This book talk features the author, Atalia Omer, T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding; Senior Fellow in Conflict and Peace, discussing her new book "Decolonizing Religion and the Practice of Peace." The book is 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, the effects of their efforts are often perverse, reinforcing neocolonial practices and disempowering local religious actors. This book is based on empirical research of inter- and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines.
This book event is the first event in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Spring 2024 Book Series. This event took place January 25, 2024.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Decolonizing Religion and the Practice of Peace. January 25, 2024.
DIANE MOORE: One of the great things about having an event early in the term is get to greet people after long absences. So I'm delighted that people are doing that but I am going to ask us now to please settle in. I want to start because my introductions alone can take up 45 minutes of our time.
I'm so excited. I'm Diane Moore, and I'm the Associate Dean of religion Public Life here. And on behalf of my wonderful friend and colleague, Hilary Rantisi, who's the Associate Dean of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative under RPL, we want to welcome you to decolonizing religion and peace building with our beloved friend and colleague, Atalia Omer.
This book is just a milestone and a really important contribution to religious studies and peace building and the cross-disciplinary work that Professor Omer has been involved in for so many years. And it is just a delight for us to be able to host this conversation. And thank you all for coming during a busy time of the year.
Before I introduce Professor Omer, I want to just say thank you to our wonderful colleagues at Religion Public Life. Rachelle Swe, Tammy Liaw, Reem Atassi, Natalie Campbell who have done all the background work. It takes so much work to do what appears to be on the outset a simple event. It's never simple and just want to thank you all for all the work you do for us in support of this important work.
And of course, our wonderful Bob Deveau who just shows up everywhere to videotape this experience so that others who aren't able to be with us are able to see and experience this important conversation.
So Professor Omer for us a senior fellow for the Religion and Public Life and a TJ Dermot Dunphy visiting Professor of religion, violence, and peace building here at Harvard Divinity School. She has been a colleague with and for us for the last five years to really build out our Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative with our special case study in Israel-Palestine, which is one of her many areas of expertise.
Along with-- when she's not with us, which we wish it was fewer less time than it is, when she's not with us, she actually has another job somewhere else. She is 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.
She earned her PhD in religion, ethics, and politics here at Harvard University in 2006. And her research focuses on religion, violence, and peace building, Palestine-Israel Jewish Studies, decoloniality and religion, and religion and politics.
In 2017, she was awarded a prestigious Andrew Carnegie fellowship and the result of that fellowship is the book we're here to celebrate today. I am going to highlight a few other publications that Professor Omer has authored because you'll see an important pattern not only of consistency but of the depth of theoretical and methodological scholarship that she has been engaged in now for years and years and has contributed to deepening and profound ways the study of religion itself in these intersecting areas.
So her first book, When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks About Religion, Nationalism, and Justice, I was building off of her dissertation here at Harvard. And this particular volume that was published by University of Chicago Press in 2015, that volume examines the way the Israeli peace camp addresses interrelationships between religion, ethnicity, and nationality and how it interprets justice vis a vis the Palestinian conflict.
This work scrutinize uses the visions of peace and visions of citizenship articulated by a wide spectrum of groups ranging from Zionist to non-Zionist and secular to religious orientations.
Her second solo authored book is entitled, Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness and Solidarity with Palestinians published by University of Chicago Press in 2019. And this volume explores why divergences in conceptions of national identity between "homeland" diaspora could facilitate the proliferation of loci of analysis and foci of peace building efforts, which are yet underexplored both in peace studies and specific scholarship addressing the relations between diasporas and conflict.
She has also edited and co-edited multiple volumes including the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Building published by Oxford in 2015. She's published articles in among other venues, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Journal of Political Theology.
I'm going to-- I'm not going to keep going because the-- so this will be the 15 minute extra that I was talking about. Let me say in closing though, I've always joked with Professor Omer to say that for her to do even what she does with us, let alone what she does at Notre Dame and in other venues of her life, including being a very active and proud mother, and actually has a life outside of the academy, I think even what she does with us requires at least 12 heads that she seems to pull on and engage simultaneously.
So it is with great pleasure and a wonderful personal honor to welcome you here to celebrate this important accomplishment. And please give a warm welcome to Professor Atalia Omer.
[APPLAUSE]
ATALIA OMER: Thank you, Diane and all the amazing people in the Religion and Public Life Program and it's always a home for me to be here. So I'm really honored and thankful that you created the space and the time in your busy days to come engage with the book and with this research and to just be here.
So let me start with a story that I discussed in the book. So in June 2019, in Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao, in the Philippines, I met a Catholic priest named Father Chito or at least this is how he was known who had been sent to Marawi in Mindanao to promote inter-religious peace decades before the really devastating siege of 2017.
117 days of that siege, he had spent as a hostage together with 100 others in the basement of the Bato Mosque, which served as the headquarters of the insurgent operation of a group of tangentially associated with Abu Sayyaf.
Throughout his captivity Father Chito found himself in a complicated relationship with his captors as he dined with and prayed for them and with them. To survive, even helped make bombs as they all captors and hostages endured aerial bombardment by the US-backed and assisted governmental forces of Duterte.
When I met Father Chito in what turned out to be the last year of his life, he served as the chairman of the board of interfaith leaders of Pakigdait, which is Tagalog for peace. It's an interfaith grassroots peace building organization. The organization Pakigdait that focuses on conflict transformation, peace advocacy, interfaith dialogue, cultural sensitivity, and peace anchored community development in Northern Mindanao.
