the project’s ethnographic phase in the early 1990s, the cancellation of the Festival program in 1994, and the continuation of the project as a university course and study tour. She interrogates the notion of parallel self-determination as a methodology and demonstrates the complexity of curating in zones of conflict.

This chapter reflects on the ethical dilemmas surrounding teaching about violence and peace in conflict zones, whether in surrounding communities or in faraway locales. Drawing on the increasingly common use of experiential learning and field-based courses, it discusses how students with strong normative commitments but limited understandings of the world find their assumptions challenged and questioned in the field, where problems and possible solutions are much more complex than they may have expected. The chapter then highlights a host of wicked problems and provides concrete suggestions on how to make field courses more ethically reflective, noting the importance of consent, inclusivity, and listening to local voices. The result is an approach that underscores the value of field experience while also encouraging humility and awareness of the claims and agency of local actors. These dilemmas and responses are relevant well beyond the academy, as they apply to any field-based efforts, whether undertaken by researchers or activists.