Conflict, Peace, and Political Imagination in Contemporary Orthodox Christianity
By Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Nikolaos F. Dimitriadis, and Aaron T. Hollander
Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is a Professor in the International Studies Program at Boston College and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She is an internationally recognized expert on global Orthodox Christianity; she was a diplomat on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2004-2012), served as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group (2011-2015), and was a delegate consultant of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the Holy and Great Council at Crete in 2016. She advises international organizations and institutions such as the European External Action Service and the International Negotiators Working Group, on religious literacy, security, and human rights, and she directs leadership training programs for faith-based institutions. With her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her academic research concentrates on the intersection of geopolitics, religion, democracy, and human rights. Widely published in academic and policy journals, she is on the editorial board of the Review of Faith & International Affairs. She is a member of the Global Academic Council of the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Secretariat and she co-chairs the International Relations section of the International Orthodox Theological Association.
Dr. Nikolaos F. Dimitriadis is Professor of World Religions at the American College of Thessaloniki, President of the Center of Ecumenical, Missiological and Environmental Studies (CEMES), national contact of Globethics.net in Geneva, and member of the Executive Committee of the World Conference Association of Theological Institutions (WOCATI). His PhD is in “Historical Religious and theological considerations of Interreligious Dialogue in contemporary Mission,” and his other areas of expertise include environmental ethics, theology of religions, and faith-based social entrepreneurship (MBA). In 2023, he was appointed an advisor by the Episcopal Conference of Italy (CEI) regarding the “Stewardship of Creation,” as well as a member of the Scientific Committee of Byzantine Thessaloniki, an NGO based in Greece. He is a composer and a singer, and in 2017, he concluded his first world tour, “SMILE, a concept based on Ethics, Environment and Music,” offering concerts and lectures all around the world.
Dr. Aaron T. Hollander is Editor of Ecumenical Trends, Associate Director of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute, and Adjunct Faculty in Theology at Fordham University. In 2022, he was elected President of the North American Academy of Ecumenists; he also serves on the steering committee of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network and on the summer faculty of the Centro Pro Unione in Rome. He is a scholar of ecumenical theology and lived religion, with his PhD from the University of Chicago (2018). His research focuses on the lived dynamics of ecumenical/interreligious conflict and coexistence, the aesthetic texture and political power of holiness (particularly in Orthodox Christianity), and the circulation of theological understanding beyond explicitly religious settings. His first book, forthcoming from Fordham University Press (2025), is entitled Saint George Liberator: Hagiography and Resistance on the Island of Saints.
Aaron Hollander, for Ecumenical Trends: I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you both, in what is a first for our interview series in Ecumenical Trends: a conversation between three rather than two interlocutors. We wanted to host this interview for a few interlocking reasons. We’ll come back, later in our conversation, to consider the significance of two important anniversaries that we are observing over the coming year – the 50th anniversary of the invasion and division of Cyprus, this summer of 2024, and the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, in 2025. But more broadly, we are bringing you together because, over the last five years, we have published a number of articles and roundtables in Ecumenical Trends pertaining to intra-Orthodox Church conflict and conversation around moral, political, and ecological reconciliation.1 The two of you are leading scholarly voices on the ecumenical, interreligious, and political entanglements of modern Orthodox Christianity, and you both work and think in interdisciplinary and interchurch contexts. Your insights into the range of ecclesiological and political crises in which the Orthodox churches are embroiled today will be most germane and appreciated.
By way of introducing yourselves to our readers, I wonder if you would speak a little to your own interdisciplinary scholarly backgrounds: how different traditions of thought and method have shaped your own current work.
Elizabeth Prodromou: Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation. I really appreciate it. In terms of my own scholarship and how I approach the kind of subjects that we’re discussing today, I’m trained as a political scientist. In political science you can choose sub-fields, and mine are comparative politics and international relations. I see these, of course, as completely intersecting. And although I’m trained as a political scientist, almost all of my work is intentionally and quite heavily inter- and cross-disciplinary. I deal primarily with issues related to religion, democracy, human rights, and geopolitics, and I focus heavily on eastern Christianity. But in recent years I have focused more and more on interreligious research.
As a consequence, I would characterize myself as a hybrid, in a couple of senses. First, my work extensively incorporates methodologies and research from outside of political science; in particular, I draw on literatures from sociology (and, especially, on the sociology of religion), history, and religious studies, as well as theology. Second, I’m a hybrid insofar as my scholarship draws on and incorporates my practitioner and policy work and multi-track diplomatic experience;2 my hope, of course, is that these experiences of practice and expertise outside of the academy make my scholarship more rigorous and, ultimately, more impactful.
AH: Your current position at Boston College (BC), likewise, positions you at the crossroads – both ecumenically, in terms of your work on Eastern Orthodox Christianity at a university with Roman Catholic roots, but also disciplinarily, in terms of your work between international politics and ecclesiology, between religious studies and theology.
EP: That’s right. I’m in the International Studies Program, which in and of itself is an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental program. In terms of both the teaching and the research, being in a Jesuit institution has been incredibly enlivening. At BC I’m constantly, either consciously or unconsciously, in dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, and I feel that this really sharpens and deepens my work and makes me a better scholar when it comes to teaching with comparative rigor on the role and salience of religion in international relations. The intellectual and pedagogical commitments of BC, the active commitment to formative education and to service, also make me, I hope, a better Christian: these make me far more actively aware of the need to heal the ongoing divisions in the global church. BC has been such a welcoming environment for my work as a political scientist focusing on issues of religion, geopolitics, democracy, and human rights. BC is a place where the more conventional, and I would say, still quite prominent, secularist bias in higher education is absent – and that has been refreshing and quite liberating.
AH: Niko, same question: would you share a little about your own interdisciplinary background and how that shapes the work you’re currently doing at the Center for Ecumenical, Missiological, and Environmental Studies (CEMES) in Thessaloniki?
