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Theorizing Modernities article

A Call for a New Approach to Religion and Peacebuilding


Easter Candlelight Procession, Cebu Philippines. Via Flickr User Adam Cohn. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The conversation around religion’s role in international development and peacebuilding has undergone a significant shift over the past two decades. Initially, much of the focus was on getting development actors to take religion seriously—a response to its long neglect in secular frameworks. However, as Atalia Omer highlights in her book Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, the way religion has been incorporated into development and peacebuilding often reinforces colonial assumptions rather than challenging them. Religion is frequently instrumentalized to serve external agendas, categorized into “good” and “bad” forms, and repurposed to align with Northern development goals.

The role of religion in peacebuilding has long been viewed through a narrow, instrumentalist lens—either as a force for stability or a source of conflict. But what if this binary framing misses the deeper, more transformative potential of faith-based engagement? As someone who has worked extensively in this field, I have long been interested in moving beyond these rigid, western-centric definitions of religion. Instead, I advocate for an approach that recognizes the lived religious practices of communities, the nuanced roles of faith-based organizations (FBOs), and the structural limitations that often hinder true decolonization in peacebuilding. By shifting our perspective, we can uncover pathways for more equitable, locally driven peace initiatives that challenge, rather than reinforce, colonial frameworks.

The Harmony Industry and Its Shortcomings

One of the most striking arguments in Omer’s book is her critique of what she calls the harmony industry. This refers to the system of NGOs, donors, and development organizations that promote religion as a tool for peace and development while failing to acknowledge the power dynamics embedded within these structures. This approach assumes that religion can be neatly packaged into development-friendly frameworks—where “good religion” promotes harmony, while “bad religion” must be countered or reformed.

This is problematic because it imposes external definitions of religion onto diverse communities. In many societies, religious practices do not fit into the institutionalized categories familiar to Western organizations. Spirituality, ritual, and oral traditions often exist outside the formal structures that NGOs recognize as “religious.” By attempting to engage with religion through a narrow, predefined lens, the harmony industry reinforces colonial paradigms rather than dismantling them.

A Third Way: Moving Beyond Instrumentalization and Reductionism

Omer contrasts the harmony industry with decolonial scholarship, which tends to focus on religion’s role in colonial oppression. While this critique is essential, it can also be limiting if it treats religion solely as a problem rather than recognizing its potential as a source of empowerment and resilience.

The challenge, therefore, is to carve out a third way that neither instrumentalizes religion for external goals nor dismisses it as merely a colonial construct. This necessitates recognizing that religious actors can be both complicit in colonial power structures and agents of decolonization. It also involves engaging with faith-based peacebuilding in ways that respect local agency, rather than imposing external expectations.

Faith-Based Organizations and the Tensions of Decolonization

Many FBOs find themselves caught between competing pressures. On one hand, they are deeply embedded in local communities, often serving as brokers between international aid systems and grassroots actors. On the other hand, they rely on funding and partnerships that come with conditions shaped by donor priorities—priorities that may not align with the needs of the communities they serve.

This tension was evident in a research project I co-led in South Sudan, where two international FBOs—one Christian and one Muslim—sought to strengthen the role of local faith actors in humanitarian response. The project aimed to facilitate a two-way exchange: local faith leaders would learn to navigate the donor-funded humanitarian system and international humanitarian actors would gain religious literacy to engage with local communities more effectively.

In practice, however, this balance proved difficult to achieve. Local faith actors were eager to engage in training and adapt their approaches, but humanitarian workers were far less willing to prioritize attending religious literacy sessions. Ultimately, the component of the project that was designed to help international actors better understand local religious dynamics was underfunded and deprioritized. This reflects a broader pattern in development: while local actors are expected to adapt to global norms, international organizations rarely make equivalent efforts to understand and respect local epistemologies.

Hidden Peacebuilders: Capturing the Intangible Aspects of Faith-Based Peacebuilding

Another project, the Hidden Peacebuilders Network, highlights the often-overlooked dimensions of religious peacebuilding, including spirituality, supernatural beliefs, and ritual practices. One of the key challenges we faced was that while many religious leaders acknowledged the role of prayer and supernatural interventions in their work, they hesitated to discuss these aspects in NGO spaces. There was a clear discomfort—perhaps a fear that emphasizing spiritual elements would make them seem less professional or credible in the eyes of secular donors.

Similarly, in interviews conducted by local researchers, some faith leaders were reluctant to share details about their spiritual practices with outsiders, particularly those from different religious backgrounds. This response suggests that our conventional ways of asking these questions in research may not be suitable or culturally resonant for eliciting such information, particularly around deeply personal or spiritual practices.

Creating “Decolonial Openings” in Peacebuilding and Development

Omer’s book provides a useful framework for thinking about what she calls decolonial openings—moments where dominant paradigms are disrupted, creating space for alternative approaches to emerge. For FBOs and development practitioners, fostering these openings requires deliberate shifts in their engagement with religion. Some key strategies include:

  1. Critically Examining Organizational Structures
    FBOs should reflect on how their own practices may reinforce colonial and neoliberal agendas. This means questioning funding sources and the assumptions built into their operational models.
  2. Engaging with Lived Religion and Local Spirituality
    Instead of viewing religion through the lens of formal institutions and doctrines, development actors should engage with the everyday practices of religious communities. This includes recognizing indigenous spiritual traditions and their role in peacebuilding.
  3. Empowering Local Voices and Leadership
    Decolonization requires shifting power away from international organizations and toward local actors. This means creating funding structures prioritising grassroots-led initiatives rather than imposing top-down solutions.
  4. Shifting from Instrumentalization to Genuine Partnership
    Religion should not be treated as a tool for achieving pre-determined development goals. Instead, FBOs should work with communities to understand how their own religious and spiritual traditions define peace, justice, and development.
  5. Advocating for Structural Change in Donor Systems
    Many of the barriers to decolonial peacebuilding are embedded in the funding structures that shape development work. FBOs are uniquely positioned to challenge these norms and push for more flexible, context-sensitive approaches.

Conclusion: The Role of FBOs in Reshaping Peacebuilding

Faith-based organizations can potentially play a transformative role in decolonizing peacebuilding and development, but only if they actively resist the pressures that pull them toward reinforcing colonial paradigms. This requires deep self-reflection, a willingness to engage with difficult questions about power and representation, and a commitment to centering local voices in their work.

Atalia Omer’s book is an important contribution to this conversation. It critiques existing frameworks and offers a vision for a more just and inclusive approach. The challenge now is to translate these insights into concrete action, ensuring that peacebuilding efforts are not just about resolving immediate conflicts but also about dismantling the structural inequalities that sustain them.

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Emma Tomalin
Emma Tomalin is Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on the topic of religion and development, including the following books - Religions and Development (2013) and The Handbook of Religions and Global Development (2015). She co-edits the Routledge Research in Religion and Development book series, which now has 19 volumes. She is the co-chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Community (JLI) learning hub on Anti-Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery.  
Global Currents article

God is Getting Tired


Children walking by a destroyed mosque in the Gaza Strip. © 2009 UNRWA Photo by Shareef Sarhan.

It’s clear that God is getting tired
They worked so hard to keep that child alive under the rubble
For six days until she was rescued
But then They couldn’t save her from that 2000-pound bomb

It’s clear that God is getting tired
They spent so much energy keeping a mother and her twins healthy
Through an entire pregnancy and birth amidst a genocide
But as They took a breather thinking that the hard work was over
All three were killed in an airstrike

It’s clear that God is getting tired
They worked around the clock keeping a man who had lost three limbs alive
And it seemed that he was out of the woods
When the hospital was bombed and the building collapsed on top of him

It’s clear that God is getting tired
The prayers are not even reaching Them anymore
There’s just so many that They have simply given up
Like when you reach a certain level in Tetris
And the blocks start coming so fast
And for a time, you frantically move around the pieces in an attempt to maintain a semblance of control
Until at some point you just put up your hands in defeat
Recognizing that the end is inevitable and there is nothing more you can do

It’s clear that God is getting tired
That God is tired
That God has been tired for twenty horrifying months
For 76 horrifying years
God is tired and defeated and They’ve decided that it’s time
To vacate Their home in the sky and move down to a tent in Gaza

God is there now
Ready to die alongside Their people
In Israel’s next airstrike

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Thandi Gamedze
Thandi Gamedze is a South African educator, theologian, cultural worker, and poet based at the University of the Western Cape’s Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice as a Senior Researcher. Her doctoral research was transdisciplinary, bringing together the worlds of education and theology to better understand the role churches play in both upholding and challenging dominant power relations relating to race, gender, and class. Thandi’s interests include black theology, liberation theology, social justice, education, and the arts – particularly poetry. She has broad experience working across multiple sites, including churches, universities, high schools, and community organisations.
Global Currents article

Making America White Again


President Donald Trump meets with President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok). Public Domain.

From 2013 to 2017 I served as Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs under Secretary of State John Kerry. During that period the global refugee crisis expanded and the Obama administration significantly increased US refugee admissions. From a Uyghur restaurant in Astana, Khazakhstan, to a cramped Church World Service refugee center conference room in Jersey City, New Jersey, and many other places, I met countless people, some of whom were refugees, others who were migrants, and still others who were internally displaced people. I had never seen such suffering personally, nor had I heard so many stories of persecution combined with tales of heroism and determination. And I also saw remarkable levels of human compassion and solidarity, especially from the broadest range of religious communities I had ever seen, all working to address the needs of millions of people on the move.

Made for TV

Needless to say, I was intrigued when I saw on Thursday May 15, 2025, President Trump hold a made for television conference in the Oval Office with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and his delegation in order to attack Ramaphosa for allowing what he called a “White Genocide.” In the process Trump made a fool of himself and his senior staff. The hour-long exchange, which took place before their formal private conversation, provided a master class in diplomatic failure and incompetence on Trump’s part for all to see, including allies, enemies, and dumb struck U.S. citizens. By the end, Ramaphosa successfully parried Trump’s attacks through a combination of charm, direct refutation, and the blunt testimony of the famous White South African golfer, Ernie Els. The latter told Trump he was wrong to say Whites, not Blacks, were the main victims of violence.

In the already vast landscape of President Trump’s lies, distortions, and chaos, this moment may not be the most egregious of his offenses. Nevertheless, it is instructive because so many of his now classic tropes that are displayed across all policy sectors in his cruel descent into fascism are prominent here. Among these are White Supremacy, the distortion and misrepresentation of data, a reliance on right-wing media, bullying of weaker partners, and attacking religious communities, both global and domestic, based on the peculiar theologies of his fundamentalist Christian supporters. The dynamics we see in this policy drama shed significant light on why his foreign policy is failing globally and justify a deeper look.

Ending Refugee Resettlement (For Some)

Trump radically reduced the numbers admitted as a part of the US refugee resettlement program in his first term by 85%. One of his first actions in his second term was to pause the US refugee resettlement efforts and most of the implementing partner organizations have laid off their resettlement staff and are currently fighting the Trump Administration in federal court.[1]

After shutting down America’s robust and historic refugee resettlement infrastructure by means of an Executive Order on January 20, 2025, President Trump issued another Executive Order on February 7, 2025 criticizing a law passed by South Africa in 2024 setting the legal conditions for government expropriation of land for public use to conform to the language in the constitution of South Africa. Trump’s Order incorrectly interpreted this legislation as authorizing the seizure of White Afrikaner farm land without compensation and its alleged redistribution to Blacks. The order also cited South Africa’s “aggressive positions” toward the U.S. and Israel by accusing Israel of genocide, and not Hamas, in the International Court of Justice. As a result, the US will cease all aid to South Africa and weirdly, it directed the US Refugee resettlement program, which Trump shuttered just days before, to prioritize refugee resettlement of White Afrikaner farmers who were alleged victims of unjust racial discrimination.

