Overview

An investigation of what consolidating religion as a technology of peacebuilding and development does to people's accounts of their religious and cultural traditions and why interreligious peacebuilding entrenches colonial legacies in the present.Throughout the global south, local and international organizations are frequent participants in peacebuilding projects that focus on interreligious dialogue. Yet as Atalia Omer argues in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, the effects of their efforts are often perverse, reinforcing neocolonial practices and disempowering local religious actors. Based on empirical research of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, Omer identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing and, second, more doing of religion does not necessarily denote deeper or more critical religious literacy. Further, she shows that these religious actors generate decolonial openings regardless of how closed or open their religious communities are. Hence, religion's occasional usefulness in peacebuilding does not necessarily mean justice-oriented outcomes. The book not only uses decolonial and intersectional prisms to expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the global South, but it also speaks to decolonial theory through stories of transformation and survival.

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9780197683026

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Reviews

In Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, Atalia Omer sounds a stunning and urgent call for us to recognize that current approaches to the integration and bureaucratization of religion in peacebuilding and development work can actually serve to denude religion of the prophetic impulse to justice, thereby reinscribing the very relations of power it seeks to disrupt. This book represents not only a significant academic advance in decolonial understandings of religion, but also a timely and powerfully counterintuitive warning to practitioners. * Peter Mandaville, United States Institute of Peace and Georgetown University * Atalia Omer is the expert on hermeneutical openings and closures as pathways and obstacles (respectively) to peace. This important and powerful book, by zeroing in on the closures of the 'harmony business,' shows us clearly what is at stake for peacebuilding in creating spaces that deepen religious 'knowing' across intersectional registers. * Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine * In this brilliant, multilayered exploration of religious peacebuilding ventures in Kenya and the Philippines, Omer employs decolonial, queer, and feminist theories to expose and critique the religious peacebuilding industry that often reifies colonial legacies that undermine just peacebuilding efforts. She skillfully challenges facile and uncritical acceptance of 'purity' tendencies within decolonial theory and what she calls the 'harmony business' of religious peacebuilding; both of which hinder versus enhance just peacebuilding efforts. Readers are left with a fresh understanding of how embracing complexity and contradiction can inspire creative and generative possibilities for just futures that are otherwise unimaginable when trapped within hermetically sealed epistemologies. Decolonial theorists and religious peacebuilders alike will be transformed and inspired by Omer's astute, timely, and innovative contribution. * Diane L. Moore, Harvard Divinity School * Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding offers an irreplaceable gift to the scholarship and practice of building peace, and to people motivated by faith who seek the transformation of harm and violence. The gift is this: To understand that lasting change starts with honest, critical reflection. This type of engaged scholarship requires the courage to unravel the paradoxical challenge of how to appreciate the deep commitment of the faith-inspired practitioner navigating difficult settings of violence while unveiling the ubiquitous overlay of historic and contemporary patterns of religious colonial patterns that perpetuate dehumanization. With extensive interviews and extraordinary mastery of interdisciplinary literature, Atalia Omer has surfaced the deep conversation our fields of peacebuilding and religious studies have long needed. * John Paul Lederach, Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame *

Author Information

Atalia Omer is a Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She is also the Dermot T.J. Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peace Building at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard University's Religion and Public Life program. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017. Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (2019). She is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford, 2015).

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