This session will focus on religion's complicity with discursive violence and religion's potential disruption of such violence through decolonial intersectionality. "Peace" is not usually the outcome of forms of critical and hermeneutical resistance. On the contrary, in contexts defined by legacies of mass atrocities, intergenerational trauma, and colonial structures, including epistemic forms of violence, "peace" often does not redress historical harms and injustices. Hence, neither "peace" nor "religious actors" necessarily constitute a conduit for justice. The panelists will examine how Christian Zionists weaponize Islamic history to delegitimize Palestinian indigeneity in historic Palestine and why decolonizing the depth of Eurocentric Christianities is urgent in post-Apatheid South Africa, where the neoliberal logic of post-apartheid peace still shapes and delimits the scope of decolonial futures. Yet, within this context, the presenters identify moments of intersectional discursive disruptions from within religious spaces and through the multi-vocality of traditions while also interrogating the risks of using the medicalized metaphor of "healing," often attributed to the instrumentality of "religious actors" in the aftermath of mass atrocities for its potential depoliticizing upshot.
Influenced by Atalia Omer's argument in Days of Awe (University of Chicago Press, 2019) that the category of religion ought not "be studied in isolation from gender, ethnicity, race, and other sites of contestation" (p. 248) and her related commitments to critical intersectional approaches to the study of peace, this paper argues that intersectional decolonial thinking and design practices can critically resist Eurocentered Christianities' universalizing influences on the study of peace and religion while designing pluriversal processes and approaches to Religious Peabcebuilding (RPB). Drawing on the critical resistance offered by decolonial thinkers from the Global South and diaspora and Indigenous North, this paper then calls for self-reflexive creativity centered on the principles of decolonial design justice as the basis for antihegemonic and convivial praxis that encompass Walter Mignolo's description of pluriversaility in The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Duke University Press, 2021).
Using ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper analyzes the endeavors, or jihad, of a Sunnī Muslim community in Cape Town, South Africa, to challenge the (neo)liberal peace of post-apartheid South Africa. The discourses and practices of this community attempts to cultivate an intersectional Islamic ethic attentive to the operations of violence in late modernity. While postcolonial South Africa has been lauded for its liberal rights-based framework, it has not transformed the forms of power producing structures perpetuating socio-economic marginality. Responding to this lacuna, some Muslims draw on Islamic tradition in dialogue with the praxis of solidarity. Divided into three sections, this paper maps socio-religious context through the multi-vocality of jihad. Then, it shows how jihad is lived out in the religious activism of the mosque. Finally, it argues that hegemonic framings of peace need to be deconstructed, because of its embeddedness in relations of violence, and critically reconstructed.
From its inception in nineteenth-century Europe, Christian Zionism has operated as one of the strongest ideological forces in support of a Jewish nation-state in the Levant. While the theological underpinnings and narrative structures of this ideology are well-established, certain notable discursive shifts have emerged in the past decade. Chief among these is the introduction of language around indigeneity, diversity and social justice—imports from wider conversations and cultural concerns globally. This research explores the nature of these discursive shifts, including their imputesus, target audiences, and impact. Particular attention is given to the role of Palestinian Christian communities in these trends, as well as the changing ways in which both Judaism and Islam are employed in the service of a Christian Zionist political agenda. This research has the potential to contribute to conversations around Middle Eastern religious minorities, social movements, intersectional struggles, globalization, and Palestinian Christianity.
In contexts of historical violence—from the immediate aftermath of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and gross human rights violations to addressing the ongoing legacies of the injustices and violences of colonial projects—one regularly encounters religious actors using the language of healing to describe the shape of the justice and peace they seek. This is often the case when philosophies and practices of restorative justice inform the shape of social action in these contexts. For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission utilized the language of healing in its project of national reconciliation and Indigenous peacemakers in North America often use this language in formal and informal processes to address historical harms. I propose to examine the use of healing in these two examples to excavate the relative merits and dangers of conceiving a just peace as a project of healing.
| Erin Runions | erin.runions@pomona.edu | View |