On May 12, 2025 a group of 59 White Afrikaners entered the US on a plane chartered by the US government, based on a false claim of being victims of a “White Genocide” in South Africa. In addition, the Trump administration asked Episcopal Immigration Ministries to be one of the implementing partners in the former refugee resettlement with the State Department to resettle some of the White Afrikaners to the U.S.

I do not believe these 59 Afrikaners were actually refugees. Part of the United Nations definition of a refugee is that a person has to have fled their country of origin out of fear of persecution and who also refuses to return because of that fear. One had to apply for refugee status from a second country. The US chartered flight that carried these people to the US came from Johannesburg, South Africa. The evidence, for me, suggest that the Trump Administration doesn’t actually understand or care about the actual legal refugee process. With no sense of irony, they are willing to use a program that they have killed, i.e., the refugee resettlement process, to bring a set of unqualified people into the country in irregular fashion. Currently there is an ongoing lawsuit against the Administration’s shutdown of the refugee resettlement program.

Similarly, the justification offered by President Trump was that these farmers were victims of “White Genocide.” This claim has been debunked by various news outlets and South African government officials. There is no international legal judgment for such a claim. While South Africa does have a very high murder rate, which is widely documented, the overwhelming number of murder victims are Black. All of the members of the Ramaphosa delegation, Black and White, told Trump he was wrong on this point and that all races are victims of violence, and that Whites were not disproportionally affected. Trump has not issued a detailed case for why he believes there is a legal case, based on the criteria of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, that supports considering White Afrikaners as victims of genocide. He is simply repeating allegations from right-wing sources that also do not make any legal argument.

With no sense of irony, they are willing to use a program that they have killed, i.e., the refugee resettlement process, to bring a set of unqualified people into the country in irregular fashion

Ironically, or perhaps better yet, cynically, one of the “refugees” is Charl Kleinhaus, who has made a series of antisemitic posts on social media. The Trump administration is attempting to deport a number of nonwhite people, for among other things, making antisemitic posts on social media. DHS has said such activity is grounds for deporting immigrants while simultaneously suggesting the 59 White Afrikaners have been fully vetted in the accelerated security process in the first one hundred or so days of the new Trump policies. Either there are two sets of criteria for evaluating White applicants and nonwhite applicants, or the radically foreshortened time to approve the Afrikaners represents an amateur and incomplete security process for the Afrikaners. Neither option provides any comfort regarding the incompetence of the Trump refugee regime. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio is arguing in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a US Lawful Permanent Resident, that unnamed antisemitic protests and disruptive activities are grounds for the deportation of Khalil while the president is simultaneously naming a White South Afrikaner who is an antisemite, the hypocrisy is there for all to see.

Religious Voices Respond

The typical Trump strategy of bullying who they deem weaker partners, in this case is also evident in his treatment of the Episcopal Church of America. The Episcopal Church response was even swifter than President Ramaphosa and just as effective. On May 12 Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe released a letter responding to the administration’s request that the Church’s organization, Episcopal Migration Ministries, assist in the resettlement of the White Afrikaners. He is worth quoting at some length:

Since January, the previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in the resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. Then, just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees.

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of South Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.

It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country. I also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.

As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s resettlement program and investing our resources is serving migrants in other ways.

The Episcopal Church would not capitulate to the administration’s deceit in violation of a fundamental theological commitment. This attempt to bully the church into compliance with the bizarre request to violate the spirit and letter of the law in order to aid a contingent of White Afrikaners into the country failed. Such an act, the Church saw, was in in service of White Supremacy. By all appearances the request is retribution for an episode at the National Cathedral when Bishop Mariann Budde delivered a sermon during the inaugural prayer service at The National Cathedral on January 31, 2025 when she implored President Trump, at the end of her sermon, to show mercy and compassion to those who live in fear in America including LGBT persons, undocumented immigrants, and those fleeing persecution and war. Budde’s winsome plea was met with disdain and disgust by the new president and vice president, and apparently their grudges still endure. To the extent that there is a comprehensible theology underlying the Trump Administration’s engagement with the world, it is not premised upon an understanding or tenet of Christianity.

What the president’s approach seems incapable of grasping is that the historic efforts of U.S. refugee resettlement efforts since the end of World War 2 reflect a fundamental policy commitment of the U.S. to acknowledge that the mass displacement of human beings due to political persecution is in the American interest, broadly defined. The effort to assist refugees under the United Nations’ umbrella since World War 2 is one of the signal moral and political accomplishments of the liberal post-war era. And Trump’s withdrawal from participation in that system is a grave signal of fascist moral failure.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry looks on as Pope Francis shakes hands with U.S. Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs Shaun Casey on December 2, 2016, following a one-on-one meeting in the Papal Apartments at the Vatican in Vatican City. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

In June 2024 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said there were 43.7 million refugees worldwide. In the United States a refugee had to undergo a vigorous security vetting, usually taking several years, in order to be eligible for admission to the US. It is the most difficult way for a person to legally enter the United States. The State Department engaged multiple implementing partner organizations to manage the entry and resettlement of vetted and approved refugees. Most of these organizations were religiously affiliated organizations, including Church World Service, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, World Relief, Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services), HIAS (formerly Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), and Episcopal Migration Ministries. Taken together these organizations represent a majority of Christians in America. That the Trump Administration would pull the plug on their global efforts signals either willful ignorance of the fundamental moral beliefs of religious Americans or a willful repudiation of those values.

The Interlocking Politics of Genocide

The last item to note in this story of malice, ineptitude, and just plain hypocrisy on the part of the new administration, is Trump’s attempt at undermining South Africa’s effort to present an international legal claim of genocide or other crime against humanity against Israel in light of an allegations of war crimes. If South Africa is guilty of White genocide against its own citizens, the argument runs, how could their claims against Israel for its response to Hamas in Gaza possibly have merit? By giving credence to the right-wing claim of “White Genocide” Trump helps to undermine the charge against Israel in international legal terms that are being lodged by the South African government against Israel.

The fate of this policy foreign policy on the part of the current Administration is in the hands of the Federal Judiciary. Only time will tell how and when the various legal cases will be resolved. In the meantime, all across the planet people are watching the various threads I have identified. Friends and foes are making a careful study of the lessons to be learned. And while these processes play out, tens of millions of refugees who have lost everything to tyrants wait in peril while the country that used to resettle more of their brothers and sisters sits idle as that number grows. And most interesting of all, perhaps, are the adherents of an astonishing array of American religious communities—including millions of Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and many more—that are now lamenting the epic moral failure of our corrupt political leadership.[2]

[1] For a very helpful primer on the U.S. refugee resettlement process that has been shuttered, see the amici curiae brief by a number of former US Government officials in support of the ongoing federal case against the Trump administration currently before the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. This brief contains a compelling refutation of the Trump administration’s arguments and also provides a detailed but digestible description of how the refugee resettlement process actually worked. It is an indispensable guide.

[2] For further reading see Jessica Goudeau, After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America (2021) and Shaun Casey, Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Diplomacy ( 2023), esp. Chapter 6, “Through the Golden Door.”

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Shaun Casey
Shaun Casey was T. J. Dermot Dunphy Senior Fellow of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School from 2021–2022. He was U.S. Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs and Director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs from 2013-2017. He served as Director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Professor of the Practice in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2022. He served as Professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC from 2000–2013. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 and Chasing the Devil at Foggy
Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Diplomacy (2023). Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.
Global Currents article

Trump’s Afrikaner Refugee Policy: Religious Resistance & the Palestine Factor


A “Refugees Welcome” sign spray painted on the eastern side of the Malet Street Gardens, Bloomsbury, London Borough of Camden. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” said President Trump to reporters on May 12, 2025, “but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place.” You might have thought he was talking about Gaza where more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed—including 16,000 children—and much of the coastal strip has been destroyed by Israel’s military assault, but you would be wrong. Instead, the Trump Administration, without evidence, has posited a “genocide” of Afrikaners, the White South African minority who are now the sole new “refugees” being resettled to the United States amidst an otherwise complete shutdown of the U.S. refugee admissions program. This, despite a judge’s February order blocking the program’s suspension based on a lawsuit filed by faith-based groups.

How has this come about, how does it connect to the broader contexts of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and Palestine/Israel, and what can we learn from the responses of religious organizations and leaders?

Resettlement Agencies and Religious Leaders Respond

When the news broke that the Episcopal church, long tied to South Africa through the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, would end its partnership with the federal refugee resettlement program, Vice President Vance had one word in his re-tweet of the story: “crazy.” However, when faced with the prospect of receiving no refugees from dire contexts such as Afghanistan while having to resettle individuals facing no appreciable imminent threat, it is no surprise that the Episcopal church balked. As Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said, “the idea that we would be somehow resettling Afrikaners at this point over other refugees, who have been vetted and waiting in camps for months or even years, is unfathomable to us.”

His view reflects that of more than 150 White South African Christian leaders who signed a statement rejecting Trump’s claims of White victimization in South Africa. “The narrative presented by the US government is founded on fabrications, distortions, and outright lies. It does not reflect the reality of our country and, if anything, serves to heighten existing tensions in South Africa,” the statement said.

Around 2000 people gathered in downtown Minneapolis to rally in support of immigrants and refugees on February 11, 2017. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Some resettlement organizations, such as the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, agreed to resettle the Afrikaners, “hopeful” that it indicated intention to restart the U.S. refugee program. Other faith-based groups wrestled with the issue or provided only limited support. Church World Service supported one family with remote services, while voicing frustration with the administration’s actions; Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington assisted with processing some travel expenses at the state of Virginia’s request. Other organizations did not take part: Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay in California refused to participate; their director called it a “stunt.” A major national coalition focused not on rejecting Afrikaners but rather on leveraging their resettlement to get the broader program back: “It’s time for the Trump administration to honor our nation’s commitment to the thousands of vulnerable refugees that the United States has abandoned,” said John Slocum of Refugee Council USA, comprised of more than forty organizations.

The U.S. Catholic Church had already ended its cooperative agreement on refugee resettlement with the federal government; it is suing the Administration for its suspension of funds for the program. Bishop Seitz, head of the Bishops’ committee on migration, has also spoken out about this new resettlement policy, incredulous that a “new channel is open to white Afrikaners” while at the same time the U.S. is “closing the door for people who are poor and starving.”

A May 27 amicus brief filed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations in support of the original faith-based lawsuit challenging Trump’s refugee ban outlined theological arguments from their different traditions that put “service to the stranger—refugees, immigrants, neighbors—at the core of their practices and systems of belief.” Several used the word “obligation” to describe this work as something inextricably bound to their understanding of themselves as people of faith. At the heart of refugee resettlement is a call to accompaniment, a walking with those most vulnerable and on the margins. While refugees are often measured in the millions, the process of resettlement is a sacred and tactile work of encounter: collecting car seats and kitchen items; driving a family to the social security office; hearing stories of loss, terror and alienation. To prioritize groups that are not most in need is an affront to fundamental commitments and convictions. Thus, it is not unexpected that the resettlement of Afrikaners has been met with a combination of resistance, dismay, and redoubled advocacy by so many of the faith-based organizations and leaders confronted with this new policy.

“Refugees” Who Don’t Fit the Definition

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, usually involved in the referral and vetting of refugees, was not part of the screening process for Afrikaners. Based on international law and a 1951 refugee convention, refugees are people forced to flee, unable to return to their own country because of “feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder.” Afrikaners are a far cry from fitting this definition.

At the heart of refugee resettlement is a call to accompaniment, a walking with those most vulnerable and on the margins.