Father Chito is prominently featured in the work of Pakigdait as he made his way in the months following his captivity in Marawi through violence-affected spots in Mindanao bringing together the military and the MILF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and embodying as he understood it and talked about it with me and others, the meaning of forgiveness and the overcoming of divisions for the sake of peace.
So I just have a few images to kind of capture-- Father Chito is in the center with the beard. So very not-- And these are some of the other people, leaders, religious leaders engage in this kind of work in the violence-affected areas in Mindanao. This is one of the kind of activities in camps of rebels engaging the different what they call sectors.
Here is, again, with the colorful socks. In what is called the theory of listening sessions with sectors. So you have the women's sector, youth, and so you have kind of the language of sectors very much operative. In those processes of listening and really trying to-- a lot of what they were doing is trying to get some of the tensions and the hostility and the potentiality for violence redirected and let people-- give people opportunity to talk about their fears of the other.
And so those sessions were created and part of those leaders showing up together representing different positionalities just in the very obvious way is to in a sense do a performance of being able to show the possibility of being together in those difficult moments.
OK. So I'll go to the next slide in a second. In this context, we have larger intergovernmental or global organizations that often sponsor such activities that those images capture a little bit of. Those are efforts to shadow interfaith actors across Mindanao, which defines interreligious and intercultural praxis in Mindanao and this has functioned both as a survival mechanism in a sense real opening toward rewriting scripts for Mindanao.
And also, as an instrument or instrument of what I call in the book, the harmony business. That relies on people's really truly amazing capacity to survive and through relationship building on the level or horizontal level, and what is called in the language of peace studies elicitive conflict resolution methodologies. Meaning, elicitive going from the ground up rather than structural changes or top down and policies of historical repair.
Ensure one another's security and livelihood thereby confirming the presumed effectiveness of the harmony business. Even if it functions to maintain the status quo. So this slide shows what elicitive methodologies in practice where the communities get together. These are people representing different communities.
So Muslims, Christians, Indigenous people, Lumad, and they get together in one space and this is kind of coordinated and there is a lot of investment, programmatic investment in those kind of moments. And they do kind of-- they trace-- they do conflict analysis of, what is the conflict? How are we going to navigate it? How are we going to resolve the conflict?
And so it's articulated as elicitive, as bottom up, and it's kind of articulated then by various granting organizations and so forth as, look, this is-- we are sitting authority to the local. We are not dictating to the local how to resolve and analyze their own conflicts. So this is another example.
But the book as a whole grapples with the paradox of how many of the people that I met, how they talk about their experiences within those programmatic spaces and then how those activities and practices are co-opted into a broader kind of global designs and global agenda that replicates colonial dynamics.
So decolonizing religion and peacebuilding, the book is based on extensive empirical research of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices specifically in Kenya and the Philippines. And as Professor Moore mentioned, I was awarded a Carnegie grant that enabled me to go on a kind of repeated trips to these two regions.
I met with 250 people in Mindanao. These meetings included 20 focus groups with key participants in various programs encompassing religious leaders, and professionals in civil society spaces of intra and inter-religious dialogue and peace education. In Kenya, I interviewed 150 people. I conducted six focus groups with women, youth, and religious leaders, and clerics.
The interviews focused on multiple actors in the religious field, including what is called preventing or countering violent extremism spaces and inter-religious dialogue. I also engaged civil society actors working on questions of corruption, devolution, gender justice, poverty, marginalization, and other key areas of concern that are kind of articulated in the civil society spaces.
Further, I had access to additional focus groups with key participants in what is called dialogues of action, which means dialogue for implementing common good projects. Such projects include building wells or building footbridge to ensure that kids don't drown when they go to school. Public bathrooms or reducing instances of child marriage in Malindi, on the Coast of Kenya.
And so I was able to triangulate all this data, which helps to kind of offer a critical mass of testimonies illuminating the legion's global relevance to peacebuilding/development. And part of what I traced in the book is the synergies and the convergence of peacebuilding practices and development. Whatever development is, of course, it has really a lot of colonial baggage with it.
So as political theorist Cecelia Lynch identified neoliberalism and Islamophobic, securitization discourse have underpinned the subfield of religion and peacebuilding, especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The intersection of an Islamophobic security discourse and development praxis, thereby securitizing what is called, "development". So understood as maybe ensuring that people have food.
This has also coalesced with other adjacent subfields and their respective discovery also of religion as something that needs to be taken into account. But there is kind of a binary-- religion is understood and interpreted through a binary prism as either a force to contain when it's bad and destructive or a force to mobilize and a word that I kept hearing, harness, when good or potentially good or useful.
The securitizing of development also points to the intersection of peacebuilding and development, which previously were siloed as I said in international praxis. And this is shown that the effort to synergize what is called development praxis and peacebuilding praxis is really captured explicitly in the UN 2030 agenda and the 17 sustainable development goals that were ratified in 2015.
And I zoom in on the two sustainable development goals, goals 16 and goals 17 in the book. Goal 16 captures the synergies of peacebuilding into a development paradigm. And critically, goal 17 captures another neoliberal concept of local partnership. Here, I put for a moment my hat as a scholar in peace research. So since the 1990s, and the utter failure of top down peacebuilding missions, one can trace a growing recognition of the need to engage "local actors" and gain their buy in which is another kind of neoliberal devolutionary concept.
