Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding

Abstract Based on empirical research of inter- and intrareligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, the book identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing; second, more doing of religion does not necessarily denote deeper or more knowing or critical religious literacy. The book traces the neoliberalization and securitization of religious virtuosity and how interreligious peace governance uses a language of empowerment and peace as intercommunal harmony but, in effect, depoliticizes communities through double closures. Accordingly, communal belonging is defined by religious belonging and vice versa; “being Muslim” or “being Christian” is a communal marker and thus a predetermined script into which all individual narratives must be assimilated. This disenfranchises individuals’ agency and political imagination of peace beyond a segregationist approach to managing plurality. The more there is a programmatic investment in religion as a peace mechanism for managing postcolonial divided societies, the more the capacity of each communal actor to disrupt their ascribed religious and communal scripts diminishes. On the one hand, the book’s decolonial and intersectional prisms expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the Global South. On the other hand, the many stories of transformation and survival that emerged from the fieldwork speak back to decolonial scholarship and theory, exposing their limited traction and, often, their irrelevance to people’s survival struggles.