“This is the land of milk and honey if you’re white,” says South African political scientist Piet Croucamp, who like many experts as well as Afrikaner farmers, argues there is no credence to the claim of “White genocide.” Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonists who first settled in Africa in the 1600’s, remain economically ascendant long after the fall of the apartheid government they led from 1948–1994. All indicators point to ongoing inequality; for instance, despite being just 8% of the population, White people occupied 65.9% of top management posts as compared to 13.8% of Black people in 2022. While economic privilege does not shield any group from other kinds of oppression, farm killings of White South Africans remain statistically low in the context of the country’s overall crime problem and high murder rate, which affects all races and especially Black South Africans who continue to bear the brunt of violence.

Somali-British poet Warsan Shire describes the experience of a refugee as one of desperation. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark, you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well,” she writes in the opening stanza of the poem “Home.” In my collaboration with immigrant and refugee organizations in Northeastern Pennsylvania and through a community oral history project, I have heard many hard stories in which being designated a refugee was simply a matter of survival. Chandra Sitaula, a Bhutanese refugee who faced persecution as part of the “Lhotshampas” minority, was expelled to Nepal after having relative status as a landowner. As he shared, “it is not [a] choice for us to become refugees.”

Resettled refugee Ushu Mukelo recounted how he and his father and brother ended up in a Ugandan refugee camp after a rebel group attacked their village in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its brutal civil war. “Our mom [was] killed. We lost everything…because of war…we were forced to flee, to save our lives.” In contrast, Afrikaner refugees were seen at the Johannesburg airport with carts full of suitcases; no one was running for their lives.

Moving Afrikaners to the Front of the Line

In February, Catholic Vice President J.D. Vance argued, drawing on a Catholic concept of “ordo amoris,” that love is ordered toward family and neighbors first in such a way that justifies this administration’s immigration crackdown. Many Catholics, including Pope Francis and then-soon-to-be Pope Leo XIV, pushed back—not to say that we don’t owe love to our family but rather that such love is not exclusive or scarce. Pope Francis wrote to the U.S. Bishops criticizing the administration’s immigration policies, exhorting Catholics “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against…our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” and clarifying that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” Then-Cardinal Prevost shared a now famous tweet stating simply that “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” referencing the title of a National Catholic Reporter article critiquing the vice president.

Now, a couple of months later, Vance and others have found it in their hearts to show love for the stranger—just not by advocating for the Black, Brown or poor and persecuted ones of all backgrounds that have long come through the refugee resettlement program, but rather by moving White South Africans to the front of the line. The decision to accept Afrikaners comes amidst a backdrop of targeting immigrants of color—denying refugee admission for Afghan, Congolese, and other populations who were poised to enter; ending humanitarian parole for Venezuelans, Haitians and others; and marking for deportation unauthorized immigrants who have come to this country predominantly from Central and South America and Mexico—wrongly associating a lack of lawful status with criminality.

At a May 21 meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, President Trump doubled down on his claims of widespread Afrikaner suffering, using erroneous evidence. As proof of mass killings of White people, he showed his guest images that proved to be humanitarian aid workers lifting body bags in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not South Africa. As Gareth Newham, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa which tracks violent crime, has shared: “if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity…we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.” Such expertise has had no bearing on Trump’s perspective.

Trump’s History with “Anti-White” Racism

Trump has been interested in the Afrikaners’ alleged plight of systematic persecution for years as part of his and his allies’ obsession with the manufactured cause of anti-White racism. Trump has had a longstanding cozy relationship with White supremacy and beliefs in White victimhood, which are the undercurrent of his mantra to “make America great again” and which have also brought him in contact with the views of South Africa’s Far Right—views shared by his outgoing appointee Elon Musk. This preoccupation began during Trump’s first term when he directed then Secretary of State Pompeo to investigate the South African government’s “land and farm seizures” from White farmers based on alarmist and inaccurate reporting by Tucker Carlson.

At particular issue for Trump now is a January 2025 law (Expropriation Act) that seeks to address unequal land ownership in South Africa and is cited in the February executive order promoting resettlement of Afrikaners. Apartheid had banned Black South Africans from owning land for decades and forcefully removed Blacks from their land. As a result, White South Africans continue to hold the vast majority of land; they make up 7% of the population but own 72% of private farmland. The 2025 law allows for limited state expropriation of land for a “public purpose” with compensation offered in some, but not all cases, in a process subject to judicial scrutiny. No land has yet been seized under the Act. It is important to note that according to Catholic social teaching, expropriation of land is sometimes called for. In Populorum Progressio, para. 24, Pope Paul VI wrote: “If certain landed estates impede the general prosperity because they are extensive, unused or poorly used, or because they bring hardship to peoples or are detrimental to the interests of the country, the common good sometimes demands their expropriation.”

Broader Contexts: The Palestine Factor

The administration’s February executive order also cut aid and assistance to South Africa based in part on policy differences on Palestine. In particular, the order cited that “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Indeed, South Africa led the charge to bring international action against Israel’s assault on Gaza. In the end, the ICJ’s preliminary opinion in January 2024 ruled that Palestinians’ rights to protection from genocide were plausibly at risk and Israel should take steps to prevent genocide. Since then, many experts including Holocaust scholars and Amnesty International have concluded that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. In fall 2024, Pope Francis also urged further investigation into whether Israel’s Gaza military campaign constitutes a genocide.

Demonstration in Paris for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon. October 5, 2024. Via Flickr User Jeanne Menjoulet. CC BY 2.0

As part of their motivation for bringing the case and for their solidarity with the Palestinian people, South African leaders cited their country’s history of repression and violence, human rights abuses and the crime of apartheid. For its part, the U.S. under the Biden Administration called South Africa’s case “meritless,” refusing to reckon with how U.S. and Israeli policies had so devalued Palestinian lives. The Trump administration has now further upped the ante with its retributive stance toward the South African government. They see no irony in their willingness to recognize a “White genocide” in South Africa, with no evidence, while supporting ongoing atrocities by Israel in Gaza; indeed, President Trump is colluding in such wrongdoing with his own plan, which coincides with Israel’s, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the coastal enclave.

Conclusion: A Call to Solidarity

June 20th is the annual global celebration of World Refugee Day. Since January 20th, the Trump Administration has indefinitely paused refugee resettlement; that is, until it opened U.S. doors to Afrikaners. Daily, Palestinians are being killed, displaced, starved and deprived of humanitarian aid and basic rights by Israel. The resettling of Afrikaners and the shunning of South Africa makes a mockery of two important things: refugee resettlement based on international norms and the claim of genocide, which has been unfolding not in South Africa, but in Gaza. By making this move, the Trump Administration demonstrates that it does not care about either. Faith communities and all people of goodwill must continue to do their part to provide friendship, solidarity, and welcome to local refugee and immigrant communities and to raise their voices for a permanent Gaza ceasefire and a just peace in Palestine/Israel.

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Julie Schumacher Cohen
Julie Schumacher Cohen is a PhD student in Political Science at Temple University in the areas of American and comparative politics and political theory, focusing on issues of religion and politics, polarization and conflict, and forced displacement and territorial rights. Long involved in Israel-Palestine peacebuilding, she is a member of the Catholic Advisory Council of Churches for Middle East Peace, where she previously served as Deputy Director. Julie is also Assistant Vice President for Community Engagement and Government Affairs at The University of Scranton where her local engagement involves collaboration with refugee and immigrant communities. Her op-ed, “Catholics Must Oppose Detention of Mahmoud Khalil,” was published by the National Catholic Reporter on March 26, 2025.
Global Currents article

Inter-Racist Solidarities and the Case of the White Afrikaner Refugee


Meeting of South Africa-Israel Chamber of Commerce taken in 1985. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1977, a few months prior to his arrest and subsequent murder by the South African apartheid state, Steve Biko, widely known as the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, said the following:

There is no running away from the fact that now in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless. The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. (155–56).

48 years later, it is safe to say that Biko called it. Present day South Africa, over three decades since the end of apartheid, remains severely unequal. This inequality continues to exist along apartheid racial lines. And this is not surprising. If you create a politico-legal system which massively privileges White people in terms of land, education, wealth, and opportunity at the expense of Black people, and then replace this system with supposedly non-racial neoliberal economic policy, very little actually changes. The majority Black population, having previously been forcibly removed and relegated to particular sites and occupations under apartheid, are no longer legally barred from owning land and living and working wherever they would like. Instead, they are barred by the “free” market and various other structural obstacles. This leaves the majority unable to afford or access safe, let alone well-situated, housing, or sound economic opportunities, due to centuries of systematized oppression.

112 years after the 1913 Native Land Act (which, in a classic case of colonial expropriation of land without compensation, granted over 80% of South Africa’s land to the White minority), White people—who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population—still own close to three quarters of the country’s farmland. The distribution of other forms of wealth follows similar patterns.

Into this context, the Expropriation Act—the piece of legislation which provoked the wrath of Trump and his anti-woke brigade—was introduced in January 2025 after years of consultation, discussion, and failure to address the injustices of the past. In line with the provisions of the globally lauded South African Constitution, the Act, in exceptional cases, makes allowance for the state to expropriate property for reasons of public interest, and in even more exceptional cases, makes expropriation without compensation possible. The processes outlined by the document, through which both expropriation with and without compensation are governed, are detailed and stringent. The conditions under which the latter is possible are outlined in section 12 (3) (d) of the Act. Essentially, in relation to private land, for expropriation without compensation to be ruled just and equitable (a pre-condition for such action), this land is required to either be unused (with no plans for development of the land or income generation on it) or abandoned. Thus, the flurry of outcry around this is unjustified. Similarly, Trump’s claim that White Afrikaner South Africans are experiencing “government sponsored race-based discrimination,” his fabrications about a “White genocide” in South Africa (spoiler alert: this is not true), and his subsequent welcome of White Afrikaners as “refugees” into the US, are ludicrous. And if not so dangerous in terms of their intended delegitimization of South Africa’s democracy (and all related implications thereof), and the deeply problematic and untrue narratives that they act to justify, they would be laughable.

While the ridiculousness of this situation would make it easy to simply dismiss as unworthy of attention, we would be remiss in doing so. This current US-South Africa debacle is a microcosm of some much broader dynamics at play. As such it holds important potential for shedding light on this current moment.

South Africa has always been a site of struggle—a deeply contested landscape where there are clear clashes between marginalized (but majority) interests and hegemonic (but minority) ones. This was most overt under the apartheid system, where oppressed and oppressor identities were very (forgive me) black and white and constructed through a myriad of legislation. But while these delineations are somewhat more opaque today, shrouded beneath “rainbowist”[1] post-apartheid narratives—although these myths were effectively disrupted by the 2015 and 2016 #Fallist calls for decolonization—they remain ever-present. In this regard, there is something deeply sinister about Trump’s singling out of White Afrikaners for refugee status. While those with a deeper awareness of South Africa’s colonial history recognize that the British colonizers played just as, if not more (how to compare colonial violence?) harmful a role as the Dutch descendants, the history of apartheid as implemented by the Afrikaners is much more popularly known. Thus, Trump’s singling out and extending of “solidarity” towards White Afrikaners appears to be a not-so-subtle nod to apartheid—and indeed a call to “make South Africa great again” in the same way that “make American great again” is a not-so-subtle nod to slavery and White supremacy. If these intentions weren’t already abundantly clear in Trump’s actions, the words of US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau to the Afrikaner “refugees” upon their arrival to the US on May 12, 2025, sealed the deal. He welcomed them effusively, saying, in what can only be understood as a blatant celebration of apartheid, “We respect the long tradition of your people and what you have accomplished over the years.”