Nikolaos Dimitriadis: Of course, and first let me add my thanks to Elizabeth’s, for the opportunity to take part in this conversation. I am a historian of religion who has studied theology extensively – already, perhaps, a disciplinary combination that is unusual, at least as these terms are used in the US. I’m a historian of religion, deeply concerned with the historical development of religious traditions. But I have the blessing of teaching in a multicultural and multi-religious program in the American College of Thessaloniki, in the Department of International Relations and Social Sciences. My approach there, together with my students, is to engage the history of religions as part of a journey of discovery, looking at religion as part of a larger whole of what it means to be human, and then in turn working to appreciate how being human is necessarily part of being in the universe, being part of ecosystemic and planetary processes. This is where the focus of environmental ethics – which was the subject of my postdoctorate – comes in, and it has been most fruitful in the context of an Orthodox discourse about the human, as Orthodox Christianity has a profound theological appreciation for creation. It has become customary to refer to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as “the Green Patriarch,” and he is indeed a leading voice in promoting environmental stewardship (through the Halki Summits, for instance), but much more broadly, it is aligned with Orthodox religious traditions going back many centuries, which understand environmental care as a spiritual responsibility. In addition to history, theology, and environmental ethics, I have brought art and music into my work, creating “The Smile World Tour,” a project on Ethics, Environment, and Music,3 and most recently I decided to pursue an MBA with a focus in faith-based social entrepreneurship, which equips me to approach Orthodox Christianity not only historically and theologically, but also from a practical and innovative perspective. I’m finding much of value in this integration, helping to bridge the gap between spiritual teachings and practical implementation.
AH: Thank you. Both of your accounts are resonant with the work and perspective of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute on the power and purpose of ecumenical exchange – at least on the research side of ecumenical studies – where investigating, diagnosing, and intervening in the topographies of conflict requires mobilizing every intellectual resource at hand, without becoming siloed by existing disciplinary boundaries or presuppositions of how phenomena in the world should be categorized by scholarship. It’s refreshing and inspiring to hear these specifics of how you are, respectively, integrating political science with sociology and ecclesiology, and integrating the history of religion with environmental ethics and interreligious dialogue.
I’d like to think with you about the patterns of political and ecclesiological conflict in which the contemporary Orthodox churches have found themselves involved over the last several years – whether in the aftermath of the 2016 Holy and Great Council of Crete and its difficulties in functioning as a universal council due to patriarchal factionalism, or in the ongoing (and well-studied) pressure of nationalism in the Orthodox churches, or of course in the endurance of a brutal war in Ukraine that is consequential not only for the divided Orthodox church in Ukraine but also ecumenically and interreligiously, in light of the variety of ways that the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy has been implicated in the Putin administration’s political agenda.
You don’t need to take up these examples specifically or in their entirety – though of course there are some clear continuities between them – but would each of you speak to how you are inclined to approach these patterns of intra-confessional and ecumenical conflict in the Orthodox world today? Where do you see these patterns deriving from, and how might you expect we will see them develop?
EP: I’ve thought a lot about these questions, Aaron, and there are many different things to say. I think we need to draw a distinction between patterns of conflict within the Orthodox churches themselves, on the one hand, and the conflict zones in which Orthodox churches are located, on the other. These are often closely related challenges, but they are not identical. One of the things helpful for me in studying and engaging on these issues – both in specifically Orthodox Christian conversations and in ecumenical or international diplomacy circles – is to remember that, even within the span of my own academic career, there has been a sea change in terms of the visibility of Orthodoxy to the academic community and to policy actors who would once have been either indifferent to or ignorant of Orthodoxy. This sea change is part of the larger shift in the academy toward greater interest in religion in the modern and postmodern world – where there’s greater understanding that modernity and postmodernity are not necessarily some sort of irreligious form of secularity, as long predicted, but instead are conditions in which religions have become more profoundly integrated with political life and are shaping conflict and peacebuilding patterns worldwide. This “discovery of Orthodoxy,” if you like, is part of the broader recognition of religion’s salience in the world, and it also imposes a real responsibility for scholars of Orthodoxy and on Orthodox leaders to be able to articulate positions in a mature, thoughtful, theologically sound fashion, when speaking about and for Orthodoxy while also acknowledging the internal multivocality of Orthodoxy.
Being able to distinguish between intra-Orthodox conflicts and those broader conflicts in which Orthodox communities are present and active (in any number of ways) is a complex enterprise in intellectual and policy terms. The distinctions and connections become all the more urgent, and all the more challenging, when non-Orthodox scholars and diplomats have to master a whole new vocabulary, history, and institutional apparatus in order to engage with Orthodox decision makers and actors. I worry that the Orthodoxy “discovered” by scholars and diplomats in international conflict zones has been somewhat skewed, less about global research and engagement, and more about the most evident, violent conflicts – as we have seen, for example, during the war in Ukraine. For the international policy community, in the post-Cold-War context, the discovery of Orthodoxy has been largely focused on engagement with the Transatlantic Alliance and Russia. This has meant overwhelmingly a focus on Ukraine and Russia, or, more generally, a focus on Orthodoxy that is refracted through the geopolitical engagement between NATO and Russia. This has meant comparably less attention on intra-Orthodox cooperation and its significance for positive, practical impacts. The geopolitical framing that policymakers bring to Orthodoxy has meant, as well, a focus on Orthodoxy’s presence in active conflict zones, with lesser attention to Orthodox populations’ experiences in locations free of active conflict, but nonetheless important because of how non-democratic regimes’ impacts on Orthodox churches are a means for considering how authoritarian regimes violate broader human rights.
