Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions are the only denominations that benefit from confessional education in the school system.

Kazakhstan had created all the conditions needed to revitalize the culture of its population groups, and had established permanent and friendly dialogue between all ethnic and confessional groups living in the country.

With regard to parliament, there is no need to follow Lebanon s rigid apportionment of seats according to confessional identity. All the same, Iraq s parliamentary electoral law should be drawn up to take two important factors into account

As a Swiss Foundation, headquartered in Geneva, and as an international, non profit, non confessional, humanitarian NGO (with UN consultative status ECOSOC and UNFPA), WWSF is known for its annual empowerment programs for rural women, children and NGOs.

Sudan a vast, multiethnic, and multi confessional country, established as a political entity by the British in the 1890s is continuing to fray. The emergence, after a prolonged and bloody civil war, of an independent South Sudan in 2011, freed the local Christian and animist population from the Arab Muslim yoke.

To get out of it, greater entry into the economy and politics is needed, but also less demand for quick fix assimilation. All the religions that descend from Abraham have internal mechanisms for change that allow them to reckon with new circumstances in ways that the confessional community can respect.

The United States and France, which have taken the West s lead on Lebanon, have both confirmed the democratic and constitutional nature of the Siniora government. This is true, but only up to a point, for Lebanon s confessional based political system assigns the Shi a, who make up close to 40 of the population, only 21 of parliamentary seats.

Historically, the political ethic of confessional societies has been grounded in a single, basic foundation. In Europe, various kinds of laïque societies have tried to invent themselves out of the ruins of the Christian foundation, but they have made the same mistake in another way, with a kind of Jacobin insistence on the civil religionof the Enlightenment.

Wherever the political and socioeconomic conditions of the short and medium term timelines fail to provide order and stability, the confessional, ethnic, or tribal identities that emerged over the longue durée gain prominence. The extent to which identities are invented matters little, as long as their invocation helps to appropriate elements of history and harness them to current political goals.

In Lebanon s post war parliament, seats are widely distributed among the various confessional communities, so that none feels excluded or fears losing political representation if it loses numerical superiority. In the executive branch, the council of ministers is balanced among Christians and Muslims in order to encourage, indeed force, cooperation and to avoid the risk of domination the fear of oppression by one group.

Iraqi leaders were well aware of the decreased participation in the election by a significant portion of Iraq s multi ethnic and multi confessional mosaic, particularly the Sunni community. Accordingly, they sought out those who were under represented in the Assembly, but whose sense of participation in and ownership of the process was essential, not merely to the constitutional exercise, but to binding the nation s wounds.