And so this instrumentalist recognition generated a kind of a fashion, a fad in peace theory and practice known as the local turn, which since the 1990s especially-- also, of course, it also produced a critique that I would happily discuss in the Q&A if anyone is interested. The important point for me to highlight now is that the quote "local turn" converge with the post-secular discourse that deemed religion as useful and not as previously overlooked resource and capital.
This is where the neoliberal discourse and rationality plays in. It's something to be moved here or there. So it's a resource, it's a capital, soft power, those are some of the kind of prisms through which we can think of how the religion factor became integrated.
And so we have all of a sudden, within that context and within this notion of partnership, the discourse of partnership, we have something called the religious actor that comes to the foreground. And the "religious actor" is found in a place called the local.
Of course, we can devote much time and space and I do in the book to problematizing the assumption that there is a place called local, that is distinct from another place called the international community. With all the normativity that that place kind of connotes.
Similarly, critics of secular teleology give us tools to deconstruct reductive accounts of the religious act or what exactly-- what is religious action exactly, as distinct from other kinds of actions. Nevertheless, the local turn discourse in conjunction with the synergies of peacebuilding and development praxis, and of course, those synergies mean also a lot of money and investment. And there is a lot of power behind. It's not just language and words.
And the securitizing discourse of religion, [INAUDIBLE] Islam led to a post-secular investment, as I said, in religion as a peacebuilding/development instrument. That perpetuates itself through measurable, tangible, deliverable. And the notion of measurability is very important.
Inter-religious peacebuilding work is only observable and can be invested in and investment can be renewed if you have something tangible that can be measured like building a well or building a footbridge. And so the issue of measurability is really key and really illuminates the neoliberal underpinning of this.
So the synergies of peacebuilding and development focus on the local leverage religion as a form to securitize "at risk demographics" and facilitate constructive inter-communal work, especially focusing on economic survival or what are called livelihood projects without redressing structural and historical legacies.
I trace in the book the deployment of religion within the framework of development/peacebuilding as an especially effective technology, an instrument of peace as pacification consistent with the colonial deployment of religion to divide, dominate, and conquer.
I therefore examine through a decolonial prism how inter-religious peacebuilding practices enhance neocolonial violent legacies and to what extent such practices expose decolonial religio cultural peacebuilding agency and opening in the two places that are deeply, deeply marked by ongoing colonial legacies and scars, which is Kenya and Mindanao.
So the first four chapters of the book interrogate what it means to do religion in peacebuilding and development with a particular focus on typologies of religious actors, including technocratic religious actors within the religious business, the harmony business, which instrumentalizes local religious actors. And the dynamics that go into generating a form of piety, which I call in the book survival piety within a neoliberal frame.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the securitization discourse and its cross-fertilization with development praxis. And the final two chapters examines where the lived realities on the ground of the friendships formed in and through programmatic spaces like we saw in those images of Father Chito exceed where I identify and grappled with really with the moments and spaces where the relationships, the actual relationships that formed exceed the decolonial gaze and offer glimpses into decolonial potentialities.
So Kenya and the Philippines are infinitely more complex than I can represent here. And the book is really about the harmony business. I'm not an expert in either case so I approached the research with my long study of religion violence and peacebuilding and try to think about it from this positionality.
Each of these cases, Kenya and the Philippines, involves different dynamics of minoritizing Muslims and recasting local and historical conflicts in civilizational decontextualized terms as part of the government's, the respective governments in each place integration and/or co-optation into a global infrastructure of the so-called global war on terror.
In what follows I'll just briefly touch on the case of Mindanao just to give a sense. And my analysis regarding the Philippines revolves around the axis of the moral conflict on the island of Mindanao. The Philippines epitomizes the enduring centrality of land thefts and legacies of marginalizing IPs or Indigenous Peoples. They are called IPs in that context. And specifically, Lumad and Muslim populations.
And in order to understand contemporary dynamics of the conflict, religious and communal identities themselves do not constitute the source or the root of the conflict in Mindanao. Rather, enduring systemic inequalities and discrimination and land thefts against Muslims and Lumad inhabitants of Mindanao and that was combined with Manila's settlement policies of channeling Christian settlers to the southern islands, which is called in that context domestic colonization.
This domestic colonization and all these other factors transform the demographics of the island. So this is the minoritization. And the fallacy of religion and peace praxis is that it glosses over the histories and structural forms of violence, spiritualizing, and psychologizing peacebuilding as the project of overcoming stereotyping and hatred as if religio cultural difference is the root of the violence.
So this is the tension that needs to be navigated and understanding how religion can be constructive in this context and to what degree it's being co-opted and only deepen kind of colonial dynamics. So to this extent, religions integration into peace building projects, we articulates rather than disrupts religion as a technology of division and control.
So the question is, where and how to identify the moments of disruption of this colonial logic. So back to the case study. So the tool of land titles or the Regalian Doctrine that the Spaniard whose rule lasted in the Philippines from 1565 to 1898 through the Regalian Doctrine that they brought with them in the 16th century together with the fact that the Spaniards labeled the internally plural Muslim population tribes as Moros, i.e. moors taking it from Spain from home.
So Muslims and Lumads became dispossessed and this is what is at the heart of why in the '60s, the 1960s you have the violent resistance and kind of consolidating and emerging to the foreground. So because the Spaniards never attain total control of Moro lands, this process which undermined moral traditions. So there is a really deep form of epistemic violence.
This process was accelerated under the post 1898 treaty of Paris, which established the US colonial administration that lasted from 1898 to 1946 whose laws-- the laws of the American colonial framework voided previous claims to Moro lands by their inhabitants, as well as their traditional and political associations with regional sultanates. So very, very disruptive and violent moment.
