Meet the 2020-21 Fellows in Conflict and Peace: Fady Khoury

My name is Fady Khoury. I’m a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a human rights attorney for a Haifa-based NGO (Adalah), and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School exploring constitutional design in divided societies and focusing on power-sharing system design. My interest in the RCPI program is animated by my own background as well as by my research.

I was born in Haifa to a lower-class Palestinian semi-secular Christian family. We were not very religious and church attendance was only occasional, yet religion was very present in our lives and it shaped our ideas about morality and good behavior. God, Jesus and Mary were often called upon in moments of hardship. So, in many ways, religion was a roadmap of right and wrong and a psychological tool for survival.

Christianity was also a marker of identity, qualifying another: our Arabness. While being Arab set us apart from the Jewish majority, being Christians differentiated us from the Muslim community.  As a teenager, however, I grew to resent my religion as I was coming to grips with my sexual identity, which I perceived to be at odds with Christianity. Knowing that I was unable to live up to the version of Christianity I grew up seeing, I started rejecting all of its forms. It would take years for me to escape the traps of binary thinking and distinguish between the religion to which many of my loved ones adhered, and other religious practices and manifestations which are not necessarily shared by all.

In my academic work, which I will continue to develop as an RCPI Topol Fellow, I am interested in religion as a political actor and as a marker of identity in identity-based conflicts in divided societies. I explore ways in which constitutions can be used to accommodate diverging views by different ethnic, national and religious groups to create a democratic system of governance that is not only stable, but also inclusive.