Inter-Racist Solidarity

Salim Vally categorises the close historical relationship between the South African apartheid state and the Israeli state as a case of “inter-racist solidarity”[2].  This term aptly describes the current US-White Afrikaner dynamics, as well as the broader convergence and consolidation of imperial, right wing, and White nationalist forces that we are seeing today. Indeed, the mention and condemning of South Africa’s ongoing International Court of Justice case—where the case is being argued that Israel’s actions in Gaza after October 7, 2023, amount to genocide—in Trump’s executive order makes clear that the administration’s response to South Africa is not just about South Africa. It is simply part and parcel of this inter-racist solidarity network that is currently being established, nurtured, and consolidated through various means.

As such, everything that threatens the right-wing White nationalist (yet transnational) empire is under the microscope. And the very existence of post-1994 Black-led South Africa is a threat, representing the failure of this empire’s White nationalist vision. This threat is magnified by South Africa charging Israel with genocide at the ICJ, and even more so given the global South connections and solidarities that this move has inspired. Of similar threat are the mass popular movements of solidarity with Palestine taking place globally, as are the Movement for Black Lives and the so-called “woke” politics and DEI interventions of recent years.

The athletes from South Africa parading in the stadium at the 2nd Maccabiah Games opening ceremony. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As we are seeing ever more clearly, this empire does not take kindly to threats. It is organized and knows how to mobilize to accomplish its goals. This is evidenced in the speedy travel, broad reach, and buy in to “White genocide” myths. It is evidenced in the recent expelling of Ebrahim Rasool, South African ambassador to the US. It is evidenced in the cutting of USAID and other US funding to South Africa. It is evidenced in the absolute impunity with which the US is operating in its continual funding of the genocide in Gaza. It is evidenced in Elon Musk’s encouragement and support of right-wing nationalist movements in “at least 18 countries.”  It is evidenced in the current spate of unlawful and highly irregular arrests, detentions, and deportations of individuals seen as transgressing or challenging US White nationalist ideals. It is evidenced in the massive amounts of money raised for the legal defence of Daniel Penny, a White 24-year-old marine corps veteran, after he choked to death Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused African American man—and the broader pattern of which this case is representative. And of course there is much more evidence one could cite.

As this conversation makes clear, race remains a salient node of analysis, carrying clear material and structural implications. This reality notwithstanding, we must be particularly careful not to essentialize race. In this regard, Salim Vally and Enver Motala caution against uncritically reproducing “the apartheid state’s usage of racialised forms of consciousness” (39). Thus, it is necessary to hold the tension of race as both social construct and materially salient, in order to challenge and not reproduce the harms of racially oppressive realities. This tension is important in this conversation about inter-racist solidarity and White nationalist empire, as it is clear that this empire quite often has Black and Brown allies—whether this be the Black representatives at the UN voting on behalf of the US against a ceasefire in Gaza, or Gulf state leaders falling over themselves to secure massive deals with Donald Trump. In thinking about a framework to help understand this phenomenon, I offer two considerations. Firstly, it is important to recognize the fundamentally socially constructed nature of racial categories, which has meant that these categories are impermanent and ever shifting—the apartheid state’s contentious “pencil test” (one of the apartheid state’s official racial categorization tests involving sticking a pencil into a person’s hair and letting go to see whether it fell out or remained) evidence of this. Secondly, the capitalism aspect of racial capitalism shapes these relationships of “inter-racist” solidarity according to profit margins, in ways that can actually be quite racially inclusive. Here however, it is important to take seriously various Black thinkers’ critiques of Marxist understandings that erase race in favor of a pure class analysis. White nationalism is here and increasingly asserting itself in worrying ways, yet even White nationalism will put up with some Black and Brown people if the money is right.

The Role of Religion in Inter-Racist Solidarity

We would be remiss in failing to acknowledge the way that religion —conservative evangelical Christianity in particular—often underpins and is appropriated in these configurations of power. As outlined by Mitri Raheb, religion is often mobilized to act as the “software” that whitewashes, justifies, sustains, and sacralizes the “hardware” of empire. As such, through immaculate theological manoeuvring, South African apartheid was configured and framed as divinely ordained. Similar techniques have strategically shaped and deployed Christianity to effectively serve and provide the foundations for colonialism, slavery, land theft, and genocide over numerous eras and geographical contexts. Today these techniques theologically justify Israeli occupation, settler colonialism, and genocide. In this regard, it is not mere coincidence that the US, Israel, and White Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa have understood (or at least framed) themselves as nations or people chosen by God. This narrative, among others, works to justify and even sacralize the atrocities that these groups carry and have carried out. And importantly, as evidenced in the testimony of one of the Afrikaner “refugees,” while these notions of chosen-ness are held at the level of nations, they filter down to individuals. In his testimony, Mr. Kleinheis—a self-declared “religious person”—claims that his selection was, for him, evidence of his own chosen-ness, stating that “to be in this first group is an act of God.” He goes as far as to say, “if he (God) didn’t want me to come, I wouldn’t be here,” tacitly making the case that God is behind this whole saga, sanctioning narratives of “White genocide,” ordaining (or even instigating) the White House’s inter-racist solidarity moves, actively demonizing and rejecting actual refugees, and ultimately blessing the White nationalist empire.

Conclusion: The Hope of Transracial Solidarity

Bangladesh March for Gaza protest against ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

This current moment should be understood as one of heightened mobilization and consolidation of inter-racist solidarities for the purposes of securing an imperial White nationalist (yet transnational) vision. Conversely, however, there are rich histories of resistance through which such inter-racist solidarities have been countered. Notably, where the apartheid regime constructed and weaponized racial categorizations according to colonial “divide and rule” tactics, while consolidating its own power by various means, the Black Consciousness movement combatted this with what could be called “trans-racial solidarity.” By refusing apartheid race categories and reframing blackness as not just a racial identity but a political one—indicating an unwavering commitment to liberation—this movement emphasized and strengthened the connections between the struggles of the oppressed. Such trans-racial solidarity was and remains a powerful counter to that of the inter-racist kind. Hence, in these times, the martyred prophet Biko has much left to teach.

[1] Archbishop Desmond Tutu described post-1994 South Africa as a rainbow nation, and while perhaps unintentional, this descriptor has come to do the work of presenting South Africa as a happily diverse but unified society, belying, plastering over, and thereby sustaining the severe inequalities that exist. As analyzed by prominent South African feminist academic Pumla Gqola, “rainbowism” has functioned as an “authorising narrative which assisted in the denial of difference” foregrounding “racial variety even as it does not constructively deal with the meanings thereof” (99).

[2] Despite its staunch pro-Nazi origins, the South African apartheid state ruled by the National Party (the White Afrikaner party that instituted apartheid in 1948) grew to develop strong and intimate ties with the Israeli state.  Among other things, these ties involved extensive military and economic collaboration. On this point, see Francesco Pontarelli’s interview with Salim Vally.

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Thandi Gamedze
Thandi Gamedze is a South African educator, theologian, cultural worker, and poet based at the University of the Western Cape’s Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice as a Senior Researcher. Her doctoral research was transdisciplinary, bringing together the worlds of education and theology to better understand the role churches play in both upholding and challenging dominant power relations relating to race, gender, and class. Thandi’s interests include black theology, liberation theology, social justice, education, and the arts – particularly poetry. She has broad experience working across multiple sites, including churches, universities, high schools, and community organisations.
Global Currents article

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza


 

Professor Atalia Omer and guest lecturer Peter Beinart discussing Beinart's new book on March 3, 2025.
Professors Atalia Omer and Peter Beinart discussing Beinart’s new book on March 3, 2025.

The war in Gaza has surfaced deep divisions in the American Jewish community, most notably in generational divides as older American Jews cleave to support for the State of Israel while younger Jews take to the streets chanting, “Never Again for Anyone.” Renowned journalist, political commentator, and CUNY Professor Peter Beinart joined Contending Modernities (CM) and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies for a conversation on March 3rd about his introspective new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Atalia Omer, CM Co-Director and Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, spoke with Beinart on the intra-traditional debates taking place in Jewish communities in the face of the televised mass atrocity ongoing in Palestine and Israel. The lecture was cosponsored by the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies.

With the first days of Ramadan underscoring the starvation across the Gaza Strip, Omer opened with the ways in which many American Jews have felt the need to unlearn, and reckon with, a particular narrative of Jewish history. In her own research for Days of Awe, Omer met Jews asking: “If occupation [of Palestine] is not my Judaism what is my Judaism?” While many older American Jews were raised in establishments defined by their relationship to the State of Israel, such as the Jewish Federation, Hillel, and most mainstream synagogues, increasing numbers of young Jews have begun to question their institutions’ and elders’ embrace of Zionism as central to Jewish life. This has entailed exploring non-Zionist forms of community and reviving Jewish diaspora ethics and identity through accountability to Palestinians. Omer quoted Beinart’s prologue: “From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horrors that a Jewish country has perpetrated. . . . We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims, we are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it” (10). Omer invited Beinart to explain his call for a new narrative.

Beinart, a professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and editor at large of Jewish Currents, shared that his own unlearning had begun in his early 30s. An Orthodox Jew from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Beinart’s family had experienced the “fragility of diaspora” across Africa and Eurasia and viewed Israel as a place of security and cultural flourishing. It wasn’t until he met Palestinians in the West Bank as an adult that he came to face the level of brutality they experienced at the hands of a state that was completely unaccountable to them. Beinart likened this to Black Americans in the Jim Crow era, during which the state could restrict your movement, take your land, your life, with no consequences. He had to rethink his experience of Israel and Zionism, in the words of Edward Said, “from the standpoint of its victims.”

“I was unprepared for Palestinian humanity,” Beinart shared, having grown up in an environment where Palestinians were “a faceless threatening collective.” This book was “a re-exploration of what it means to be Jewish. . . . In many ways my teachers in this work . . . have been Palestinians.”

 

 

“They Tried to Kill Us, We Survived, Let’s Eat”

Painting of Queen Esther by Hugues Merle, 1875. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Beinart’s humorous chapter title references the joke that “every Jewish holiday has the same plot: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” Omer asked Beinart to unpack his re-reading of the story of Esther and the holiday of Purim in light of his commitment to Palestinian humanity and dignity. Beinart explained that Queen Esther of the Jews of Persia, through “a series of daring maneuvers” managed to turn the Persian King against an advisor named Haman who wanted to kill the Jews, thus saving the community. This is the story that’s generally celebrated at Purim.

But that’s not where the story ends, Beinart continued. “We tend to cut off these stories in our sacred texts at precisely the point that they might help us reckon with the Jewish capacity to be victimizers as opposed to victims.” The Persian King instead sided with the Jewish community, and the Book of Esther ends with Mordecai and his Jewish Kinsmen massacring 70,500 people from the advisor Haman’s community (Esther 9:16). 

“Jews can be in many different roles, right? Not only the role of the oppressed, not only the role of the victim. I think there is a connection between what we don’t see and don’t reckon with at the end of the Book of Esther and what we refuse to see and reckon with so often in our organized communal space vis-à-vis Palestinians and vis-à-vis Gaza.”

Ways of Not Seeing

Omer asked Beinart to discuss chapter three of his book, where he debunks common talking points used to deflect criticism of Israel. Beinart noted that arguments about “Hamas’ use of human shields,” “the vote for Hamas in 2006,” and “Israel having no choice but to kill civilians in Gaza” served as emotional “defense mechanisms” for those defending the assault on Gaza. However, “[w]hen you’re fighting a guerrilla force that’s embedded in the civilian population, international law does not allow you to say, we think there’s some fighters in this building so we can destroy the apartment building or we can destroy the hospital,” Beinart emphasized. He noted that American revolutionaries, too, were a guerrilla force. “If you have the right to destroy an entire building because there were military people there then Hamas would be justified in blowing up apartment buildings all over Israel—Israel’s military headquarters is not in a remote location; it’s in downtown Tel Aviv surrounded by schools and other civilian infrastructure.” Every group that kills a lot of civilians uses the “human shields” excuse, he argued; Russia is one contemporary example in its invasion of Ukraine which has extensively bombed civilian infrastructure.