The minoritization of Muslims under the Americans and later through domestic colonization constitute the background to the eventual emergence as I said of the separatist MILF movement in the '60s, and to the unfolding of bloodshed and massive displacement of populations throughout Mindanao over decades.
So any kind of framing it as Muslims against Christians against Lumads is something that needs to be interrogated. And then what does it mean to then invest in inter-religious peacebuilding within that framework. Therefore, the opportune assimilation of the fault lines within both countries Kenya and Philippines into the orientalist discourse of the war on terror extended the colonial logic into the postcolonial space through the importation of a historical conflict narratives and convenient culturalist reductionism.
Muslim, Christian, Lumad religious difference is not the root cause of violence but rather colonial theft and domination are. Indeed, to gloss over the ongoing logic of the regalian doctrine, the war on terror, reductively and opportunistically shifted the analysis of conflict and to a civilizational plane trapped in a historical and centralizing explanatory frame.
This narrative inversion certainly feeds into the harmony business that locates the sources of violent conflict as if in inter-religious misinterpretation, misrepresentations, othering, and perverse understandings of the true message of faith, culture, religion, and so forth.
And thus, focusing peacebuilding efforts on alleviating fears through a lot of investment and funded projects of what I call getting to know one another, which is a different version of saying the contact thesis, or people to people, there are various names to that kind of understanding.
So the peacebuilding methodology I identified involved as-- you can see in this slide that catholic relief services let me use capturing their theory of change as it's called. So it focuses on binding. It's called the 3B methodologies.
So binding-- there are always a lot of acronyms everywhere in that space. I need to go with a cheat sheet everywhere. So binding is a process of intra-subjective transformative work. Bonding, which is within your own community. So it's inter-subjective transformational work within the community itself.
Who are we? What are we about? What does it mean to be Muslim? What does it mean to be Christian? And what does it mean to be Lumad? And putting it on usually on sticky notes in various kind of workshops, that kind of capture that process. And then bridging mechanisms, which is inter-communal action that is also framed and invested in that notion that I referred to earlier of the dialogue of action.
Again, the action being-- well, in this case, in the Mindanao, the key issue is resolving land disputes. So that's a tangible result. It can be measured and it's indicative of the success of the interreligious work, which otherwise if you don't have that deliverable, then it's like, how do if it was successful?
So you have to have that deliverable, that project. Empirical evidence that can be counted and measured. And then there is a lot of production of empirical data and research using the most advanced programs and then it feeds back-- it's kind of a feedback loop into the donor spaces and/or the epistemic communities usually in the global north.
OK. So what we can see here is that the engine of change in a neoliberal fashion is located in the emotional labor associated with intra-subjective transformation and cultivating interpersonal friendships, trust and partnerships. So a lot of burdening of the individual as the key engine of the change.
And so this is an image of just a closing-- a lot of prayers and engagement with one another in those spaces to resolve conflicts. And this is a closing ceremony of one of those activities that I was a part of.
OK. So these foci are what ignite the peacebuilding engine, the individual. This form of peacebuilding delegates responsibility for achieving goals of peace and stabilization to the people whose mere survival or resiliency is now rearticulated as expression of their spirituality.
The spiritual-- so what we see in those spaces of trying to resolve conflict and getting to know one another and getting along is invested in-- there is a spiritualization of this practice that makes it even more, in a sense, effective without going into the deep historical structural roots of the violence.
In the book, I analyze this-- kind of trace how it is reflective of a neoliberal rationality that in many respects, depoliticize religion while giving a sense of empowerment to individual participants. And this is one of the paradoxes that I kind of trace. When you read and we talk about the personal stories, the testimonies that people are giving about participating in various programmatic spaces like that, they truly feel empowered.
For instance, in the CRS workshops, there is a lot of-- what many women call legal empowerment. Now they know, they are empowered to make legal arguments to get their land or to defend their land. And so there is a sense of empowerment.
So who am I coming from a decolonial theory perspective telling, oh, no. You think you are empowered but you are not empowered, which is one of the things that I constantly kind of really struggled with in this context.
So rather than analyzing kind of the-- but what we see here is that we have kind of a focus on problem solving rather than problem posing to kind of invoke a [INAUDIBLE]. We see that rather than analyzing matrices and webs of power and ongoing legacies of colonialism, the depoliticizing maneuver posits that supposed culture of violence as the cause of people's predicament of poverty, marginalization, and insecurity.
So to combat the culture of violence, we have culture of peace seminars. They are very ubiquitous in Mindanao. Along with peace zone and peace islands and a variety of other kind of concepts like that. And in the book I challenge and I feel very challenged by the prevalent metaphor of the seed of peace and peace islands.
And that metaphor, seed of peace, is something that I've thought a lot about before because my work is very based-- my other work is very based in Palestine-Israel, and also, an industry of a peace, religion-- a peace industry-- and peace industry broadly that focus on the people to people.
And this notion, the metaphor, the deployment of the metaphor of the seed of peace. And so that's something that really kind of resonated with me. And as I was doing the research for a few years, in a different context, that was not my context that I was deeply familiar with, it really clarified some things also with respect to Palestine-Israel.
So inter-religious dialogue of action in Mindanao have included the creation of zones of peace or [NON-ENGLISH], as they are called, which were initially created very organically amid violence and through the organic initiative of local communal leaders such as Father Bert of Pikit in Mindanao.
