On 7 April, Queen’s University Belfast’s Religious Studies Forum hosted a roundtable discussion of a special issue of Religions on ‘Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding’, co-edited by Joram Tarusarira me.
All articles in the special issue are open access, and you can read them here.
Below, I have reproduced our introductory remarks from the roundtable. This should give you some sense of the content of the special issue – and hopefully whet your appetites to read further.
Introduction: Roundtable on Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding
You are all very welcome to our Queen’s Religious Studies Forum roundtable on Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding, based on a special issue of Religions, co-edited by Joram Tarusarira and me (Gladys Ganiel). The special issue is open-access, which means it is freely available for you to read online.
We are excited about the special issue and pleased to have the contributors with us today. We are grateful to the Religious Studies Forum at Queen’s University and its Chair, Andrew Holmes, for organising this event. We also wish to thank Donna Busby for administrative support.
Our contributors are: Atalia Omer, 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; Peter Ochs, the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia; Gladys Ganiel, Reader in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast and Jamie Yohanis, an independent scholar from Belfast; Christine Schliesser, Professor affiliated with the Center for Faith and Society, Fribourg University, and Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Christo Thesnaar, Professor of Theology at Stellenbosch University; Molly Manyonganise of Zimbabwe Open University; Alexander von Humboldt; University of Pretoria; and Joram Tarusarira, Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Joram and I will explain the rationale behind the special issue and provide an overview of the content. We will then pose a question to each of our authors, who will have five minutes to respond. After that, there will be an opportunity for questions from the floor.
First, why a special issue on this topic? And why now?
Last year was the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. These events altered the way we view the world in many ways. Suddenly, so-called ‘religious’ terrorism was a hot topic in public debates; and discourses like Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ were increasingly used to frame public policies.
The 9/11 attacks also served as a catalyst in the study of religion and violence. More than two decades on, we wanted our special issue to take stock of developments and advance the field in new ways.
Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order had argued that coming global conflicts would be fought along ‘cultural’ lines, with religion a key component of culture. This work is well-known for advancing a view of Islam as inherently violent, including the (in)famous line that there are ‘bloody borders’ between Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations.
Scott Appleby’s book The Ambivalence of the Sacred, published in 2000, is often viewed as a corrective to the assumption that religion is inherently violent. He emphasized that religion can be a source of both conflict and peace. He also drew our attention to the importance of radical, prophetic religious actors – he called them militants for peace – who courageously critiqued their own religion’s contributions to violence and were thus key players in peacebuilding.
From the mid-1990s, John Paul Lederach’s work on conflict transformation consistently highlighted the impact of faith-based actors in peacebuilding, in conjunction with other actors and factors. Some of his key concepts developed out of religious frameworks. For example, Lederach’s four-fold Truth, Mercy, Justice, and Peace ‘meeting place’ conception of reconciliation is based on his observation of mediators of peace talks in Nicaragua, who began negotiations by reading Psalm 85: ‘Truth and Mercy will embrace. Justice and Peace will kiss.’
John Brewer’s 2011 book Religion, Civil Society, and Peace in Northern Ireland advanced sociological perspectives on what made some religious peacebuilders more effective than others. Northern Ireland attendees at today’s roundtable are doubtless aware of Brewer’s conception of the most effective religious peacebuilders as ‘mavericks’ who operated on the margins of church institutions, capitalizing on the freedom and flexibility that this gave them to critique their faith and to take radical action. Mavericks is now a term widely used among Northern Ireland’s Christian peacebuilders.
In addition, over this time a tradition of ‘public theology’ has developed to justify the use of faith-based concepts like forgiveness and reconciliation in public debates, especially in majority Christian contexts. This has been driven by academic theologians (see, for instance, Emmanuel Katongole’s 2017 book The Journey of Reconciliation), but it is also reflected in the work of faith-based activists. The late Archbishop Demond Tutu could be considered a paradigmatic public theologian of this type; see, for instance, his 1999 book No Future without Forgiveness.
There are many others whose work is foundational to the field. But now we must turn to how our special issue strives to advance it.
