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.
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.