Father Bert experienced his transformation from hatred. He grew up hating the Muslims and the Lumads. To an embrace of inter-religious peace building through his work in pursuit of what he came to understand as the mission of the church in Mindanao.
So he tells the story of the church in Pikit as a story of transformation, multiple wars between the MILF forces and the government, resulted in destruction and massive displacement and an enduring "silent war" in the hearts of the local inhabitants, Lumads, Muslims, and Christians alike.
And then he tells-- he continues his story, the parish at that time was divided on whether or not to extend humanitarian assistance to Muslim evacuees. It was only after a passionate debate that the parish decided to break down the walls of apathy, remember the command of Jesus in the gospel that tells them to love your neighbor as yourself, and the exhortation of Jesus that whatever you do to the least of my father's, you do it unto me.
As a result of this introspection, the parish organized mostly with young Muslim and Christian volunteers a disaster response team. And Father Bert remarked, "whether under the scorching heat of the sun or the pouring rain and amidst bullet fire, the young volunteers distributed food to thousands of starving evacuees in various evacuation centers. We would eat together, pray together, and even cry together when we heard that another baby had died in the evacuation center."
This initial experience led to the confirmation and then he continued in his discussion with me, that helping the poor is not a matter of choice for us Christians in Mindanao, it is a duty and social responsibility. So this confirmation required the cultivation of a new inclusive vision for the church that underscored the centrality of two forms of ongoing and sustainable activity.
Inter-religious dialogue and inter-communal peacebuilding through the mechanism of the culture of peace seminars in multiple barangays, which is the administrative units in Mindanao, in the Philippines. And involving always multiple sectors.
So somehow, the religious sector is not also the women's sector and the youth sector. So this is part of the sectoralization, is part of the manifestation of the operation of the neoliberal rationality in those contexts.
And then he tells me the main objective is basically to plant the seed of peace in the heart of every person and to restore the broken relationship of people caused by extreme biases and prejudices. So what's the cause of the violence? Biases and prejudices.
It's not to say that they don't exist, but this is kind of where the tension resides. So the planting of seed thesis reveals the peace mission's reliance on perseverance and concrete projects to improve people's material lives. Meaning that if you are-- it's the correlation between hunger and extreme food insecurity and the propensity to violence.
This is that correlative discourse is very operative. But also, there is a process of sacralizing what I call kind of the Sisyphean labor of peacebuilding of this inter-communal work over and over and over and over and over on that horizontal level. Those culture of peace seminars.
This survival piety notwithstanding the peace zone in Mindanao reveal a kind of a mixed legacy of grassroots, organization that has coalesced to resist the realities of violence, but has also revealed the corrupting dimension of extreme development-- of external development money, as well as governmental co-optation and manipulation of the concept of peace zone as pacification rather than an opening for future relational repairs.
So the peace zones emerge organically and then they became a business. And an instrument for pacification and keeping things under control for the hegemony. So for Father Bert, however, the planting the seed metaphor cannot be critiqued away as merely a form of co-optation into a neoliberal frame and a harmony business. It defines his work and his spiritualization of the inter-communal space, in and of itself is a sacred space because it's so hard to get to it in the midst of so much hate and division.
Mike from a grassroots Muslim communal organization in the same region is one of Father Bert's Muslim allies. He expressed a similar sense of inter-communal solidarity as he reminisced about how when he experienced displacement, Father Bert offered him a place to pray in the church.
The Father Bert and the Mike's of Mindanao are not the creation of the global NGO world that turned them into local partners or beneficiaries, which is the word I heard mostly, come meet our beneficiaries and so and so is our beneficiary.
So this is kind of again-- just re-articulate that same tension but those channels do fund and create possibilities of those kind of relationship buildings that in and of themselves are very meaningful and people experience them very authentically as meaningful and transformative.
So many of those projects, as I said, are driven by this neoliberal and securitizing rationalities, but the agency and aspiration for creating peace through small islands or zones are organically connected to the landscape of Mindanao. And this is what I saw and heard over and over.
So while this cross communal relationships are deemed useful for devolutionary peace mechanisms, opacification rather, really strong tension between peace and justice. And those mechanisms are more than happy to have their local actors or communities figure out a way to clean their polluted rivers or dispose of their waste.
This is the tangible deliverable projects, the solidarity projects is, how can the community come together and be able to figure out a way to get rid of waste or build a public bathroom or something like that. But the friendship that emerged in the context in those programmatic spaces exceed the neoliberal frame.
And so I was interested in that tension and dynamics and those remainders. And this is something that I'm trying to trace throughout the book. So this remainders where the relationship exceeds the neoliberal gaze, the frame, and kind of the decolonial gaze of critique, this illuminates what I call decolonial openings to love, as a refusal of hate and division.
Even if the very assumption of cultural and religious discourse as the heart of the violence amounts to a neocolonial erasure of historical injustices and power differentials as I highlighted earlier.
So I met people whose religiosity and spirituality offered a resource for peacebuilding and ethics of the common good, and opening to survivalists rather than revolutionary decolonial love that resist the forces of despair and division. Neither religion, culture, nor peace/harmony in those contexts are intersectional or woke or feminist. Yet, they work to reduce people's precarity.
And I personally was really challenged by that. And so existence as resistance doesn't mean relinquishing political and cultural claims. Still, it does reveal that the refusal to disappear and the active work on what decolonial thinkers call alter reality.
So imagining and rewriting materially new scripts, future scripts, constitutes an agentic challenge to the neoliberal concept of resiliency as depoliticized adaptability to ever worsening conditions. And making that adaptability somehow sacralized, which is a real tension.