Idolatry and the State of Israel

Woodcut of Korah's Rebellion by Hans Holbein, 1538.
Woodcut of Korach’s Rebellion by Hans Holbein, 1538. Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. Public Domain.

“[T]he magnificence of this people once lay in its belief in God—that is, in the way its trust and love of God far outweighed its fear of God. And now this people believes only in itself?” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1963.

Omer read this quote from Arendt cited in Beinart’s book to introduce a conversation on the final chapter, “Korach’s Children,” which warns of misinterpreting the Jewish concepts of chosenness and holiness. Beinart explained Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s interpretation of Korach’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron. Per Leibowitz, chosenness means a set of obligations and responsibilities to the law, not impunity. Korach’s claim that holiness resided in the people signaled an idolatrous motif that must be challenged. The widespread belief in the inherent holiness and chosenness of the State of Israel is a form of Jewish exceptionalism, Beinart argued, where Israel is seen as self-justifying and not subject to the same moral standards applied to other states. Beinart notes in the book, “In Jewish tradition . . . states are not created in the image of God, human beings are. States are merely instruments” (100). At the event, Beinart concluded, the state’s “value is dependent on how good a job it does in protecting the lives of the people under its control, and if it radically fails in that effort, it should be rethought.”

Omer asked Beinart to speak further on Avodah Zarah, or idolatry. Drawing again on the work of Leibowitz, Beinart noted that the State of Israel can function as an idol when it becomes an unconditional object of worship, superseding fundamental Jewish values and the rights of Palestinians. He pointed out the phenomenon where support for the state has become a litmus test for being a Jew in good standing in some communities. “Idolatry is when you say Israel has an unconditional right to exist as a Jewish state with this particular political system, right? But the rights of Palestinians to exist . . . that is negotiable.”

“It’s the elevation of the state above the human being that makes this idolatry.”

Conclusion

Finally, Omer addressed critiques of Beinart’s book, specifically mentioning Chicago-based Rabbi Brant Rosen’s concern that while Beinart expertly dismantles blindly pro-Israel narratives, he doesn’t adequately reckon with genocide. Beinart responded that while he had largely avoided the term “genocide” in the book, partly due to its timing and a strategic decision to focus on the human impact in a way that might better resonate with his intended audience, it is a term he now uses more frequently. The conversation concluded with a sense of the urgent need for new narratives in the American Jewish community that grapple with the capacity for violence and that make human flourishing the litmus test for a state’s value, rather than putting states over people. 

Beinart remarked: “I think the nightmare scenario . . . is really whether Israel can do in the 21st century what this country [the United States] did in the 19th century.”

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Contending Modernities
Theorizing Modernities article

Engaging our Imagination with Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding


A mural in Manila, the Philippines. Image via Flickr User Jonathan S. Igharas. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

There are many things to say about Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, a volume whose central thesis is that peacebuilding practices based on religion in postcolonial settings are not necessarily always empowering. I want to start, however, by saying that I appreciate the way the book problematizes the degree to which religion can be a vehicle of liberation. Omer does not discount the agentic potential of religion, but in my view she attends more to how religious agency is delimited. The use of religion in peacebuilding efforts, she reminds us, is no guarantee that decolonial justice will be attained. The use of religion in inter-organizational peacebuilding efforts—the “increased contact, collaboration on livelihood projects, and relationship building” they entail (139) as well as the “interreligious dialogue” they facilitate (185)—is both empowering and disempowering.

The use of religion is empowering in that it creates a “pathway for negotiating plurality or the possibility of coexistence amid or in the aftermath of violent intercommunal divisions, conditions of marginalization, and fatalistic despair” (3); enables the formation of “safe spaces for dialogue and interaction,” to reference an interviewee (14); makes it possible for the young and women to become “‘social cohesion and equal rights’” agents (99); opens the door for “grassroots empowerment” against religious extremism (174); makes it possible for people to “‘find[] the humanity of the other … [and] understand they are their own solution’,” to reference another interviewee (185); acknowledges “differences as empowering” (214); and can, to a degree, “restor[e] peaceful relations … and empower[] people to achieve minimal economic survival and communal sustainability” (224).

Yet, religious peacebuilding practices are also disempowering. They are disempowering because the business of creating harmony among parties in conflict has been coopted—if not hijacked—due to several different forces: geopolitical (the War on Terror) and geoeconomic (neoliberal globalization) agendas; the fact that communal belonging is primarily understood in terms of traditional religious identities, foreclosing the possibility for alternative interpretations, voices, and individual and social understandings to develop and play a role in breaking free of the neoliberal and War on Terror contexts under which they operate; because “problem-solving and resilience” (176) are “often appropriated and deployed as [] neoliberal mechanisms whereby marginalized communities” are left “to adapt to and persevere in precarious conditions” as well as “endure [the] further erosion of their humanity” (274); and because the “language of human rights” takes a back seat to economic and political interests (111). Instead of focusing on structures of oppression and their impact—i.e., geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts/trends and their effects on the lives of people—it makes individuals responsible for the personal and social circumstances in which they find themselves. Religious peacebuilding practices are similarly disempowering because they promote  “a closed sociopolitical and religiocultural hermeneutics that ensures, rather than disrupts, the status quo” (74–76); because they “subordinate[] theological engagement to neoliberal rationality” and governance and in so doing produce “prophetic lite” orientations and trajectories (79); because they “bypass[] the orientalist association of Islam with vio­lence” (201); because they disregard colonial histories; and ultimately because they encourage/enable androcentric, heteronormative, racial, and patriarchal understandings and practices.

Art Deco Floor Works in Iloilo City, Philippines. Image via Flickr User Shubert Cecil. CC BY-NC 2.0.

The focus on both the empowering and disempowering effects of religious peacebuilding practices is appealing for it speaks to the usefulness of a “both and” way of understanding, interpreting, and thinking about social reality. Such an approach is a hallmark of intersectional theorizing/methodology that takes us beyond “either or” ways of understanding, interpreting, and thinking about reality. Such an approach embraces complexity and it is a compelling part of the argument in the monograph. Before discussing this in more detail, I want to turn to some broader points and questions about the book concerning the agency of peacebuilders and practices of peacebuilding.

Agency and the Practice of Peacebuilding

Decolonizing Religion and Peace Building seems to suggest that the type of agency that one can expect from within the context of religious peacebuilding is a non-revolutionary religious agency, an agency with lowercase “a.” Peacebuilding practices based on religion cannot be oriented to move beyond geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions nor can they move us to overcome androcentric, heteronormative, racial, and patriarchal orders, although they do facilitate some, if “minor” changes. This, of course, raises a very important question: What is agency and what qualifies as agency? Can non-revolutionary religious agency (“a”) be transformed into revolutionary religious agency (“A”)? If so, how can this be accomplished? Relatedly, what might be the ethical responsibilities of religious actors in this type of transformation? How might they navigate the moral dilemmas they encounter as they move forward, in the “right” direction, towards religious agency with a capital “A”?

Another question that comes to mind as it pertains to the issue of agency, is: how does one get from religion-based peacebuilding practices that maintain existent orders of domination to peacebuilding practices that challenge and potentially transcend orders of domination? In the book’s last chapter, one finds an answer to this question. First, we are told that eliciting Indigenous epistemologies is not sufficient since “what is Indigenous is not necessarily feminist or decolonial” (294). Fair enough. Relying on decolonial and other critical thinkers, critical pedagogy, epistemological disobedience and resistance, critical border thinking, hermeneutical/theological resistance/disobedience, Indigenous criticality, and double critique are identified as other varied instruments of consciousness/epistemological liberation/transformation. Yet, this answer still raises two more questions: (1) How does one get to a place where one can embrace such critical instruments of appraisal/practice?, and (2) Under what circumstances is this a real possibility? It is one thing to identify what can facilitate transcendence or epistemological openings. Identifying how, by what means, and under what contexts one arrives at critical instruments of liberation is altogether a different task. It would be helpful for the author to illuminate how, by what means, and under what circumstances can one get a hold of such instruments?

How does one get from religion-based peacebuilding practices that maintain existent orders of domination to peacebuilding practices that challenge and potentially transcend orders of domination?

To be more specific, I am wondering about the practical implications of Omer’s work. I do think that what she has provided readers with is significant because it forces us to reconsider mainstream assumptions about the usefulness of religion when it comes to peacebuilding practices that operate in geoeconomic and geopolitical contexts inimical to their revolutionary potential. The author also conveys a complex that takes issue with the limitations of decolonial approaches: Omer states, “Decolonial critics tend to interpret religion reductively as an instrument of empire and neocolonialism…. [They] see only the patterns of disempowerment” (258). Is the use of religion in peacebuilding practices necessarily a good thing? Omer’s answer to this question is, of course, “it is not a simple answer, an ‘either or answer,’ but a ‘yes and no’ answer, an answer that embraces complexity, a ‘both and’ answer.” Omer does not side with religiocrats, since they tend to blindly overemphasize the empowering effects of religion, given their utilitarian, realpolitik, if not neoliberal orientations, and she does not side with decolonial critics either, given their tendency to focus on disempowerment. Omer seems to be in between and suggests a new horizon: “Decoloniality, along with emancipatory imaginations, points to double critique, border thinking, and interculturality as pathways” (268). Yet, one is still left wondering what might this look like on the ground. What are the practical implications of getting to and developing “pathways”?

Theoretical Questions: Intersectionality and Pragmatism

On Intersectionality

Intersectionality privileges the perspective of the marginalized. This is a point, it seems, that is underexamined in the book. Renown intersectional scholar Patricia Hill Collins privileges the perspective of the marginalized with one significant term, the “outsider-within”—a term associated with DuBois’s concepts of the “veil” and “double consciousness” as well as Dorothy Smith’s “bifurcated consciousness”—and a term that opens the door to understanding processes of change, precisely because this is the intended goal of intersectionality as a critical theory. Collins similarly calls attention to the power of self-definition for the marginalized and the processes associated with it. Self-definition and the outsider-within, as ways of understanding and reflecting on social reality in alternate ways, if not otherwise, can provide insight into the nature of oppression and can potentially function as platforms for crafting ways out of oppression. Transversal politics, a type of coalitional politics that is focused on interdependent group histories, intra-group dynamics, and “both and” thinking, is another key concept in her tool bag. Although Omer employs different terminology, she seems to address this type of politics in the last chapter. But I wonder about the two other intersectional terms. Who is/are the outsider-within(ers) in this account, but more importantly in what kind of self-definition processes does/do she/they find(s) herself/themselves and how might these play a role in religious agency with capital “A”?  Intersectional theorizing places the marginalized and their subaltern understandings at the center of knowledge production, the critical assessment of social reality, and social transformation efforts. How would such a focus and attendant concepts inform/advance our understanding of religious agency?

