**6. Conclusions**

Over the last three decades, many religiously rooted ideas and institutions have been effectively developed and applied as the result of a secular–religious partnership. While reaching the doctrinal and ethical fundaments, they often transcended the existing notions constituting the source for the further mutual inspiration. Among them, there are such fundamental concepts as reconciliation, just peace, relational diplomacy, or transformation of conflict. Along with other socio-political problems where the non-state religious and faith-based actors turned out to be indispensable, there has also been the issue of migration.

The religious and non-state actors have long been involved in providing humanitarian aid to the displaced person. However, in the face of the scale and nature of the migration wave that Europe has been struggling with since 2015, their engagemen<sup>t</sup> gained a new innovatory form and a new dimension. As such, the issue of migration has become one of the main areas where not just the "technical solutions" but the ethical dimension as well has to be recognized, thus constituting the vast area of creating "common knowledge" on contemporary political challenges. In this process, the "reinclusion" and "reappreciation" of the religious dimension turned out to be an indispensable option for political deliberations.

The project of Humanitarian Corridors can be perceived as the exemplification of the religious–political partnership in which policy is not only significantly influenced, but in fact made in the first person by civil society actors themselves. Since 2015, the project carried by the Waldensian Church, the Federation of Protestant Churches, and the Community of Sant'Egidio served as a successful innovation and a case of multi-stakeholder engagemen<sup>t</sup> not only to the most vulnerable refugees, who were o ffered legal and safe resettlement, but also the involved governments and the European societies struggling with the "duty dilemma" between the political and moral obligations towards "the other". As such, the project can be perceived as the pioneering case of civil society mobilization not against but with the government, as well as the instrument of creating of civic culture recognizing "the other" not as inferior, but as equally important and vulnerable. In this process, the religiously rooted perspective of re-humanization against dehumanization was applied, which is the essence of the relational and transformative approach in the area of religious conflict transformation and peacebuilding.

Ethics is born when "the other" enters the scene. While obviously acts of altruism are not reserved solely to those referring to some religious foundations, civil society initiatives expressed in the form of the Humanitarian Corridors can be perceived as the demanding call aimed at raising the ethical awareness and fundamental empathy on the side of society, as well as o ffering a legal and politically acceptable solution to the government. As a result, "multi-sided" advantageous political- religious partnership has been constructed. It expresses itself in the "concentric triad" of those "empowered" in the process, meaning the migrants, civil society actors, and the government.

Among the numerous advantages of the project, the essence of the "empowerment" could be reduced to fundamental significance of rudimentary moral considerations. In a way, the explanation for those activities at the motivational level can be recapitulated in the two main ideas referred to by the actors engaged in Humanitarian Corridors, both on the non-governmental side. "Every person counts" (Del Re 2019) and "A few small drops can change the sea" (Gois and Falchi 2017) could be well used as the evidence of the already achieved level of mutual understanding and stimulus between the religious and the political. The human being is not only *homo politicus*, but also *homo religiosus* and *homo esperans*. The sharpened perspective on this multidimensionality of the individual combining all those equally important aspects of "human condition" has been better understood, respected, and acknowledged.

Ethics, which according to Kant means the relation towards what is the absolute good, introduces dynamism in the social life (Mazurkiewicz 2007). Religious–secular partnership becomes the source of the dynamic progress at both the political and human level. Reinclusion, reinterpretation, and reappreciation of the religious voice creates a new "window of opportunity" (Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2011), which can be constructively utilized for advancing the ever-present challenge of defining and constructing of "common good" and "common humanity".

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