So the book finally illuminates a hopefully productive tension between critique seeking a horizon of revolutionary justice, and the empirical realities, and spiritualized practices of peace, survival, and non-revolutionary survivalist decolonial love.
So I grappled throughout the book with these moments when the empirical evidence seemed to exceed the gaze of my decolonial critique. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you immensely, Professor Omer. The layers of this book are I think unmineable, I will say. With the arenas that you've explored and helped to illuminate and even further here in this conversation.
One of the things I have deeply appreciated about all your work is your employment of a critical lens of reflection to illuminate the structures that are often invisible, that function to limit the capacity for us to imagine something else.
So the challenges of what you continue to grapple with in your own work are, what does it mean that we have such good people with such good intention on the outside functioning in ways that ultimately end up reproducing the very structures that we're trying to dismantle.
And your work has always been focused on remembering that the deconstruction is only the first part of the work. That the deconstruction is to open up imaginative and illuminate other possible spaces. And this work is just so beautifully reminiscent of that. And I'm so grateful for it in context that, again, is outside of other arenas of your authorship and work.
We talked about a few questions. I have a trillion more. I'm not going to take up the whole time. We will-- I'll ask a couple of questions and then we'll open it up for audience. So please start to identify questions you'd like to pose to Professor Omer.
OK. I'll go with our questions just because otherwise, we're going to go off in a different arena. Can you unpack the distinction you make between this-- I think this is really, really central between in the book that you make between doing religion and knowing religion? Because that unpacking I think is critical
ATALIA OMER: Thank you for the question that we agreed on.
[LAUGHTER]
DIANE MOORE: Transparency. Transparency.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, I mean, this is what I've been struggling with for a long time. I've been immersed a lot in-- that kind of trying to understand the religion business and especially in that post secular mode, meaning that, OK, after the Iranian revolution and then, of course, with the push of the September 11, all of a sudden, religion is something to be as I said, to be contended with either to control and contain.
So you need to know something about it. And of course, religion is a marked category, this is where the Islamaphobic dimension really comes in. But then, oh, there are a whole host of people that we can be useful because guess what, most of the people in the world are religious. And there are-- of course, by religion, we mean institutions, networks. I mean, there is a whole--
And so if we want to vaccinate the community, we need to make sure that we get a buy in from the communal leaders who are often associated with churches, mosques, et cetera. So kind of the underpinning logic here is a functionalist logic, utilitarian logic.
So it's not about I don't care what kind of Jew you are, the question is, what can you do for me? What can you do? And that generates-- and I kind of also trace in the book in the various kind of programs that I studied how in fact, there is such a closure.
So you have kind of the utilitarian approach to how to do religion. So it builds itself as, oh, look at us. We are religiously literate because we engage with the "religious sector". But in fact, there is no hermeneutical openings and interpretive openings.
Not only that, feminist-- let's say feminist engagement with particular tradition and-- traditional sources are often not useful and not helpful and become some sort of either luxury. Like, oh, we can talk about because everything is kind of beholden to a realist framework, the realist utilitarian framework.
So there is no room and space for actual interrogation, engagement, hermeneutical work that centers marginalized voices within the tradition or what decolonial scholars call kind of a work of double critique that provides opening. And in addition to this, there is also kind of double closures that can be identified.
The double closure within the colonial context and the post-colonial context where communities are defined through religious affiliation. Which is, of course, also very, very relevant to Palestine-Israel. So communities are indexed to religious affiliation and so there is no possibility of writing a different kind of script that transcend, that is about solidarity, that transcends religious belonging, communal belonging.
And within that, you have kind of a closure or the hermeneutical closure about the knowing that is deep and critical and connects to the kind of work that you do, Professor Moore, with a critical interrogation, historical, hermeneutical account of religion.
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you. I just-- I'm so struck by just your comment here to say this notion of, what can you do for me? What's the usefulness? And the connection then between the individuality that you pointed out and the nature of the individual becomes the locus of this agency.
And again, without any power analysis, the harmonization-- harmonizing project becomes-- when people say, well, what can you do for me with this belief that, well, all of us are for peace. With this underlying assumption somehow that we all know what that means.
And of course, peace then in this context means the absence of direct violence. So the whole thing is just continually reinforced and reproduced in the ways that you articulate. Do you want to say anything more about the double closures or in communal and hermeneutical? Because I think that's a really interesting entry into, again, unpacking these assumptions.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah. I mean this was-- in many respects, it's so devastating to see how-- the only-- so people show up and there is kind of a process of reduction of people's identities to their religious identification that really precludes the possibility of thinking about power in complex ways.
About moving power but broad based coalitions that engage in economic analysis, political economic analysis. So conceptions of peace in many respects demonstrate how the colonial logic of division won and continue to win but now they are framed as, oh, this is a repair, a form of repair.
So it's really hard to-- it's a real-- in many respects, strategy. And also, as part of my research and I didn't ended up not including the case in the book but as part of the research, I also studied inter-religious peacebuilding programs work in Bosnia.
And it was also devastating to see there in that post-conflict moment, how the genocidal logic won because of the utter segregation logic that is operative in thinking about peace. That is it's within-- it's according those division of the different groups that in and of itself, those divisions were introduced as a part of the war.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah, absolutely.
ATALIA OMER: I mean, of course, they were-- so the difference exists. It's not about no difference, it's about this kind of segregationist logic.