It’s good, of course, that policy makers are finally learning that there are Orthodox churches, such as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem, and so forth, that are actively engaged in conflict prevention and peacebuilding, in intra-Orthodox dialogue, and in ecumenical and interreligious cooperation. But there are other Orthodox Christians in conflict zones – for example, in the Middle East and in Africa – that continue to be ignored by the international community. As a consequence, the existential vulnerabilities of those Orthodox communities are overlooked, just as are the resources that Orthodox thinkers and actors can contribute to conflict prevention and or to post-conflict human healing and societal reconciliation. I think that’s concerning and short-sighted, because it takes off the table a set of voices and institutional capabilities that can really contribute to problem solving and action on some of the most important existential issues of our time – whether about nuclear non-proliferation, or about the uses and consequences of AI, or about public health issues, or about economic inequality and development, to name only a few. In a word, the global Orthodox ecosystem is complex and is comprised of churches and peoples here who can contribute to peace or, conversely, perpetuate conflict and contribute to violence.
AH: These are invaluable reminders that you’re offering, to both an ecumenical audience and an academic audience that are now alike confronted with the presence of Orthodox Christianity in new ways. I would underscore two of those reminders as particularly important – first, this sense of multivocality, this recognition that Orthodoxy does not speak with a unified voice, in spite of the strategic rhetorics of Orthodox univocality that have historically been quite forceful in their articulation. And second, I would emphasize the recognition that, when we see Orthodox churches embroiled in conflict, we can never reduce those conflicts to “Orthodox problems,” as for example it was common for some time to describe the sectarian struggles of Northern Ireland as “a Catholic-Protestant problem,” or for that matter, as it is commonplace still today to imagine the crisis in Israel-Palestine as an essentially or even principally “interreligious” conflict. Such a confinement of conflicts into the religious perspectives and identities of those involved in them tends to miss the many integrated, intersectional dimensions that an interdisciplinary investigation might identify as deeply significant.
EP: It’s so important, this point about avoiding the essentialization of Orthodoxy – both the essentialization assumed or imposed by non-Orthodox and also that which is either internalized or strategically projected by Orthodox Christians themselves. Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly with the advent of new technologies of globalization, Orthodox Christians have increasingly had to come to terms both with their own internal pluralism (that is, the unresolved relationship between unity and diversity within particular Orthodox church communities and across the Orthodox world as a whole) and with the broader context of global religious pluralism. The complexities of coming to terms with these two, intersecting types of pluralism is central to Orthodox churches’ understanding and living their identity as a global Church.4
AH: I want to come back to this question of the relationship between unity, diversity or dissent, and the pluralistic realities within which and encompassing which our church communities have always, but now increasingly self-consciously, exist. But for the moment, Niko, I hope we can hear what your perspective adds to this initial conversation on the patterns of conflict, either within the (increasingly factionalized) Orthodox churches, on the one hand, or across the conflict zones in which Orthodox churches are embroiled and implicated – as Elizabeth so helpfully distinguishes?
ND: Let me begin with something that came to my mind only now, after listening to this discussion between you and Elizabeth, and here I am speaking as an Orthodox believer who lives in Greece. You mentioned the aftermath of the 2016 Council of Crete, and many people here would say that the Council process aggravated some troubling tendencies in inter-Orthodox relations. I do think that the Council of Crete was an excellent idea, and even that it happened at an appropriate time – I hear all the time that it “wasn’t an appropriate time” for a pan-Orthodox Council, but I’m happy that the Patriarch insisted, because we can now see more clearly than ever the challenges that the Orthodox world is facing. Here’s an example – the social ethos document, For the Life of the World, was prepared by experts across the Orthodox churches at the invitation of the Ecumenical Patriarch, but in its reception (here in Greece, at least) the document is regularly described as an “American” document, as though it reflected only American concerns and moral predilections rather than a truly ecumenical process of discernment.
We are hearing more and more often that one of the main problems we are facing is that of nationalism within the Orthodox churches, often referred to as “ethnophyletism,” which is in essence the conflation of religious identity with national or ethnic identity. And of course, this phenomenon can have profound implications for the life and the structure of the Orthodox Church. Nationalism manifests in very particular ways – it is not a single coherent phenomenon, really – as is evident, for example, when comparing how religious and national identities are intertwined in Greece to how they are intertwined in Russia. There are ongoing efforts by many scholars to promote a more universal and inclusive understanding of Orthodoxy, to mitigate the divisive effects of such nationalisms; our center in Thessaloniki (CEMES), already prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched a project on the viability of a single and unified Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and this was studied through the trifocal lens of primacy, conciliarity, and autocephaly. We published that project’s final report in April 2019, stressing the need to consider pragmatic proposals rather than remaining mired in idealistic images of one’s own ecclesial faction as free from contamination.5
We know that the church is supposed to serve as an iconic model of unity and reconciliation; we preach forms of liturgical ecclesiology, which involve practices that embody the unity of the body of Christ. To put it a little more clearly, the Church is most authentically itself in its liturgical worship. The Divine Liturgy (Eucharistic celebration) and other liturgical practices are not just rituals, but profound expressions of the ecclesial identity and unity of the Orthodox Church.
But I fear that these images and ideals do not necessarily yield concrete solutions to the bedeviling problem of how we are to transcend our political and ethnic divisions. Maybe this is my MBA training asserting itself, but we need to integrate deep theological and ecclesiological contemplation, for which the Orthodox Church is justly recognized, with practical and interdisciplinary dialogues that include social scientists, policy makers, and peace and reconciliation specialists. Nationalism is a global ethical issue, not a minor embarrassment or idiosyncrasy.