Atalia Omer’s article ‘Religion and the Study of Peace: Practice without Reflection’ provides a trenchant overview of how the field has failed to advance beyond Appleby’s insight that religion can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. She explores how this has led to a ‘religion matters too’ discourse that has ensured that religion is now part of international policy concerns. But this also has resulted in the creation of a religious ‘sector’ in which ‘good’ or ‘useful’ religious actors are promoted by powerful states and policymakers. These powerful agents often decide who counts as a so-called religious actor, and whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Numerous case studies have demonstrated that religious actors have contributed to better relationships at the grassroots level: Omer uses Catholic Relief Services ‘Binding, Bonding, and Bridging’ activities in the Philippines as one such example. But she ultimately argues that the religious sector is occupied not by prophets (think Appleby’s militants or Brewer’s mavericks) but by bureaucrats who are unlikely to work for the type of radical change that could adequately address structural and historical injustices. Accordingly, Omer advocates adopting an ‘archaeological lens’ to interrogate how ‘religion’ is currently defined in the field, emphasizing the colonial legacies of religious/secular distinctions. Decolonizing the study of religion, conflict and peacebuilding therefore requires an intersectional approach, which recognizes that the categories of religion and secular are unstable, and that race, gender, nation, class and so on must also be part of our analysis.
‘Read the Signs: Detecting Early Warning Signals of Inter-religious Conflict’ by Peter Ochs, Essam Fahim, and Paola Pinzon,’ is the fruit of an 11-year study by a US-Pakistani research team which has received support from the US Department of State, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the University of Virginia. The support of the US Department of State underscores how governments have increasingly attended to the role of religion in conflict. The work of Ochs and his team was designed to make immediate contributions to local inter-religious peacemaking, by providing practitioners and policy makers with the tools for understanding how to detect early warning signals of conflict. Researchers can be trained to analyse a range of ethno-religious signals that appear uniquely in the discourses of religious groups. To that end, the research team developed the Value Predicate Analysis (VPA) model for diagnosing the probable near-future behaviour of religious groups towards other groups, based on five years of field testing in regions of high tension and verbal but non-lethal conflict. VPA focuses on speech and writing (teachings, speeches, sermons, essays) by teachers or cultural influencers; and it has produced good predictions of flexibility of key words in religious discourses. The article in our special issue focuses primarily on the team’s scientific paradigm, including the distinction between performative utterances (where the purpose is to affect the world) and constative utterances (which make descriptive true or false claims), exploring how insights gleaned from performative utterances enhance the effectiveness of the VPA model.
‘Presbyterians, Forgiveness and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland: Towards Gracious Remembering’, by Gladys Ganiel and Jamie Yohanis, engages with wider, interdisciplinary debates on the role of forgiveness in the study of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. Ganiel and Yohanis analyse varied perspectives on forgiveness among Presbyterians who experienced the Troubles, noting the implications of different Christian conceptions like ‘no forgiveness without repentance’; or a duty to forgive, based on the Lord’s Prayer/the Our Father. They propose a modest role for religious discourses within a wider process of political forgiveness and advance ‘gracious remembering’ as a contextual, faith-based, transitional concept for helping to create conditions in which political forgiveness may be more likely. Drawing on their study and the work of Northern Irish public theologian Johnston McMaster, gracious remembering is orientated around a vernacular understanding of grace and utilizes a four-fold framework to guide grassroots and civil society dialogues about the past: (1) the rehumanizing of the other by acknowledging the human cost of violence; (2) giving victims a public voice; (3) engaging in self-critical reflection; and (4) listening to alternative interpretations of events. Ganiel and Yohanis ultimately argue for the value of faith-based contributions on forgiveness in post-violence settings where that is contextually appropriate, but with ample recognition of their limitations.
The next two articles we consider are contributions in the field of public theology.
In ‘The Road to Reconciliation – Insights from Christian Public Theology’, Christine Schliesser returns us to debates about the concept of reconciliation. Schliesser acknowledges that the concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness have religious, especially Christian roots. But they have become prominent – albeit contested – concepts in peace and conflict studies. She argues that in appropriate contexts, Christian public theology can orientate people towards reconciliation. To that end, Schliesser employs the metaphor of the ‘road to reconciliation’, with certain milestones that may be encountered as part of the journey: remembrance, repentance, confession of guilt, forgiveness, and justice. If none of those milestones have been met, it is very possible that we have missed the road for public, societal reconciliation. At the same time, Schliesser cautions that the road to reconciliation is not linear; rather it is both a process and a result (an idea that resonates with Lederach’s Christian-influenced conceptions of reconciliation). Schliesser also counters concerns that the pursuit of reconciliation can result in a neglect of justice; for her, Christian public theology prioritizes both reconciliation and justice – indeed, quoting Jurgen Moltmann, she observes that ‘Desmond Tutu’s proclamation “No future without forgiveness” … has a twin sister: “No forgiveness without future”.’