On Challenging Pragmatism

I agree with Omer’s appraisal that doing religion is not enough, an insight specifically develop in chapter 3, which is appropriately entitled, “Doing Religion.” “Doing religion,” as she states, “simply answers the questions of what works, why it works, and how we can make it work more effectively.” When doing is delimited to practical approaches and solutions within a neoliberal framework of operation this does nothing to challenge/interrogate, as Omer rightly puts it, “the broader landscape of religion, development, and peacebuilding,” a necessary step if one is to move in the right direction (87). It is clear that a significant component of her criticism is how the absence/lack of integration of the broader context in peacebuilding practices/epistemology delimits peacebuilding practice itself. Yet, while I agree with this line of thinking, I am wondering if the author’s position aims to challenge pragmatism, a philosophical tradition that turns to thought and language—thinking and interpreting processes, to be more precise—to make sense of how we “practically”/“pragmatically” navigate and solve problems in our social worlds. The pragmatic maxim, moreover, suggests that our conception of reality is ultimately based on what is experientially useful. In sociology, my mother discipline, pragmaticism imparts the following 4 lessons to symbolic interactionism, a major research area in the discipline:

  • “true reality does not exist ‘out there’ in the real world; it ‘is actively created as we act in and toward the world’ …”
  • “people remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has proved useful to them. They are likely to alter what no longer ‘works.’”
  • “people define the social and physical ‘objects’ that they encounter in the world according to their use for them.”
  • “if we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do in the world” (332–33).

None of these lessons get at broader geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts; they are focused on the immediacy/imperatives of localized social situations. To point to the absence of broader contexts in peacebuilding practices, as Omer does, makes sense since it would tell us something about the thought-based and language-based practical orientations that potentially take place in localized social situations. What would the author name this lack, then? What is it that pragmatism—if not peacebuilding practices—is missing/lacking in their interpretations of reality? The term that comes to mind for me is “hermeneutic suspicion,” a central feature of any critical theory. In Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur defines a hermeneutics of suspicion as “interpretation as exercise of suspicion,” further noting that it is defiance of faith, even “faith that has undergone criticism, postcritical faith;” and that it fundamentally stands for “the death of idols” (32, 28, 275). Ultimately, a hermeneutics of suspicion is an attempt at distancing oneself from taken-for-granted/“natural” meanings or the “objective validity” commonly attributed to “things”—it entails dispossessing of the immediacy, naiveté acceptance, and/or prejudices of the given—in order to have a more “accurate,” if not “freer,” meaning/understanding of human situations/consciousness.

Omer elaborates on “hermeneutic disobedience” and “hermeneutic resistance,” although she does not exactly connect these terms to the “doing” dilemma she identifies. In addition, they do not seem to fit. Omer emphasizes “hermeneutic closure,” which does not describe an orientation towards an object (e.g., broader contexts) but rather describes the problem associated with an object. Regardless, why not “hermeneutic suspicion”? If “hermeneutic disobedience” and/ or “hermeneutic resistance,” what is/are the difference(s) between these terms vis-à-vis “hermeneutic suspicion”?

All in all, Decolonizing Religion and Peace Building provides us with significant critical assessments of religious peace building practices. It compels us to consider, via intersectional, decolonial, and other critical lenses, the limitations of religious peacebuilding practices in postcolonial settings. Omer’s use of the intersectional approach, while useful, could have been broader. Her position on “doing religion”—in my estimation a significant step in peacebuilding scholarship—could have benefitted from a more precise conceptual exploration, if not more philosophical probing. The latter two points are not detractions. Rather, they stand as an invitation for Omer to open the door to new landscapes of understanding. Caveats aside, readers will recognize the book as a stimulating and crucial contribution.

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Jean-Pierre Reed
Jean-Pierre Reed is Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A qualitative sociologist by training, his scholarship lies in theoretically driven, historically informed, and empirically grounded analyses of socio-political processes. He specializes in the sociology of revolutions/social movements, social theory, and the role of religion and emotions in revolutions/political contention. He is author of Sandinista Narratives: Religion, Sandinismo, and Emotions in the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution (Lexington Books, 2020) and co-editor of Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements (Routledge, 2022). Presently, he is working to complete Social Movements and Positive Emotions: Advancing Theory through Latin American Cases (Routledge) with Karina Navarro and Rodrigo A. Asún (Universidad de Chile).
Global Currents article

Racialized Asylum, Moral Inversion, and the Erosion of Refugee Norms: The Case of White Afrikaner Resettlement in the United States


Displaced Palestinians during their journey back to Gaza and the north via Al-Rasheed Street. © 2025 UNRWA Photo by Ashraf Amra. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In contemporary South Africa the legacy of apartheid remains inscribed in the social, economic, and political fabric of everyday life. Apartheid was not merely a system of governance; it was a legal and theological order meticulously constructed to secure and maintain White economic exploitation. Racial domination was characterized by White supremacy and paired with the apparatuses of structural, cultural, and institutional violence. These apparatuses served as instruments to sustain and legitimize an economy that enriched a White minority at the direct expense of the Black majority. This racist and oppressive regime received support from successive United States political administrations of the time, often justified using the strategic imperatives of Cold War geopolitics. A notable example was the Reagan administration’s policy of “constructive engagement,” which resisted sanctions and provided both rhetorical and material support to the apartheid regime. The administration advocated for quiet diplomacy despite growing evidence of systemic human rights abuses. Such policies served to reinforce the apartheid state’s resilience and perpetuate its oppression.

Apartheid was not merely a system of governance; it was a legal and theological order meticulously constructed to secure and maintain White economic exploitation.

It is against this historical backdrop that the Trump administration’s decision to designate White Afrikaners as refugees eligible for US resettlement takes place. Some of these Afrikaners were either too young to have actively contributed to the apartheid-era economy before 1990, or were born after its formal end. Yet they still continue to materially and politically benefit from its enduring legacy. Such a resettlement policy represents a staggering inversion of justice. This policy reframes historical beneficiaries of racial domination as victims of persecution, and in doing so, distorts the very foundations of international refugee norms.

White Victimhood as Policy

The narrative of White South African victimhood has circulated in far-right and White nationalist circles since the dismantling of apartheid in 1994. What once was fringe rhetoric has now been granted the imprimatur of US state policy. The result is a deeply racialized moral economy in which whiteness is centered as the locus of vulnerability, deservingness, and innocence. Centering White people in this way stands in stark contrast to the marginalization of racialized communities facing direct, structural, and institutional violence, such as besieged Palestinians in Gaza or Black and Brown asylum seekers at the US border. Their suffering is minimized, dismissed, or outright denied. This policy shift is not just morally suspect, it is a legal and humanitarian distortion.

The international definition of a refugee, codified in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, hinges on a credible, well-founded fear of persecution, typically by the state or by actors the state cannot or will not control. By these criteria, there is no evidence to support the classification of Afrikaners as a persecuted minority. Farm attacks in South Africa, while tragic, are part of broader social crises that affect all South Africans and are not evidence of state-sanctioned or systemic persecution of Afrikaners. Granting refugee status to Afrikaners in this context stretches the legal definition of “refugee” beyond recognition. It suggests that ideological motives, rather than legal merit or factual grounding, are driving this policy.

What once was fringe rhetoric has now been granted the imprimatur of US state policy. The result is a deeply racialized moral economy in which whiteness is centered as the locus of vulnerability, deservingness, and innocence.

The narrative that Afrikaners are the targets of a genocidal campaign lacks credible empirical support and has been propagated primarily by far-right and White nationalist networks, both within South Africa and internationally. This narrative has gained political currency through repetition rather than through legal or factual merit. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), the vast majority of victims of violent crime in the country are Black South Africans, who make up over 80% of the population. For example, in the 2022–2023 reporting period, over 25,000 murder victims were recorded, the overwhelming majority of whom were Black, while farm-related murders, including White farmers, accounted for fewer than 1% of total homicides. The disproportionate emphasis on White farmer victimhood obscures this broader and far more deadly reality. When refugee policy is manipulated to selectively highlight the grievances of White populations while ignoring the systemic and ongoing victimization of Black communities, it not only distorts humanitarian priorities but also erodes the moral legitimacy of asylum law itself. In effect, such policies weaponize the language of compassion and entrench racial hierarchies, while simultaneously undermining global commitments to justice and protection for the truly persecuted. This is not merely a failure of implementation, it is symptomatic of a deeper structural condition.

The Architecture of Racialized Humanitarianism

The global refugee situation today does not operate as a neutral apparatus guided solely by need or vulnerability. Instead, it is shaped by what scholars such as Didier Fassin calls “humanitarian reason,” a form of moral reasoning that is profoundly influenced by histories of race, power, and cultural proximity to dominant geopolitical actors. This uneven moral calculus is not a theoretical abstraction, it manifests in the stark disparities in how refugee claims are received, evaluated, and acted upon across different racial and national contexts. For instance, Haitian and central American migrants fleeing endemic violence are often summarily expelled from US borders; Muslims escaping war zones endure “extreme vetting” that treats them with suspicion rather than compassion; and Black and Brown asylum seekers are routinely framed not as vulnerable human beings, but as potential threats to national security. These responses are not simply failures of policy but reflect a deeper ethical crisis in our collective capacity to recognize the full humanity of the “Other.” In such a context, the call to justice requires more than legal reform; it demands a reorientation of moral vision, one that foregrounds empathy, equity, and our shared responsibility to the displaced.

Afrikaner  horsemen celebrating the centenary of the Great Trek, an important event for Afrikaner nationalism, in 1938. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this light, the recent embrace under the banner of humanitarian protection of White South Africans—who are descendants of a settler-colonial elite—is not merely curious, it is telling. It signals how the global refugee apparatus, far from being a disinterested sanctuary for the vulnerable, often operates as an instrument for reaffirming longstanding racial and civilizational hierarchies. This phenomenon is reinforced by what Sara Ahmed terms “the politics of white innocence,” a discursive formation that constructs whiteness as intrinsically virtuous, perpetually endangered, and inherently worthy of care and protection. Within this framework, the suffering of racialized “Others” must be made exceptional, spectacular, and legible according to dominant sensibilities to warrant even minimal compassion. Even then, recognition remains precarious and conditional.

What humankind witnesses, then, is not a failure to uphold humanitarian ideals, but the presence of a deeply embedded ideology of racialized gatekeeping. As Didier Fassin and Ilana Feldman have shown, humanitarian reasoning frequently privileges White suffering, extending empathy and protection in ways that mirror existing geopolitical alignments and racial logics.

The contrast is stark: while Latinx, Haitian, Muslim, and African asylum seekers are met with walls, vetting, and suspicion, White South African farmers are offered expedited refuge, and their claims are amplified through narratives of persecution that resonate with western anxieties. This is not the impartial operation of international law, it is a selective moral economy masquerading as compassion, demanding a deeper reckoning with the structural injustices that shape who is seen, who is saved, and who is sacrificed. This selective empathy becomes even more glaring when placed in the context of South Africa’s recent legal and moral stand at the International Court of Justice.

Context: Gaza and South Africa’s ICJ Case

South Africa’s position has been criticized in western political discourse due to its principled advocacy on behalf of Palestinian civilians. Rather than being acknowledged as a legitimate appeal to international norms, this advocacy has been framed as extremist or ideologically motivated. Instead of supporting South Africa’s moral stand, the United States has responded punitively. At the same time, the US extends refuge to members of South Africa’s former White elite, thereby reinforcing a racialized narrative of victimhood that undermines the foundations of international justice and amplifies settler-colonial grievance.

In this inversion, Palestinians facing exterminatory violence are denied recognition as victims, while Afrikaners with economic power and global mobility are cast as refugees, hollowing out the meaning of this legal and ethical category. This is not neutrality, it is ideological violence masked as policy. It is not humanitarianism, it is the racial management of refuge, calibrated to preserve geopolitical alliances and US domestic White grievances rather than to uphold international law or moral consistency.