EP: If I may build on what Nikos has said: there’s still a dominant tendency to speak about the Orthodox churches as though they are intrinsically nationalist in the way they understand their Christian identity and engage with the political order. I suggest that a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Orthodoxy and nationalism has to turn to the longue durée of history. We need to take a wider view of the role played by Orthodox actors in the nation-state formation process in Europe, during the early Westphalian period. This is different in specifics but not wholly unlike how Protestants and Roman Catholics were intimately connected with the establishment and formation of states, leading to a whole panoply of options and arrangements that have evolved over time for church-state relations in Western Europe and the Americas, for instance. But we also need to move beyond thinking of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the post-Ottoman space as the only model for Orthodox church-state imaginaries – these geographic contexts have long dominated scholarly research and contemporary policy conversations, as though these nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paradigms are somehow the only experiences and as though they have been fixed and immutable.
The current, increasing policy attention and associated scholarship on Russia, and more broadly on post-Soviet/communist cases, underscores the need for a wider-angle lens in thinking about the Orthodoxy-nationalism relationship. By that, I mean that it’s crucial to think in comparative and historical terms. The impact of the Ottoman and Bolshevik experiences in shaping the Orthodoxy-nationalism relationship is different, for example, than the post-colonial realities of Orthodox populations and how they understand nationalism in terms of their existence as minorities in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, or in the United States and Canada. So, as a political scientist working at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, I think it’s imperative to avoid ahistorical, essentializing generalizations about the innate, immutable identification between Orthodoxy and nationalism. Instead, I think that we can arrive at a more robust (and interesting) understanding of the Orthodoxy-nationalism relationship by taking into account patterns of historical changes, the centrality of unresolved collective trauma in post-imperial and post-colonial cases, the significance of democratic versus non-democratic regime types for Orthodox churches’ positioning on nationalism, and the impact of geopolitics in shaping the Orthodox-nationalism arrangements. Beyond the significance for scholarly research, these factors are important for informed policymaking in today’s world – and, perhaps most importantly, for Orthodox Christians’ self-understanding as a global Church with theologically rooted responsibilities to engage with nationalism in ways that prioritize freedom and equality, drawing from the belief that all human beings are created in the image of God.
I do think that Orthodoxy has a lot to offer in terms of conflict prevention, conflict transformation, and post-conflict peacebuilding, less in spite of and more because of the ongoing efforts to negotiate understandings of nationalism under the circumstances that I’ve just mentioned. In a world that still largely functions according to the interests of nation-states, and that is increasingly cloven by dangerous competition between democratic and non-democratic regimes, the emphasis on freedom and equality that runs throughout the Orthodox theological heritage strikes me as especially important for, and indeed quite consistent with, universal human rights architectures, even as these Orthodox theological resources need constantly to be transposed into contemporary language that can make sense to non-Orthodox dialogue partners and policy makers, as Nikos has suggested.
However, the capacity to achieve a sustained engagement in organized peacebuilding initiatives takes us back to why a methodological focus on the longue durée is so important. Many Orthodox have lived for so long within non-democratic, post-imperial, post-colonial systems, and even today often remain as minorities within states that do not protect the status and rights of religious minorities or, more broadly, support approaches to religious freedom that are incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all associated legal frameworks. This history of profoundly non-democratic experience, past and present, has generated a lack of trust in states to treat all of their citizens equally, and a lack of trust (which is not at all limited to Orthodox churches) in the international organizations claiming to support the rule of law and the rules-based international order meant to protect universal human rights. In other words, the impact of unresolved collective trauma under non-democratic regimes (whether Orthodox constitute majority or minority confessions) may help to explain why Orthodox churches tend towards focus on local peacebuilding and informal conflict resolution initiatives and efforts. This can change, certainly, but the shift towards a “glocal” model of peacebuilding and conflict transformation will take time, where the work, so to speak, is both endogenous and exogenous: within and among Orthodox churches, on the one hand, and in ecumenical relationships and inter-faith relationships, on the other.
AH: In light of Nikos’ earlier comments on nationalism in the Orthodox churches – which are well-known and widely-discussed, including in the pages of Ecumenical Trends6 – to the dynamics of identity, of identity-formation and identity-crystallization, and especially to what he described as a “confusion” of political and theological identities, I do think it’s worth emphasizing how tightly linked the emergence of national identities in the Orthodox world is with processes of decolonization. It’s one key reason why it’s hard to simply dismiss nationalism as parasitic on modern Orthodoxy (even if we take a firm line on the theological incoherence of ethnophyletism), since it has been nourished in no small part by struggles for freedom and self-determination, struggles to carve out and establish “essentially” Orthodox polities from the Ottoman and British empires in which these communities had been incorporated (and, ironically, reified as discrete “communities” in no small part through imperial policies like the Ottoman millet system for confession-specific legal governance, or the British census and its differentiated legal entailments). It’s important to be able to register what goes wrong with nationalistic impulses rather than dismissing them as a priori incoherent or immoral.
*
AH: Elizabeth, you’ve reminded us of the power of that historical weight on Orthodox identities and politics – the weight of multiple overlapping empires, and the geopolitical entanglements that shape the realities of conflict in which any given Orthodox community is embedded. I couldn’t have asked for a more elegant segue into a conversation about Cyprus – the second of our key topics today, as we observe the 50th anniversary of the invasion and division of the island in July/August 1974. I realize that Cyprus will not be an obvious reference point to many of our readers – I often hear it mistaken for Crete in conversation. But the island is a vital crossroads of civilizations and in some respects a bellwether for geopolitical fault lines that are today at risk of becoming more unstable. I know that Elizabeth has Greek-Cypriot family and that Nikos also is intimately conscious of and grieved by the enduring occupation of the island. Cyprus is always in my heart as well, as I have repeatedly been a guest and grateful interlocutor there over the last twelve years while undertaking doctoral research and writing my book. But we need to set some historical context before we discuss the significance of the anniversary.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, with the northern third occupied by Turkey and hundreds of thousands of Cypriots internally displaced across the UN-administered buffer zone. Yet the island had been colonized for far longer, administered and exploited by just about every empire that set sail on the Mediterranean since the late Bronze Age. The last of these was the British Empire, which had taken over (from the Ottomans) the administration of Cyprus in 1878 and established it as a Crown Colony in 1925. British colonial rule was overthrown through guerilla warfare in 1955-1959, and with the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960, the Republic had a power-sharing government in which the Greek-Cypriot majority elected a President and the Turkish-Cypriot minority elected a VP, with other governmental roles likewise distributed in quotas between the two “communities” (which the British had begun organizing as “ethnic” blocs rather than the religion-based millet system of the Ottoman administration).