In ‘Divine Discomfort: A Relational Encounter with Multi-Generational and Multi-Layered Trauma’, Christo Thesnaar turns his attention to the unfulfilled promise of reconciliation in South Africa, which can be linked to the failure to achieve an adequate measure of justice. This has resulted in the creation of multi-generational and multi-layered ‘frozen trauma’ in which past traumas are exacerbated by increases in divisions between rich and poor, different age groups, leadership and the people, etc. His development of the concept of ‘Divine Discomfort’ can be considered a contribution of public theology. Drawing on the work of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on the ’face of the other’, Thesnaar argues that really seeing the face of the other is the first step towards being unable to ignore our responsibilities for each other, an idea rooted in our shared vulnerability as humans. He says, ‘Responsibility is therefore to live in the discomfort of the trauma of the other. In short, this is called divine discomfort.’ Thesnaar supports the concept of divine discomfort with the theory of Dialogical Intergenerational Pastoral Process (DIPP), especially its notions of accountability and justice, as means to contribute to the search for ways to deal with frozen trauma. In the South African context, this means faith-based communities should create spaces where communities can ‘embrace the values of Ubuntu and mutual recognition’, avoiding ‘the trap of dealing with past traumas in an individualized way’.
In ‘”The March is Not Ended”: “Church” Confronting the State over the Zimbabwean Crisis,’ Molly Manyonganise analyses a pastoral letter called ‘The March is Not Ended,’ released by the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference (ZCBC) in August 2020. This letter was a response to various crises worsened or brought into being in the so-called ‘Second Republic’ of President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Her analysis is rooted in a longer historical treatment of the ambivalent role of the Christian churches in Zimbabwe’s history, ranging from their varied roles in consolidating colonialism, resisting the Rhodesian state, supporting the Zimbabwean state of Presidents Robert Mugabe and Mnangagwa; or playing a ‘prophetic’ role by criticizing political actors for perpetuating injustices. Manyonganise notes Joram Tarusarira’s work on recent periods in Zimbabwean history, which emphasized that the mainstream churches’ prophetic role had become muted, with small ‘maverick’ or ‘non-conformist’ organizations offering the only challenges. Manyonganise argues that ‘The March is Not Ended’ could mark a new departure in the willingness of mainstream church organizations to protest against the government, especially because it galvanized other mainstream churches and civil society groups to join them in speaking out. However, it remains to be seen whether people have really been empowered to act on the vision of the document.
Finally, in ‘Religious Environmental Sensemaking in Climate-Induced Conflicts’, Joram Tarusarira takes us in another direction by focusing our attention on an area that has been neglected in the wider field of religion, conflict and peacebuilding: climate change. Using a case study of the Pokot community in northern Kenya, Tarusarira argues that deeper religio-spiritual mechanisms that motivate actors in conflicts induced by climate change have been neglected in favour of technical approaches. To help advance this field, he develops the concept of ‘religious environmental sensemaking’, which examines how humans, acting together, use religious and spiritual interpretations to bridge existential or fundamental gaps in their understanding, thus making sense of their environment. For example, the Pokot understand their indigenous religion and traditional knowledge system as an early-warning system for environmental disasters, including ‘warnings from the bird’ song about flooding. Moreover, the sacred relationship between the Pokot and their trees and cattle mediates how they make sense of their positions in conflicts over trees and cattle; as one Pokot elder reported, the felling of sacred trees and the rustling of their cattle is experienced as sacrilegious. From their perspective, pooling these resources or accepting payments for them violates the sacred order of the universe, making potential conflicts about not just natural resources, but also about ‘boundaries, identity, and the order of the cosmos.’
We hope our brief summaries of the seven articles has stimulated your imaginations. We will now turn to specific questions for the contributors.