The Trump administration’s decision to extend refugee status to White Afrikaners cannot be viewed as an isolated humanitarian gesture. Rather, it reads as a politically motivated maneuver designed to undermine and delegitimize South Africa’s standing on the global stage. The symbolic gesture of offering sanctuary to members of a former settler-colonial elite, at the precise moment South Africa invokes international law on behalf of a besieged and dehumanized population, amounts to an act of moral deflection. It is an attempt to reframe South Africa’s pursuit of justice as ideologically suspect, while displacing the language of victimhood onto a racialized and geopolitically convenient constituency. In doing so, the United States not only obfuscates the genocidal reality in Gaza but reinforces a global double standard in the application of humanitarian norms and legal accountability.

The symbolic gesture of offering sanctuary to members of a former settler-colonial elite, at the precise moment South Africa invokes international law on behalf of a besieged and dehumanized population, amounts to an act of moral deflection.

Nowhere is this moral dissonance more visible than in the simultaneous disregard for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. As thousands of Palestinian civilians are subjected to indiscriminate bombardment, displacement, and widespread destruction, their appeals for international protection are met with silence or skepticism. In stark contrast, White Afrikaners, who face no comparable threat of persecution, are granted sanctuary and framed as victims. This juxtaposition underscores the extent to which global refugee policy is shaped not by legal consistency or human rights commitments, but by a racialized logic that stratifies suffering and selectively dispenses empathy.

The Trump administration’s amplification of an unfounded narrative of “White genocide” in South Africa, while simultaneously ignoring or obfuscating credible evidence of genocidal violence in Gaza, exemplifies what scholars describe as moral inversion, a process in which the oppressor is rendered innocent and the oppressed are rendered suspect.

Such selective outrage is not merely hypocritical; it enacts what Gayatri Spivak terms epistemic violence: the active erasure of the subaltern’s suffering through institutional denial, deflection, and distraction. This is not a failure of the system to protect; it is the success of a system calibrated to defend racial and geopolitical dominance under the guise of universal humanitarianism. Against this backdrop of systemic erasure and moral distortion, acts of resistance that reclaim international legal and ethical standards are not only necessary, they are urgent.

South Africa’s Stand: Reasserting Moral Authority

Within this broader context of moral and legal distortion, South Africa’s decision to initiate proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) represents a notable reassertion of international legal norms and ethical responsibility. This intervention is not merely a procedural invocation of the Genocide Convention; it is a political act rooted in the nation’s historical consciousness. Having experienced the institutionalized brutality of apartheid, South Africa possesses a unique moral authority and an acute sensitivity to the mechanisms of racialized state violence. Its legal challenge reflects both a principled commitment to international accountability and a refusal to remain complicit through silence.

This stance has not been without consequences. It has provoked diplomatic backlash, subjected South Africa to economic pressure, and triggered efforts to delegitimize its position through various media and political narratives. Nonetheless, the clarity with which South Africa has articulated its case signals a rare consistency between lived historical experience and contemporary foreign policy. It affirms the foundational principle that international law must be applied impartially, that human rights protections cannot be reserved for the geopolitically expedient or racially proximate. The irony, therefore, is profound. The United States, once a defender of apartheid South Africa, now extends refuge to some of that regime’s historical beneficiaries, while simultaneously targeting and discrediting a democratic nation acting in defense of an occupied and besieged people in Gaza. This juxtaposition exemplifies the selective application of moral concern and highlights the urgent need for a more consistent and equitable global human rights framework.

Having experienced the institutionalized brutality of apartheid, South Africa possesses a unique moral authority and an acute sensitivity to the mechanisms of racialized state violence.

This paradox reflects the operation of what critical scholars have termed differential humanity, a system in which recognition of suffering is unevenly distributed according to geopolitical interests and racialized hierarchies. It exemplifies how global humanitarian norms continue to be shaped by colonial inheritances, strategic silences, and epistemic exclusions. In this light, the selective legitimization of certain asylum claims over others demands not only legal critique but an ethical reckoning with the racialized architecture of international protection.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Moral Center

The contradictions in today’s refugee regime are not mere policy failures, they reflect a deeper moral disorder. When humanitarianism is co-opted to privilege the powerful and abandon the oppressed, we are not simply misapplying asylum law, we are dismantling its ethical foundation.

To preserve even a shred of legitimacy, the category of “refugee” must remain tethered to verifiable need and grounded in objective, universally consistent implementation of refugee criteria. It must not be wielded as a political instrument, nor hoarded as a racial entitlement. When refuge becomes the privilege of the powerful rather than the shield of the vulnerable, we are not merely distorting the ideals of humanitarianism, we are dismantling them.

November 4, 2023. London’s Trafalgar Square protest in solidarity with Palestinians. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The selective valorization of White suffering, while Palestinians in Gaza face annihilation and Black asylum seekers are met with suspicion, reveals a system calibrated to preserve global hierarchies under the guise of humanitarian concern.

In a world increasingly desensitized to the inversion of truth, the acts of speaking honestly, naming injustice, and defending the truly persecuted are not no longer optional; they are moral imperatives. And ultimately, they are spiritual imperatives. Every sacred tradition calls upon us to bear witness to truth, to stand with the marginalized, and to resist the desecration of human dignity. In the face of modernity’s dislocations and moral confusion, such clarity is not only a prophetic responsibility but a deeply spiritual calling, a sacred act of devotion rooted in justice

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A. Rashied Omar
A. Rashied Omar is associate teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He also is a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and a trustee of the Institute for the Healing of Memories in South Africa
Theorizing Modernities article

A Transnational Feminist Reflection on “Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion”


The Sunlit Center postcards: Part of the I Am Okay project, combining interview excerpts with women who experienced camptown prostitution and images from the peripheries of their lives. Image by author.

I write this essay as a Christian social ethicist specializing in transnational feminist ethics. Although I do not produce exclusively confessional or non-descriptive scholarship on religion, interreligious dialogue, or peacebuilding, I still approach religion through a normative frame. As a normative ethicist, I grapple with the complexities of peace activism, framing justice, peace, and love not only as telos but also as guiding moral principles, praxis, embodied knowledge, hope, and imagination for an alternative world.

Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding invites readers to critically reflect on their assumptions about interreligious peacebuilding. More specifically, it asks: What if we viewed interreligious dialogue and peacebuilding through the lens of hermeneutical and theological disobedience, incorporating ecofeminist, queer, decolonial, and Indigenous resurgent perspectives? Omer’s fieldwork in Kenya and the Philippines, and the critical conversations she fostered with her interlocutors there, present a compelling case. She argues that many international organizations, religious and non-religious, have co-opted the efforts of local religious actors for their own neoliberal agenda—for example, international development—while maintaining the political and economic hierarchies within those local communities. This often results in the disempowerment of marginalized local actors, whose gendered and raced bodies hold critical knowledge of survival in times of violence and challenge the heteropatriarchal interpretation of sacred texts.

If we, scholars of religion, consider the way that the majority of global armed conflicts concentrated in the postcolonial world are carried out, we would agree with Omer that peace must be decolonized—epistemologically, hermeneutically, and physically. We must ask, then: Where does decolonization happen in religious peacebuilding? It first begins with a critical awareness of the intimate, historical relationship between the Christian religion and European colonialism. Unfortunately, interreligious dialogue often fails to help stakeholders comprehend this dynamic. Omer raises a critical awareness of the “harmony business”—the commodified and depoliticized religious peacebuilding practices often promoted by “religiocrats” in today’s neoliberal world that erase the historical entanglement of European Christianity and colonialism. The book offers vital theoretical and moral checkpoints for scholars and activists, urging us to critically examine whether our work perpetuates a neoliberal or neocolonial status quo rather than advancing a decolonial vision of long-lasting peace with justice in which sexually, racially, and economically marginalized people find liberation.

In the remainder of this post, I raise some questions to further the conversation on decolonizing peacebuilding and interreligious dialogue. These questions are driven by my respect for Omer’s scholarship and activism. I specifically focus on Omer’s distinction between “doing” and “knowing” religion, syncretism, and the ethics of knowledge production. Tying these together is an abiding concern with the way we carry out religious peacebuilding.

“Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion”

Omer shows that “doing of religion” does not necessarily enhance religious literacy or critical knowledge of religion, particularly if religion becomes a utilitarian tool for peacebuilding. The doing of religion refers to “putting religion to work to promote various objectives” such as the absence of armed conflict in society (3). As a result, the prophetic is turned into what Omer calls the “prophetic lite,” embodied by “an actor who is neither iconoclastic nor disruptive but rather useful and conforming to the NGO-ized deployment of religion as a peacebuilding technology” (3). This globally widespread practice relies on a neoliberal model seeking to include religious people in political peacebuilding by celebrating diversity and eliciting mutual recognition of rituals and spiritual practices. While “doing religion” typically consists of a series of workshops and events in which many religious agents participate, in most cases, the participants do not engage with “difficult questions” that challenge the heteropatriarchal ethno-nation building that is ideologically promoted by their own and other religious traditions. They hardly engage with social justice issues such as gender-based violence, land disputes, child soldiery, marriage, and more from religious perspectives. The danger of “doing religion” is to treat religion and religious people as a monolithic body. Therefore, instead of asking what works in interreligious peacebuilding, Omer accentuates that we must ask “what we can do better” to decolonize and liberate the world for peace with justice. As Omer argues multiple times, decolonizing religion and peacebuilding is “a theological and hermeneutical practice that recovers resources within traditions that are emancipatory rather than oppressive and imperial” (279).

I find it essential to interrogate the relationship between “doing” and “knowing.” Just as “doing religion” does not necessarily enhance “knowing religion,” “knowing religion” as “a discursive tradition or as a living form of historical arguments and interpretations” (4) does not automatically contribute to “doing religion” in the context of peacebuilding. From my disciplinary perspective, “doing religion,” or more precisely “doing theology,” emphasizes that theology is not merely engaging in God-talk but generating actions that will foster much deeper reflection on God. Doing can be a different way of expressing knowing: a religious doer may not articulate the critical knowledge gained through “doing religion” but rely on heteropatriarchal religious symbols and languages to explain their (decolonial) knowledge.

‘Doing theology’ emphasizes that theology is not merely engaging in God-talk but generating actions that will foster much deeper reflection on God.

For instance, I find it challenging to decipher ordinary people’s everyday religious languages and experiences while researching women’s peace activism in prostitution industries around U.S. military bases in South Korea. The Sunlit Center, a grassroots organization adjacent to Camp Humphrey’s, the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces in South Korea, has advocated human rights for the senior female citizens who used to work in prostitution for American soldiers. The center does not identify it with feminism or Christianity but only with peace activism. However, the organization often utilizes Christian feminist theology or Minjung theology (a Korean version of liberation theology). Every Tuesday, the Sunlit Center women gather for a short prayer meeting or a Bible study, followed by a lecture or critical conversation about the history of and state-sanctioned violence in militarized prostitution industries in South Korea. After educational sessions, they share meals and snacks. One day, I observed the women’s Bible study, where they shared reflections on the New Testament text. When the Bible study leader invited the women to share their interpretations of the text they read, they answered, “O! Thank you, Jesus!,” :I have no idea,” “I don’t know. I’m uneducated,” “Thank you, Father!”

These women’s refusal to share their interpretation of the biblical text reminded me of the conversation between Topsy and Ms. Ophelia in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ms. Ophelia, a “good” Christian woman, asks Topsy, an enslaved Black teenage girl, how she has lived. Giggling, Topsy answers, “I don’t know” to all the questions from Ms. Ophelia. Topsy’s ignorance, childlike innocence, and dirty appearance arouse deep sympathy in Ms. Ophelia, who would later educate and convert Topsy to Christianity (read as White civilization). However, womanist ethicist Emilie Townes interprets Topsy as a strong-willed girl full of survival knowledge who refuses to share her knowledge with White enslavers. Like Topsy in Townes’s interpretation, the Sunlit Center women’s refusal to share their religious and spiritual knowledge can be seen as a form of resistance. Just as Topsy refused to share her knowledge with her White enslavers, these women, through their silence, may be resisting the imposition of a particular interpretation of their faith.

