| Religions have become vigorous creators of an emergent transnational civil society. After the Cold War, since the dawn of modern 20th century, the worldwide resurgence of religion that has for too long been seriously neglected has driven new circles of violence and conflicts in the name of faith dramatically. Religion became one of the primary suspects in the Balkan and Kosovo conflict. On February 17th, 2008, Kosovo parliament declared independence form Serbia. Given Russia's support for independence movements in South Ossetia, Kosovo's political activities have caused a domino effect in the world politics. Religion plays an important role in the process of inter-groups confrontation in Kosovo. I argue that Religious Functional Unit can be used as an analysis tool to assess the structural relationship between religion and regional violent conflicts. Religious functional unit, such as Decani Monastery and Sinan Pasha Mosque, is consist of six parts: immovable worship building, faith-based religion, regular clergy, believer, relative independent communications with other political or religious units, and interaction with different religious functional units. Religious functional units are the basic actors of religious intervention in conflict social structures.Religious functional unit might be viewed as both a dependent and an independent variable in international public social space. State political process that religious functional unit in hardly avoid being violently attacked by other actors. Religious functional unit's interests include Essential interests, important interests and long-term strategic interests, and confirmed these interests from religious obligations, external expectancies and internal congnizations. The interactions among these actors can be separated into two dimensions: dialogue and confrontation, both has substantial interior, exterior and virtual methods. Besides, tension is a special complementary situation of interaction. Degrees of conflicts probability can be transformed to escalation or de-escalation by religious functional units' behaviors. To sum up, under the violent conflict social structure, there are two models of performances and expressions made by religious functional units, one is to bound in-group members, and the other is to bound out-group relations.Practically, in order to reduce probability and possibility of conflict, religious functional should focus more on the out-group bounding model in favor of enlarged potential alliance to guarantee regional security, while it may erode consolidation of in-group members in the meantime. |