DIANE MOORE: And that maps on to your comment earlier in your talk about how the cause of violence is considered about bias and prejudice, and not about structural issues that create the conditions for these forms of violence to perpetuate itself. Really wonderful connection.
I'm going to ask another question but if we can-- do we decide we're going to have a mic to circulate? If people do have a question, can you just raise your hand and Rochelle will pass along a mic.
And while we're doing that, can you-- this intersection that you have spoken about very, very beautifully in this book and a little bit in your comments here, the relationship between the neoliberalism and the securitization of religion I think is so key in these times. And playing itself out now very significantly in other parts of the globe too. So please if you could think more about that.
ATALIA OMER: Well, part of it is that-- so we see-- over the-- in the early 2000s, you have a wave of scholarship. And all of a sudden, this discovery of religion as something that was overlooked, the missing dimension of statecraft, and et cetera, et So
And here we see-- and of course, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd writes really powerfully about that and others. And so all of a sudden, you have kind of recognition on the part. Of course, who are we talking about? We're talking about the West, Global North.
Oh, we actually needed to know something about religion maybe because they were shocked by all those events that presented themselves to them. And so you have all of this investment in research to understand religion.
And then it manifests in various actual work and this is the post-secular moment. Post-secular but it still carries all the presumptions and assumptions and normativity of the secular. Because again, it relies on the utilitarian discourse. And of course, it doesn't interrogate the international community's own embeddedness, in particular, normativities and proselytizing discourse and itself.
So you have investment, research to show how religion can be useful. And then you have the so-called-- the global war on terrorism that recognize that there need to be certain understanding. Again, but the main point is that it's a securitized discourse.
So if you invest in religious communities and again, the language of at risk populations, it's not because you care about them or it's not because you care about Muslim girls, but because there is an understanding of-- there need to have some conditions put in place in order to reduce fatalism.
And with the reduction of fatalism and a little bit of religious literacy in the sense of what I call kind of refer to in the book, I go into two chapters that really look at how religious hermeneutics of good religion is deployed to counter message bad religion, and how different-- kind of all of a sudden there is an investment that on the surface, it appears very democratizing because you say, oh, we don't need to go necessarily to the mosque, to the church, whatever.
And of course, the people who are targeted are mostly Muslim, we need to go to social influencers who can counter tweet. And so have a little bit like, oh, this is how-- so what we see is the process of cherry picking versus or sura here, sura there to counter whatever ISIS is doing or whatever.
So you see a reduction, it goes back to the other question to the kind of reduction of what the tradition means. It's a tweet. It's something that needs to be-- it's a-- branded. It needs to be put in a form of manual. This is where the neoliberal discourse comes in. You have manuals. So religion is manualized.
How do you identify warning signs? How do you do that? How do you combat if someone says-- tells you-- cites this sura, what sura are you going to counter it with. And that's not religious literacy.
DIANE MOORE: No.
ATALIA OMER: And you have a lot of the neoliberal logic of you have to take ownership of your own community and you see the criminalization of parents and other kind of-- or the potential criminalization or co-optation of parents and other kind of people in the space of social reproduction, teachers.
Everybody is recruited into securitizing. And again, it appears on the surface of it that it's a form of investment in religion. That having a religiously meaningful articulation of policies and programs.
DIANE MOORE: Absolutely. I have to say, it reminded me, I remember all of a sudden, there was this new acronym that just emerged and was everywhere, CVE.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
DIANE MOORE: What is CVE? Countering Violent Extremism was the hallmark of a lot of the work in the State Department.
ATALIA OMER: And then they added the P. The preventing violent extremism, but this exactly captures the securitization of-- because, OK, countering violent extremism, that's drones. You bomb them. But then they said, oh, maybe we should make sure that they have food, and this is where that preventing comes in. And
Then you bring into the ecological, this is the discourse. The ecology of extremism. So how do we tackle that? But it's not about-- the point of origin here is the security of--
DIANE MOORE: The securitization frame.
ATALIA OMER: And that also includes how to-- the kind of-- in both cases in Kenya and the Philippines, a different kind of cracking down on madrasa education and curriculum. What's in the curriculum? And again, co-opting-- bringing teachers in to kind of frame the curriculum. What do they study? It has to be standardized. And has to be this and it has to be that.
DIANE MOORE: And interestingly, not looking at Christian curricula around empire but that becomes part of the other-- I have another lots of questions but we have I think many more questions in the audience. So someone have a mic. If you do, please-- can you just--
AUDIENCE: Is this on? Yes. OK.
DIANE MOORE: There you are.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
DIANE MOORE: And your question. Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for being here. My question is about the role of anger in this. You speak about the relationships that exceed the colonial gaze, but also the role of the colonial expectation that there's bias and prejudice as root causes.
And so I'm wondering if there was anger visible to you inter-community and how that manifested in those peacebuilding workshops, but also if there's anger at the institutions that come in and at the neocolonial, neoliberal players that maybe doesn't get as much attention.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you. This is-- many of the people I talk to because I-- most of the people I engage with were already years and years and years immersed in this kind of Sisyphean-- I mean, a lot of it is just like amazing how they keep showing up and showing up in really hard time.
I met people in different kind of places in terms of their struggle, but many people spoke to me as they reflected on their process about anger. Being very-- and wanting to go join the rebels and then taking another turn because they saw their whole family murdered in front of their eyes. And then they ended up not taking that route or some of them did and then--
Actually, Mike, the Muslim counterpart of Father Bert, he is also called affectionately Papa Mike. He was-- I mean many of them were in rebels and engaged in violence before they ended up. And so he specifically was-- talks about those days where he was so motivated, mobilized by his outrage, anger, pain.