In fact, the older women who used to work in the prostitution industry requested the Sunlit Center to have a Christian prayer meeting because they had fond memories of going to church with their G.I. lovers. They also remembered how the local Korean church ostracized them. The Sunlit Center’s recordings show some of the women’s critical views on Christian teachings of sin related to sexual purity or the prosperity gospel. They exercised hermeneutics of suspicion in an informal and private setting. Although the Sunlit Center women call themselves peace activists unaffiliated with Christianity, they are spiritually empowered enough to go outside to share their stories and protest state-sanctioned violence. Elsewhere, I have discussed their performative bodies as a form of spiritual activism and interfaith dialogue. In the margins of peacebuilding, grassroots women’s inter- and intra-faith dialogue and activism may demonstrate emancipatory, decolonial peacebuilding and religious talk, although their voices are not loud in realpolitik.

Like Topsy in Townes’s interpretation [of Uncle Tom’s Cabin], the Sunlit Center women’s refusal to share their religious and spiritual knowledge can be seen as a form of resistance.

I share Omer’s critique that “doing religion” in the neoliberal and neocolonial space reduces religion to mere functionality, curtailing its profoundly prophetic role in faith-based popular movements. How can “knowing religion” and “doing religion” synergize within interreligious peacebuilding? In other words, how can we hijack “doing religion” from neoliberal political and religious authorities? How can we recognize the intimate connection between knowing and doing? The unity of knowing and doing is the core of spiritual activism illuminated by womanist and feminist scholars such as Layli Maparyan, M. Jacqui Alexander,  and Gloria Anzaldúa. In this case, “knowing religion” requires a different form of hermeneutics and an alternative way of thinking about spirituality and religion, as Alexander criticizes heteropatriarchal religion for delimiting people’s imagination of spirituality. Omer’s critical reflection on “doing and knowing religion” underscores hermeneutical competency to decolonize both “doing and knowing religion.” This reflection inspires religious actors in peacebuilding to play “critical caretaking” roles in interpreting religion and building peace.

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s critique of Latin American liberation theology can help us reimagine a decolonial theology. Althaus-Reid criticized Latin American liberation theology for cooperating with a heteropatriarchal neoliberal market economy to attract Euro-American consumers. As a result, Latin American liberation theology depicts the poor as a monolithic group, and thus, a closed hermeneutical body, whose racial, gender, and sexual identities are erased. Their desires are also devalued. The poor in Latin American liberation theology become detached from the realities of the oppressed. Likewise, without critical analysis of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized asymmetry of power among international organizations, nation-states, religious organizations, and stakeholders in peacebuilding, interreligious peacebuilding serves only a heteropatriarchal neocolonialism that keeps the marginalized in their precarious situations for the sake of global peace and security. Omer’s critique of “doing religion” in international peacebuilding elicits Althaus-Reid’s queer feminist theological critique of commodified Latin American liberation theology.

Syncretism

Althaus-Reid’s book, The Queer God, elaborates on decolonial hermeneutics. By queering hermeneutics, Althaus-Reid searches for “God in the closet.” Her notion of libertine hermeneutics is meant to contemplate God metaphorically and symbolically by reading the Bible in conjunction with libertine literature such as that produced by the Marquis de Sade. Libertine hermeneutics reads biblical texts intentionally through a sexual lens in opposition to the Christian colonialist “decent” interpretation of the sexual moral code. To be certain, Christian colonizers used their closed hermeneutics of biblical sexual ethics to subjugate and demonize Indigenous populations who were not subscribed to monogamous heteropatriarchal sexual morality or the binary gender system. Althaus-Reid’s hermeneutics expand to reclaim and renew Indigenous oral traditions, folktales, rituals, and ceremonies. Her queer theology is a syncretic way of doing Christian theology—or, as she claims, a queer theologian is a Christian diaspora.

Without critical analysis of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized asymmetry of power . . . interreligious peacebuilding serves only a heteropatriarchal neocolonialism. 

One example of queer theology as a syncretic theology is Althaus-Reid’s theologizing of zemis found among the Taíno people of the Caribbean in the 15th–16th century. Zemis are not gods or goddesses but human-made objects where divine or ancestral spirits reside. Unable to comprehend zemis, Christopher Columbus was only interested in their function. By calling zemis idols, Columbus contradicted his discovery about the natives of the Caribbean islands’ worship of the celestial beings. Althaus-Reid provocatively analogizes thinking about God in postcolonial Latin America to sodomizing God with zemis. In other words, instead of using Christianity to interpret zemis or native traditions, zemis challenged the system of monopoly perpetuated by the God of the empire even in knowledge production and the spiritual market. In order to challenge this monopoly, religious syncretism or a syncretic understanding of hermeneutics can be as much sexual as material, spiritual, and metaphorical.

Is there a place for syncretism in interreligious peacebuilding? As Omer suggests, instead of another source of oppression, religion can be understood as a category complicatedly intersecting with race, gender, class, and other systems of power. Based on this framing of religion, Omer accentuates the importance of critical hermeneutics, particularly developed from feminist, queer, indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist perspectives, including Althaus-Reid’s. If so, I wonder whether critical hermeneutics, such as feminist and queer theology, and their roles in interreligious dialogue, can be understood and formed better through a syncretic frame? Furthermore, since religious syncretism happens on a more ground level, ordinary people’s everyday survivability can be understood better through the syncretic lens. A critical hermeneutic needs to trace the everydayness of interreligious engagement and dialogue, as well as everyday materiality in religious peacebuilding, namely, embodied peacebuilding.

An Ethic of Knowledge Production

Finally, taking peace activists in Kenya and the Philippines as “interlocutors,” Omer showcases how to produce transnational and intercultural knowledge. As transnational feminist scholars  M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Chapter 1) argue, transnational knowledge producers should wrestle with the links between the politics of location (e.g., the spatiality of power) and knowledge production; have a sharper focus on the ethics of the cross-cultural production of knowledge; and foreground questions of intersubjectivity, connectivity, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability as fundamental markers of a radical praxis. Alexander and Mohanty’s points of scrutiny constitute a transnational feminist ethics on how we live our lives as scholars, teachers, and organizers, and our relations to labor and practices of consumption in an age of privatization and hegemonic imperial projects. I read Alexander and Mohanty’s ethics of transnational feminism in Omer’s book—especially her conscious practice of relational ethics and friendship—not only as ethics of interreligious dialogue but also as her ethics of field research. I hope this book will inspire many readers to live as scholars, teachers, theologians, and organizers who scrutinize the consumption of decolonization, interreligious dialogue, and peacebuilding in an age of neoliberalism.

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Keunjoo Christine Pae
Keunjoo Christine Pae is professor of religion/ethics and women's and gender studies and chair of the Religion Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. As a Christian social ethicist, she specializes in transnational feminist ethics, ethics of peace and war, spiritual activism, sexual ethics, and Asian/Asian American feminist theologies. Many of her publications take U.S. military prostitution in South Korea as a critical site for producing feminist knowledge concerning militarized violence, faith-based popular resistance, and a theology of peace. She has authored A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and edited with Boyung Lee, Embodying Antiracist Christianity: Asian American Theological Resources for Just Racial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her edited volume with Kathleen Talvacchia, Searching for the Future in the Past: Renewing Feminist Theological Voices was published in 2024. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding


In academic work on and among the organizations that carry out peacebuilding across the globe, there is a common refrain one hears about the opposition between “theory” and “practice” in addressing conflict. For practitioners seeking to build peace in difficult circumstances, theories about the causes of conflict can appear as a luxury of scholars who conduct their work without having to bear the consequences of it among real people. For theorists, those who practice peacebuilding in the field without engaging in theoretical reflection on it risk unwittingly supporting institutions and systems of knowledge that maintain the oppression of marginalized groups.

Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding disrupts this binary. Focusing on the pitfalls of theory without practice and practice without theory, she makes the case that reframing religious peacebuilding as a decolonial praxis which confronts the realities faced by those on the ground is the best path forward. For Omer, decolonial theory offers resources for thinking through how colonial structures—including neoliberalism, secularism, and the “world religions” paradigm—continue to operate in the background of many well-intended peacebuilding projects. This risk of continuing peacebuilding without challenging these structures is that peacebuilding practices will be co-opted by neocolonial forces and people’s suffering will continue. On the other hand, however, Omer worries that decolonial theory risks obscuring the agency of on-the-ground peacebuilders who might have no other choice than to engage with a peacebuilding industry constructed by colonizing powers.

In fieldwork in the Philippines and in Kenya, Omer documents the intersection of the peacebuilding industry with the challenges faced by those who have suffered the recent scars of communal conflict and the longer scars left by colonialism. What she finds is that it is necessary for those invested in decolonial visions of justice, as Omer herself is, to listen to those on the ground. The result of such listening, she says, is that “something more” than what neoliberal and colonial paradigms would predict results from peacebuilding (20). This something more, Omer later refers to “decolonial openings.” Here, in spite of being born out of the hegemonic forces of colonialism and empire, peacebuilders find ways of connecting that exceed those boundaries: “Such openings include the love and friendships generated through relational but also intra subjective peace islands where people overcome hate, mistrust, and suspicion” (253).

In his response to Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, Robert Orsi goes to the heart of the philosophical, theological, and ethical challenges that Omer’s book raises. Orsi contends that the decolonial openings Omer references betray a kind of secular vision of religious peacebuilding that the book otherwise resists. By naming this decolonial opening as indicative of an ethics, religion is reincorporated into a secular/Enlightenment worldview. Orsi argues that global warming and other worldwide crises are likely to increase migration to the US and Europe, places which have built their wealth via colonial enterprises in the now developing world. To meet these people where they are, he contends, will require more than a welcoming ethics, but a willingness by those in the Global North to welcome new gods.

K. Christine Pae, meanwhile, explores Omer’s distinction between “doing religion”—i.e. instrumentalizing it for advancing specific peacebuilding goals—vs. “knowing religion”—i.e. having a deep understanding of historical religious traditions and their interpretations. She does so by reflecting on how these conceptualizations fit into her own work among a peacebuilding group of former sex workers in South Korea. She explores how their understanding of Christianity was shaped by their ostracization by Korean Christian churches and how this shapes their peacebuilding praxis. She also reflects on the role of syncretism in religious peacebuilding and the potential for Omer’s project to be part of the construction of transnational feminist knowledge.

J. P. Reed considers the conceptualization of agency with which Omer works in the book. He wonders, in particular, about how the possibility of revolutionary change fits into Omer’s understanding of agency. He then turns to a consideration of Omer’s treatment of intersectionality along with her relationship to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In putting the latter into conversation with Omer’s argument, Reed seeks to excavate what he sees as the philosophical assumptions that guide Omer’s thinking.

Finally, Emma Tomalin lays out key takeaways from Omer’s book for those working in Faith Based Organizations (FBOs). For Tomalin, Omer’s findings suggest a renewed focus on listening to on-the-ground-faith actors and critically reflecting on the structure and assumptions that guide FBOs. Tomalin’s essay is a helpful reminder that theory and practice are indeed necessary partners in advancing religious peacebuilding.

Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding asks the peacebuilding industry to look inward about the assumptions it makes about religion and its broader location within the ideological contours that shape modernity. The latter include neoliberal economic policies, secular assumptions about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of religion, and colonial political and epistemological structures. By grounding this inward reflection in fieldwork where NGOs are actively engaged in peacebuilding practices, Omer threads the needle between theory and practice that challenges narratives that seek to treat either as pure and/or untouched by the other.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.