In early July 1974, this power-sharing government was overthrown by a hardline Greek-Cypriot faction backed by the military junta which had come to power in Greece in 1967 – their goal was to unify the Republic of Cyprus with the nation of Greece, effectively dissolving the Republic and disenfranchising the Turkish-Cypriot minority’s place in the government. In response, Turkey claimed the authority to intervene (as one of the Republic’s “guarantor powers,” along with Greece and Great Britain), and mere days later they invaded the island – claiming to be conducting a “peace operation” in order to neutralize the threat of ethnic cleansing to which Turkish-Cypriots would be subject, but conducting this operation with overwhelming force and brutality, killing or displacing almost a third of the Greek-Cypriot population, who were driven south as refugees. Turkish-Cypriots in the south, fearing reprisal, fled to the north, and the ceasefire line expanded into an impassible, UN-controlled buffer zone of barbed wire and minefields for the following thirty years (until the opening of the border in 2003). There have been referenda over the past twenty years seeking various solutions – including, most promisingly, a federal solution that allowed for the maintenance of separate states with local governance within a coherent Republic polity – but these have all failed, and Turkey has refused to withdraw its military presence from the island. And so here we are, approaching July 2024, with no clear resolution in sight. This summary is, of course, vastly oversimplified. But it provides a baseline for our consideration of Cyprus as a case study of exactly the patterns of geopolitical conflict that we have been discussing, in which Orthodox communities are embedded and with respect to which they have the opportunity to be change-agents and peacemakers.
ND: These are difficult questions and the wounds of the past are still very fresh, but we know that the invasion and division of Cyprus have profound implications for the Orthodox Church (both local to Cyprus and worldwide) and for interfaith relations in the Mediterranean and beyond. I will leave it to Elizabeth to engage the broader political dynamics, but from a religious studies perspective, the situation in Cyprus can indeed serve as a case study for understanding the complexities of religious involvement in and interpretation of political conflicts, including at the same time the potential for religiously motivated peacebuilding and unity. We have always to remember – in the same way that we already discussed the internal multivocality of Orthodox churches – that the division in Cyprus is not only between “Turkish” and “Greek” Cypriots, and it is not only between Christians and Muslims, but there is also diversity (and tension) among the Muslims of Cyprus, where there is intense pressure exerted on religious life in the north from Sunni authorities in Turkey, and the Muslims living south of the dividing line are now largely in immigrant communities from Africa, from South Asia, and so forth, whose traditions differ substantially from the Ottoman-influenced Islam that prevailed on the Island for centuries.
I want to make sure that the criminal acts that have taken place in occupied Cyprus for the past fifty years are not simplistically imagined as an “interreligious” or an “inter-ethnic” conflict. It is not only the Orthodox churches in the occupied northern part of Cyprus that have been defaced and destroyed, but also much of the existing Turkish-Cypriot religious culture that has been actively suppressed and assimilated. To say that what is happening in Cyprus is “religiously motivated” or “ethnically motivated” obscures the larger picture of Turkish neo-imperialism. In other words, I’m glad we’re recognizing in this conversation both that the religious perspective is only one of several angles from which we need to view the situation, and that, even in this specifically religious view, we’re not just talking about a binary “Christian-Muslim” conflict.
AH: Absolutely right. And when it comes to the peace process, the religious leaders and networks in Cyprus are certainly not unanimous on even what the desired political outcome should be, much less on how to go about bringing the moral or institutional resources of religious institutions to bear on the many dimensions of conflict. To what extent should the peace process be guided by religious leaders’ priorities? What is the political place of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, of the Turkish-Cypriot Muslim leaders, of the Christian minorities and of other religious minorities on the island?
Elizabeth, I think your perspective here is needed, as we think about the larger political and ecumenical/interreligious contexts in which we can understand the history of the occupation.
EP: Well, let’s pause for a moment to think about timescales. We’re having a conversation about a fifty-year, half-century occupation of Cyprus. It’s not only a human tragedy for all people of Cyprus – regardless of their ethnicity or faith tradition, whether we’re talking about Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Maronites, Jews, or other religious communities on the island. The endurance of the occupation signals a crisis for the international political order: the failure to resolve an occupation of EU territory by a member of the NATO alliance (which is meant to be both a collective security community and a community of shared, democratic values) helps to explain the broader pattern of the moment in which, sadly, people around the world have less and less confidence in discourse about a rules-based international order and universal human rights. So that’s something for us to consider, because in this way, the fifty-year occupation of Cyprus becomes emblematic of widespread, contemporary questions about the strength of support for these kinds of architectures, universal human rights, and security communities that are meant to be committed to democracy and peace.
