Interstices of peace: Gendered and spatial practices of interreligious prayer in post-war Croatia

This thesis explores interreligious prayer in the post-war Croatian context as a gendered and spatially situated peacebuilding practice. Focusing on a grassroots interreligious prayer for peace initiated by Dragica Aleksa in the village of Berak in eastern Slavonia, Croatia, it examines how this initiative emerged in response to disrupted interethnic and interreligious relations following the war 1991–1995 and became shaped through everyday practices of listening, neighborly interactions, persistence, and relational leadership, offering an alternative to formal and institutionalized approaches to interreligious dialogue. The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Croatia and Serbia, including interviews, participant observation, and documentary materials. Through the lens of spatial theory and scholarship on lived religion, interreligious prayer is conceptualized as an embodied and material practice through which participants actively shape social relations. It further shows how “prayer from below” in Berak creates “interstitial” or “in-between” spaces at the margins of institutional structures within which relations of belonging, authority, and possibilities for action are negotiated within a gendered, religious, and political landscape. By foregrounding informal and locally embedded forms of interreligious engagement, the thesis contributes to scholarship on gender and nationalism, religion, and peacebuilding in post-war rural contexts.