And so this is very present in their stories. Which also deepens my own difficulties as I was immersing myself in this research because if you do come with of the systemic analysis, the global systemic analysis, and the decolonial frame, you still experience a lot of anger.
And because you see the amazing relationship and the energies that are being poured and truly transformative and the friendships are real, they're not just report of an NGO. And you see the changes horizontal, the horizontal and not any kind of vertical and structural.
And while there is the rhetoric about the scaling up-- scaling up is the neoliberal way of saying seed of peace. I mean, seed of peace is also neoliberal but the scaling up, but there is no scaling up. And in fact, the more-- the deeper those relationships are, the more it works for the structures, the power structures to survive.
I mean they take care of their own garbage and/or waste disposal. So with respect to the other kind of people who parachute in or out, it's not exactly like that because you have kind of levels of-- many of the people who took me around especially in Mindanao because I wasn't really able to go by myself to many of the places at the time, are local. I mean, are from Mindanao. And themselves are so close to the communities.
And they have-- many of them have kind of say the buzzwords of the day is girls' education. So we'll write the grant for the girls' education. So there is that level of, I guess cynical engagement with the donor communities. You also engaged with.
DIANE MOORE: Similar. OK. Do we have-- I want to suggest that we pass the mic to two other people, get two other questions on the table because we do have to end pretty much right at 4:45. And then--
ATALIA OMER: I'll try not to be verbose.
AUDIENCE: OK. Thank you so much for joining us. I guess my question has multiple parts and it's been something-- I was part of RPL's class last semester and it was something that I struggled with throughout the semester. And I kind of heard also echoed in your presentation today about this balance between the reality of manualization of religion and neoliberalism.
And in these pictures that we see that you shared with us, we have Indigenous or community-based events and yet you also see URI in the background, which is based in DC.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, all those logos.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, the logos. And the reality of the UN also being a part of it. And the reality of us being an American institution also being there on the ground. And then on the other side, you also have-- I'm just going to bring in this amazing piece of work by the Tanenbaum Center Peacemakers in Actions, which talks about knowing religion and how the people that do the work on that contact-to-contact basis are able to do it because of their religious drive, which is echoed in your work.
And yet, even the Tanenbaum Center is American and all of this is so muddied and we can criticize it all we want and yet, we're also contributing to it. And I was just wondering what is your own lived experience living in that gray beyond just pointing out that neoliberalism exists. How do you navigate it personally and then also professionally?
DIANE MOORE: And can we maybe pass one more question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] have time to answer even this question. But basically, thank you for the presentation. So you talk about what seems to be maybe well-intentioned efforts that lead to unintended consequences because of this frame that they chose a neoliberal frame and securitization of religion and so on and so forth.
My question is, in what ways-- it seems like you offer an alternative to look at power structures or we can look-- I can offer many other, we can look at the gender structures, we can look at other. So in what ways are those frameworks different-- at the end of the day, this is another framework. So the first one is rooted in neoliberal philosophy.
The second one might be rooted in dialectic materialism or Marxism or other, these are all different-- or hegelianism, I can't go into all these right now of course but, in what ways to the extent we're looking for some sort of good consequences and in what ways changing one framework with another won't stuck us in another framework that has all the other-- it has other disadvantages and advantages but at the end of the day, we still get stuck in one framework.
In reality, how can we develop a more complex way to see different aspects of it and hopefully come with more complex solutions? Because it is a complex problem and there's no one--
ATALIA OMER: I know that we are running out of time but-- I'll just telegraph it that in the book, what I kind of look at the book, I see how-- what I refer to as those relationships, those friendships that emerge, that consolidate but those friendships are not political friendships.
So I want to-- in the sense that political friendships like what Danielle Allen works on political friendships and there is a whole other kind of literature on political friendship that really center questions of democratic praxis and what would it mean and what this-- while those friendships are amazing and so powerful.
And I'm not going to be dismissive of those-- even though I have the power analysis and the kind of broad, kind of decolonial and postcolonial analysis, neoliberalism being just the current manifestation of a long colonial discourse. This is what the decolonial scholarship does. It locates the contemporary moment within the broader kind of historical frame.
So neoliberalism is like the good news of today but I want to-- when I talk about change that is transformative and the structural and political level that provides possibilities of imagining from the political outside of those double closures, those friendships need to-- we really need to--
I think there need to be more work on political friendships and what political friendships would mean. And what we see here are this notion-- this logic of the seed of peace and the inter-relationality, the bonding and bridging and all this is about friendships that are not political.
DIANE MOORE: Not defined as political.
AUDIENCE: It could be an end or possibly. Not either or. We can maybe add other layers.
ATALIA OMER: And I'm not in the business of offering an antidote in different kind of ideology, but I really want to think-- to ask, well, what does it mean to center justice? Including historical justice, redressing historical harm because this is what we see now. Those are the outcomes.
Not of prejudice, Muslims, Lumads, and as I said, but--
AUDIENCE: Political history.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, I mean the minoritization, the colonization, the utter epistemic violence. I mean, the destruction of the traditional ways of life. How to redress it and then what kind of processes need to be in place to redress it.
So this kind of what drives me-- rather than saying here is the ideology that I want to talk about. Maybe actually-- also, in a sense, maybe touch on it but we can continue to talk of here.
DIANE MOORE: I think we're going to have to close, sadly. But thank you and can we again, give round of applause to Professor Omer.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the president and fellows of Harvard College.