Again, history and timescales matter in terms of understanding conflict and for building peace. Starting the timeline in 1974 (as we’re tempted to do when observing an anniversary like this) fails to account adequately for the questions you raise, about the circumstances of state formation and the importance of decolonization in the emergence of contemporary political systems and the politicization of ethno-religious identities. If we go back further, to the period between 1925 (when Cyprus becomes a British Crown Colony) and 1955 (when Greek-Cypriot demands for self-determination and anticolonial militance break out), we can usefully situate Cyprus within the broader movements for self-determination and decolonization that spread across the Greater Middle East, and in so many other places around the world that were European colonies. So too, when Cyprus was established as an independent republic in 1960, it remained entangled in geopolitical relationships: the failure of the Greek-Cypriot majority’s push for self-determination in the form of union (enōsis) with Greece was not merely the consequence of Turkish Cypriots’ rejection of enōsis and alternative vision of the partition (taksim) of Cyprus, incompatible political destinies that met with frustration and compromise in the formation of the Republic of Cyprus. It was also the intention of geopolitical decisionmakers – specifically the UK, with support from the United States and certainly with the enthusiasm of Turkey. Cyprus is therefore a state formed as a function of these Great Powers’ decision-making, and the Republic’s capacity for sovereignty and autonomy, and for a durable, sustainable peace on the island, remains to this day primarily determined by those Great Powers’ priorities in the tumultuous world in which we continue to live. This is not to ignore the agency of Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot political leaders. However, it’s important to understand such agency within the realities of Great Power geopolitics.
This longer timescale is also important when we talk about religion and interreligious relations. It was the British administration that deliberately politicized religion and ethnicity (as was standard British imperial policy worldwide), insisting on mutually exclusive ethnoreligious “communities” with supposedly mutually exclusive interests that had to be governed and protected (from themselves as much as from one another). Combine this with the longstanding role of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus under Ottoman rule (the millet arrangement), and we have a better understanding of the conditions and factors affecting the leadership of a religious figure like Archbishop Makarios III, who became the Republic’s first President and an emblem of the synthesis of ethnoreligious identity and political engagement that continues to inspire the Church of Cyprus – including its involvement in the religious track of the Cyprus peace process. Still today, as you know, the Church of Cyprus remains actively engaged in the public square and in politics both local and international. Meanwhile, the active politicization of Sunni Islam in Turkish-occupied Cyprus has become largely disconnected from the Turkish-Cypriot community and, instead, has been a function of the geopolitical interests of Turkey – especially under the neo-Ottoman revisionism of the current, Islamist government in Turkey, but also as part of the religio-nationalism of previous Kemalist, so-called secularist governments. In Cyprus, the causes, evolution, and instrumentalization of the religion-politics nexus, most especially of confessionalized nationalisms, and the degree to which these actually represent the interests of Cypriot citizens on both sides of the Green Line, cannot be understood only within the fifty-year timeline of the territorial division of Cyprus through Turkey’s occupation since 1974.
But it’s also significant that the religious track of the Cyprus peace process wasn’t actually established until 2011. Despite all the discourse on the part of state actors and the international community about the importance of religious communities and leaders in Cyprus, and about the ways that religion informs “the Cyprus Problem,” the UN did not seriously engage with faith communities on the island while they were crafting the ill-fated Annan Plan to resolve the occupation through a federal solution. For years, the UN interlocutors and political leadership on and off the island largely talked about religion but they did not seriously engage with religion – neither hearing the perspectives of faith-based leaders from all the island’s communities nor considering them as important stakeholders in the content and outcome of the Annan Plan. Consider, for example, that the origins of the Annan Plan date to 1999, and the referendum on the plan occurred in 2004 – and it took seven more years, after the failure of the Annan Plan to be ratified in 2004, before the Religious Track of the Cyprus Peace Process (RTCYPP) track was created. There’s a lesson here in how we study and think about the significance of religion in conflict resolution, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding, so that policymakers and practitioners possess some historical depth and draw on multidisciplinary, multiperspectival options for peace by engaging all the constituencies, whether positive contributors or spoilers, involved in this frozen conflict.
AH: I could talk about Cyprus for hours, and I’m grateful to you both for contributing these different and mutually informative wavelengths. In respect for your time, but also for the sake of our readers who are not so intimately involved with this history and who yet want to understand the significance of what has taken place in Cyprus: I wonder if we can have a last word from each of you on why the continued occupation and division of Cyprus might matter outside of the island itself, not only to the Orthodox churches but also to the whole ecumenical community, and to the interfaith peace movement more broadly?
ND: I will only add that the influence of the Turkish state upon Cyprus overshadows everything, meaning that a “simple” reconciliation process between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots is far from sufficient. For my part, I would want readers to take away how the recent history of Cyprus makes visible some aspects of problems that affect the Ecumenical Patriarchate in its relationships with other Orthodox communities. The Patriarchate is based in Turkey and faces pressure from the Turkish government, which can in turn influence the actions it is capable of taking within the Orthodox world. The Cyprus issue, so overshadowed by Turkey’s geopolitical strategies in this way, reflects this wider context of tension in the Orthodox world over the status and authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate – a tension that is manifesting today most clearly between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate, and which will continue to be a factor in the moral authority that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is working to exert in global ecumenical and interreligious networks, in ecological and religion-science conversations, and so forth.
EP: I would mention briefly two last points. First, during his 34-year tenure, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has shown that the Patriarchate is unwaveringly committed to Orthodox unity, ecumenical engagement, and interreligious dialogue, and the many initiatives undertaken by His All-Holiness consistently emphasize universal human rights, reconciliation, and the rejection of violence in the name of religion. These broad themes are crucial for Cyprus, as they relate to the question of Orthodox unity (the Church of Cyprus has recognized the tomos of autocephaly granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the Church of Ukraine), to ecumenical cooperation (there are Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Latin and Maronite Catholic, and Anglican Christian communities on Cyprus, all of whom have suffered from the Turkish occupation of the island’s north), to interreligious dialogue (there are Sunni Muslims and some remaining Shi’ites and Sufis, as well as small communities of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Bahá’is on Cyprus). In this sense, I think it bears emphasis that Cyprus offers an ideal environment, perfectly positioned geographically, to allow for regular and robust conversations along intra-Orthodox, ecumenical, and interreligious lines. Amplifying the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s messages about ministries of peace and respect for universal human rights could possibly help to contribute to a creative, durable peace that would end Turkey’s occupation and ensure that all Cypriot citizens enjoy universal human rights protections.
