Interreligious Dialogue As a Tool to Manage Public Space and to Reduce Social Conflict

This paper presents some outputs of the research “Multicultural laicisim and the management of religious diversity within educational spaces” aimed to identify those conditions under which the educational community are able to develop interactions that would decrease prejudice and foster coexistence. We are facing in Europe an increasing of racism and intolerance especially towards religious minorities. Interreligious dialogue can be an important tool in a society to reduce, deactivate and prevent these conflicts. However there is a gap in the scientific literature about the elements required to develop a successful interreligious dialogue and to prevent social conflict. So we focus part of this research to find out which were these elements. We analyzed two schools within a rich multicultural context that implement Successful Educative Actions (SEAs) and we analyzed how this SEAs had a social impact in the wellbeing of the community reducing prejudices related to religion. The analysis revealed that conditions as egalitarian dialogue where solidarity, equality of differences and the arguments validity prevail allow the development of friendship ties among students, teachers, families and volunteers that are clue in reducing prejudices and as a way to prevent violence.