Critical Caretaking in the Context of Peacebuilding: Q&A with Atalia Omer
“Peacebuilders and human-rights defenders and practitioners always ask, “How can I be helpful in my village?” That's a very challenging question and a very fruitful tension that I brought to my role as a fellow in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.”
Atalia Omer, MTS ’02, RPL Senior Fellow in Conflict and Peace, T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding, and Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has long grappled with issues of political and religious identity. Growing up in Palestine/Israel, Omer was told she was part of the “Jewish state,” and she began to wonder: “What does that mean?” This question fueled her academic journey through the MTS program at Harvard Divinity School (and eventually a PhD from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard), ultimately leading to her position as a senior fellow and visiting professor in RPL's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. In these roles, Omer works to transform herself and others through RPL’s methodology and the interdisciplinary work she termed “critical caretaking.”
Scarlett Rose Ford: What has it been like going from being an HDS student to both an RPL senior fellow in Conflict and Peace and visiting professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding?
Atalia Omer: Earning my MTS at Harvard Divinity School and then my PhD in the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Politics was an incredible time of learning for me. The most valuable skill that I learned at HDS is how to read, interrogate, and think critically about texts and issues, whatever shape and form they come in. I’ve had the opportunity here to examine comparative questions of religion, violence, and issues around peacebuilding, such as human rights. This became very foundational in a long journey to de-exceptionalize the case study that has been the main driver of my scholarship: Palestine/Israel.
I came to be a senior fellow and visiting professor at HDS after years of teaching at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, I learned so much from my colleagues and students that I feel like I’ve gained another PhD in Peace Studies. These human rights defenders have challenged me, especially regarding the tensions between theory and practice. Ideas and theory are not the binary of practice; they are a form of transformative practice that is very central to my research, my writing, and my teaching. Disrupting the theory/practice binary is what eventually led me back to HDS’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative’s dedicated focus on Palestine/Israel.
SRF: For someone unfamiliar with the topic, how would you explain "just peacebuilding"?
AO: Peace studies is the study of violence, the causes of violence, and violence in all its forms—epistemic, structural, cultural, symbolic, and direct or acute forms of violence. Central to peace studies is understanding the interrelation between those forms of violence, peacebuilding practice, and research that is oriented to alleviate human suffering and transform the structures of violence. In the academy, we especially need to be concerned with epistemic violence.
I tell my undergraduate students, “It’s silly to think that complex problems can only be responded to using one tool.” Transformative processes are interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral, and involve human rights spaces, international institutions, practitioners on the ground, humanitarian actors, human rights defenders, activists, social movements, the study of social movements, transitional justice mechanisms, and negotiators under fire.
The work is multi-directional, oriented by questions of how to transform the realities of violence. The concept of transformation is essential because it recognizes that conflict in and of itself is not bad. Conflict can be very generative and constructive. The question is how to transform harmful realities without reproducing injustice and harm. Restorative justice is a part of the study of peacebuilding.
SRF: Where does your work with religion, violence, and peacebuilding fit within public scholarship and the work that’s happening at RPL?
AO: In my piece “Can a critic be a caretaker too?” I asked Journal of American Academy of Religion’s readers, “How are you going to be publicly relevant when nobody’s calling you?” That question captures much of my work—the theme of critical caretaking. It is crucial if you want to be transformative to engage in critique and interrogation, questioning categories, framing, and naming. The caretaking is that part about the hermeneutical—the interpretation and reimagining.
SRF: How does the work of RCPI contribute to discourse and education in terms of this critical caretaking, religious literacy, or breaking this binary of theory and practice?
AO: The key component of my involvement with RCPI was through the HDS course “Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine.” The syllabus involves a lot of learning and unlearning in the context of Palestine/Israel. Part of the conceptualization of the syllabus was to challenge a zero-sum understanding of memory and history and to foreground the tools of critique through different explanatory frames. The course, however, is also very much about Europe and Europe as a political and intellectual sets of projects because its starting point is the modern history of Palestine from the turning moment of the Ottoman Empire to the British mandate. We grapple with the interlinking of the Shoah and the Nakba as a historical event and as an ongoing reality.
We illuminate the role of colonial and imperial forces through the realities on the ground, specifically by looking at communities, voices, and narratives that disrupt binaries and zero-sum accounts of memory. For example, we focus on the interconnections between the displacement of the Arab-Jews and uprooted Palestinians. We look at how the hegemonic narrative binarizes Arabs and Jews, even though, for centuries, people have inhabited that hyphenated identity. When we travel to the country, we introduce students to and how people on the ground understand the interrelation of their struggles and the forces that binarize their struggles.
This is why the course is titled with the plural narratives of belonging and displacement. We shape our syllabus to recognize and listen deeply to multiple narratives and how engaging in epistemic critique is pivotal for reimagining constructively the future otherwise. This form of “critical caretaking” coheres with the RPL’s approach to critical and historically grounded religious literacy. This is one that interrogates how religious warrants connect to political forms of violence in order to also illuminate how religious meanings can participate in emancipatory justice-oriented peacebuilding.
SRF: How has the RCPI senior fellowship and visiting professorship affected you as a person and scholar?
AO: I am honored and privileged that I had the opportunity to co-teach the class with my Palestinian colleague and friend, Hilary Rantisi. Every time we do the in-context aspect of the class, things are shifting and moving on the ground in Palestine/Israel. We can never predict how things will be or what will happen. There are the dynamics of the class and the dynamics on the ground as well as all the other forces that operate on us, which have been getting worse every time.
We are always learners, and we remain students forever. Every time, this class experience has been transformative and has repeatedly deepened my learning and unlearning, and my fluency, facility, and conversation with colonialism and coloniality.
SRF: What does RCPI offer that is unique in the field of religion and public life?
AO: Thanks to the intellectual leadership of Diane L. Moore, this is a unique space in terms of what it means to be religiously literate. Many places have taken on the concept of religious literacy in a very limited way. Here we think broadly and with the tools of critical theory and decolonial scholarship about religion and peacebuilding, such as in my most recent book, Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, which looks at the religion and peacebuilding industry in two cases: the Philippines and Kenya.
The methodology is also so helpful, incredible, and real; you can’t be constructive without understanding how religion connects to violence in all its forms, including epistemic, cultural, symbolic, and direct forms of violence. The methodology of RPL is all about this: having a robust analysis of violence in all its forms and understanding that religion is not separate from the secular modern, that it’s not a distinct compartment, that it intersects with everything else.
SRF: Is there anything you would like to share about how we as humans can best approach peacebuilding in times like these?
AO: I think that the key issue, especially when doing this work in an academic space, is to be able to have conversations, ask questions, and interrogate assumptions. Academic spaces are best when they offer opportunities for people to feel uncomfortable. This is where the learning often happens. One of the reasons why I appreciated the opportunity of being in this space of RPL and RCPI is that we want to do just that.
by Scarlett Rose Ford, MTS ‘25