Second, and more specific to Nikos’ mention of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s subjection to pressures from the government of Turkey, there is a sizable set of academic and policy resources that specify the scope of the Turkish state’s limitations on and violations of the religious freedom and related human rights of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (including both the institution and the Greek Orthodox community of Turkey). I would note that Ankara’s well-documented violations of the religious freedom rights of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and, more broadly, of Turkey’s non-Sunni Muslim communities, have been repeated in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. This is especially evident in the destruction of the religious and cultural heritage of the Greek Orthodox and other Christian communities in the occupation zone. Data show that approximately 17,000 religious objects and artifacts have been looted and trafficked from Turkish-occupied Cyprus, either with active or passive involvement of the local Turkish-Cypriot authorities and/or the Turkish occupation authorities. Ancient churches, monasteries, even cemeteries have been destroyed, desecrated, and looted. This is a terrible loss to all people of the island, to ecumenical Christianity, and to the legitimacy of legal frameworks that are meant to ensure the protection of tangible and intangible cultural heritage for people of all religious traditions. There are tools that can be utilized to ensure the protection of cultural and religious heritage, and the EU, the UN, and the US can engage on this issue when it comes to policies that could contribute to the advancement of reconciliation on the island. This is an issue in which all faith communities in Cyprus should be stakeholders.
We’ve been talking today about important anniversaries – of the division of Cyprus, of the First Council of Nicaea. But we’re also coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Holy and Great Council of Crete that took place in 2016. December 2023 marked the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and July 2024 marks NATO’s 75th anniversary. In this context, we are reminded of the hopes and the failures of agreements and organizations that are intended to enshrine protections of universal human rights and the dignity of all persons in a rules-based international order. The many active wars and conflicts worldwide are a clear, tragic indicator of the fragility of and weakened legitimacy of that order. The approaching half-century mark of Turkey’s “soft partition” of Cyprus is particularly significant in thinking about the health of the rules-based international order – because it is a reminder of the corrosive consequences of the failure to establish durable peace and reconciliation. This implies a serious responsibility and opportunity for faith communities in Cyprus – they can become exemplars, visionaries, and agents of peace, or they can be agents of chaos. They can hold states accountable or they can be partners in state failure and hypocrisy.
AH: Thank you so much. This is a challenging and pressing vision, both for Cyprus itself and for the ecumenical and interreligious networks in which it is embedded.
*
AH: I’d like to conclude our conversation by shifting to another of the anniversaries we’ve mentioned, that of 1700 years since the First Council of Nicaea, which was convened in 325 AD by Emperor Constantine I. All three of us are part of the organizing committee for the next major international conference of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, which was just formally announced and will take place September 17-20, 2025, in Thessaloniki, Greece. The conference is entitled “Dissent, Power, and Christian Identity after Nicaea.” Its purpose is to pose the questions:
In what ways does Nicaea continue to shape how we configure the Church today, with what opportunities and at what cost? The conference will eschew foregone conclusions and panegyrics, instead being intended as an intensely interdisciplinary and ecumenical laboratory for exploring the ways that Nicaea can serve as a lens for interpreting the ecclesial present and imagining the ecclesial future.7
I’d like to conclude with this wider view and ask you for just a brief preview of these three themes that will animate next year’s gathering in Thessaloniki. What does the legacy of the Council of Nicaea, and the kinds of presuppositions with which the Council seeded the Church, have to do with dissent, power, and identity as they inform the challenges we face today?
After all, all of these themes connect so clearly to what we’ve been talking about today – whether the place of dissent within churches which are not univocal, the costs of unity and the difference between an imposition of unity, on the one hand, and a cultivation of unity, on the other. We’ve spoken about power and about the modern actors and systems – political, economic, social, national – which put pressure on the ethical and political engagement of the churches. And we’ve touched on the contestation of different Christian identities (whether confessional, ethnic, or national) and how these are formulated in relation to what is perceived to be the limits of acceptable diversity, continually nourished by reaction or resistance to what strikes a given community or individual as unacceptable – this relationship between identity and resistance will need to be front and center at our Thessaloniki gathering.
Today we’ve mostly been looking back at the last ten years, the last fifty years. With the 2025 conference we will be looking both much further back and more directly forward. Is there anything that you would like to suggest is particularly needful about these three themes at this moment?
ND: I’ll leave aside dissent and power for now, but Christian identity, from an Orthodox perspective, is characterized by deep connection to the Trinitarian faith and to a transformative journey towards theōsis. It is not easy to explain the term theōsis to my friends outside of religious studies – and this is one reason why I am so gratified and glad that our conference is to be an interdisciplinary gathering – but a metaphor that comes to mind is that of a football match, a soccer match. I am a football fan, and when my team PAOK won the Greek championship, I was reflecting on the words of the great Dutch player, Johan Cruyff, who famously said that “football is like life.” We can also turn this around and say that life is like football; the metaphor works both ways. Cruyff said: you have to look, you have to think, you have to move, you have to find space, you have to help others, and you have to keep going. It’s simple, in the end, so long as we play together toward a common goal – modeling our human community on a Trinitarian vision of God as relational, multidimensional, multidirectional. We have a message, the good news, the euaggelion, and we need to pass it along collaboratively, and we train ourselves and grow stronger and swifter through a lifetime of doing so. Christian identity, among people who live and work together and move forward collectively, is an ongoing process that involves overcoming theological, cultural, and historical challenges. Through ecumenical movements, interfaith dialogue, social justice efforts, advocacy for human rights, youth initiatives, and world missions, in other words focusing on shared goals, while fostering mutual respect and understanding towards people of diverse spiritual beliefs, our Christian communities are able to move forward together, embodying the unity and love which is central to the Christian message. That’s Christian identity in a nutshell.
AH: I appreciate this football metaphor for Christian identity, not only because of the beautiful image of collaborative team play as a kind of mutualistic perichorēsis, but also because of the metaphor’s negative entailments. The teams of a football league are playing the same game. They are colleagues! They belong to a common project, and they live and share together what makes their world possible. And yet, how easily identities and affiliations on the part of fans ossify into real rivalries, even real hatreds, that become the grounds for real violence. I don’t want to belabor the metaphor, but there’s a reminder in the group identity dynamics of sports that we often feel the fiercest rivalry, the most visceral antagonism, toward those who are otherwise closest to ourselves in terms of our location and our commitments. I will also note – since it’s my job to be a bit of a gadfly on occasion – that you foreground the Trinitarian modalities of Christian faith and identity, but one of the key issues that will need to come up at our Nicaea conference is precisely that of the status of non-Trinitarian and non-credal Christianities. But we’ll need to stay tuned for more on that…
Elizabeth, a last word?
EP: If this is a lightning round on the three themes that will anchor our 2025 Nicaea conference, I’d say, briefly, the following.
Dissent often has a negative connotation, but for me, there is a positive connotation of dissent as well. After 1700 years informed by the Council of Nicaea, we know that the internal diversity, the multivocality, of our traditions can become very messy. But it is productive too, this multivocality – when we experience dissent we are brought in touch with the authenticity of who we are as human beings in community, we encounter our differences and try to make sense of what unites us in our diversity. In terms of the contemporary moment, I think that “constructive” dissent can help us to recover, reactivate, and renew synods and councils as a means of ecumenical discernment, whether we’re talking about intra-Orthodox unity or about Christian ecumenicity.
As for power, I would highlight the importance of the Trinitarian paradigm, as Nikos did with Christian identity. I see the image of the Trinity as one in which power is erased. Power disappears, but diversity remains; love is the activating logic that rejects power (in the sense of control of one over and against another) and, instead, enables the freedom to have relationships that, built on the image of God in each and every human being, allow for unity in all our diversity and uniqueness. Of course, this image is the theological ideal – we know how hard it is to achieve in any human communities or institutions – but a critical approach to power demands that we not abandon the Trinitarian ideal.
Finally, on identity, I would say that the Church of today, 1700 years after Nicaea, still has to wrestle with what it means to be the Church. This is not a settled question. To be the Church, to belong to the Church, means an honest appraisal of how to create space for the voices of all who make up the Church – hierarchy, clergy, and laity. I am especially concerned about “being Church” in a way that authorizes pastoral, liturgical, and administrative roles and voices for women and girls; 1700 years seems like more than enough time to address and act on this issue. If we think about the Nicaea moment, only twelve years after the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire, we are reminded of how new and unprecedented were the Church’s opportunities to participate in the public sphere as a truly transformational actor. That is a blessing that we cannot let ourselves take for granted, and it is a burden that we must be fearless and selfless in continuing to shoulder today.
Notes
- See the ecumenical roundtable on the 2020 Orthodox social ethos document, For the Life of the World, in Ecumenical Trends5 (September/October 2020); John Chryssavgis and Aaron Hollander, “Asceticism, Ethics, and the Renewal of the Earth: Orthodox Christian Contributions to an Ecumenical Ecology,” Ecumenical Trends 49.6 (November/December 2020), 6-13; Aristotle Papanikolaou, “The Ascetical as the Civic: Civil Society as Political Communion,” Ecumenical Trends 51.2 (March/April 2022), 1-9; Aaron Hollander, “‘Only in Christ Does Time Heal Our Wounds’: Voices of Karlsruhe 2022 on Renewal, Reconciliation, and the Realignment of the Heart – Part Two,” Ecumenical Trends 52.2 (March/April 2023), 1-9; and contributions by Pantelis Kalaitzidis and Cyril Hovorun to the roundtable on Christian nationalism in Ecumenical Trends 52.5 (September/October 2023).
- Multi-track diplomacy generally refers to Track One (official, state-to-state diplomacy), Track One-and-a-Half (the incorporation of non-governmental experts and participants, usually from civil society), and Track Two (engagement by non-governmental organizations and institutions on policy issues intended to parallel and/or reinforce the other tracks) efforts, primarily associated with conflict prevention, conflict transformation, and sustainable peacebuilding. For a helpful summary of these tracks, see “A Primer on Multi-track Diplomacy: How Does it Work?”: https://www.usip.org/publications/2019/07/primer-multi-track-diplomacy-how-does-it-work, accessed June 20, 2024.
- See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-greek-rock-stars-message-to-humanity_b_591f7841e4b07617ae4cbc19/amp, accessed June 20, 2024.
- See Elizabeth H. Prodromou, “Christianity and Democracy: The Ambivalent Orthodox,” Journal of Democracy 2 (April 2004), 62-75.
- See https://orthodoxtimes.com/a-post-war-ukrainian-religious-reconciliation-an-appeal-by-the-cemes/, accessed June 20, 2024.
- See again Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “Greek Religious Nationalism between Glory and Trauma,” Ecumenical Trends 5 (September/October 2023), 16-20; and Cyril Hovorun, “Can ‘Ecumenism as Usual’ be Possible in the Wake of the War in Ukraine?,” Ecumenical Trends 52.5 (September/October 2023), 25-31.
- See the Thessaloniki 2025 website: https://thessaloniki2025.ei-research.net, accessed July 1, 2024.
This interview originally appeared in Ecumenical Trends 53.4 (July/August 2024), a publication of the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute. The journal offers distinctive perspectives where the church, the academy, and the interfaith field coincide, and combines reporting on current developments in ecumenical/interreligious affairs with accessible scholarship, interviews, and pastoral reflection on the dynamics of religious difference on common ground. Find out more, and subscribe to Ecumenical Trends (print and/or online), by clicking here.