Decolonizing religion and the practice of peace: Two case studies from the postcolonial world

Why “peace” in the critical study of religion?

It is important to interrogate the concept of “peace”—and the philosophical traditions that have undergirded it—because of its genealogical roots and theological underpinnings in various Christian cosmologies’ universalizing impulses. Peace conventionally refers to the absence of overt forms of violence. In the jargon of Peace Studies, this is described as “negative peace.” This negative conception conceals multiple layers of symbolic, cultural, and epistemic violence that critical and postcolonial theory exposes, such as racist, sexist, and misogynistic ideological formations. These formations naturalize patterns of oppression and treat them as integral to the maintenance of peace and order. Peace, therefore, could perpetuate violence (at least of the structural or symbolic kind). In reaction to this concern, some theorists working within peace research have developed the concept of a “positive peace” to suggest ways to connect the discussion of peace to analyses that tackle indirect cultural, structural, symbolic, and epistemic forms of violence (e.g., Galtung 1990; Springs 2015). For the most part, however, peace studies remains preoccupied with obvious violence.

The incorporation of religion into the framework of peacebuilding is determined by realpolitik and pragmatic concerns, and thus by the question of “what works.” Because mobilization of the “religion sector” depends on power dynamics on the ground, this framing mostly reinforces rather than disrupts androcentric and formal/institutional discriminatory practices of religious communities. The challenge for critical scholarship on religion is to retain the critical analytic lens, which has not migrated into peace research (the latter is still beholden to unreconstructed secularist assumptions), ² while not abstracting itself from normative concerns about “what works.”

Connecting the concept of “peace” to Europe’s theological, philosophical, and historical complexities, which are constitutive of “modernity,” is important for explaining the concept’s complicity in violence. There is especially a need to scrutinize the tradition of political liberalism and its later reconfigurations in neoliberal policies and rationality. The genealogy of peace reaches back to Immanuel Kant—even if this starting point already presupposes the stability achieved by the Peace of Westphalia (1648)—and its pivotal location in the story of modernity, religion, and the construction of the international system of nation-states (Philpott 2001). If Westphalia established prototypical conceptions of tolerance and pluralism to overcome the bloodiness of the wars of religion, it also territorialized religion (cuius religio, eius religio) and hardwired the links between religio-cultural identities and geopolitical boundaries. Kant’s discussion of a cosmopolitan peace emerged in this European context at a moment that saw not only the consolidation of European modernity, but also the blueprints of its colonial infrastructure. Kant’s ([1795] 2003) concept of “perpetual peace,” an antecedent of democratic peace theory, underscored the interconnectedness between peace, commerce, and certain kinds of governments, which he called a “confederation of peaceable princes.” This later transmogrified into particular accounts of democracy and “free” commerce. The latter accounts rely on notions of self-interest, autonomy, and international cooperation, and stress that peace is the fruit of actions of self-interested collections of individuals. Hence, capitalism and colonialism are both constitutive dimensions of modernity, and are entangled in multiple “peace” currencies that have roots in intra-Christian and intra-European developments (Hurd 2008, 25).

The enduring influence of the Kantian formulation in its reconfiguration in democratic peace theory and neoliberal rationality shows the continued relevance of scholarship on religion and international relations. It also shows the continued importance of genealogies of secular modernity (Hurd 2008; Mahmood 2016; Asad 2003). Within peace research, the critical lens focuses on the enduring hold of the liberal peace tradition (Little 2015).

Oliver Richmond (2011), a scholar of peace discourse in political theory and practice, analyzes the consolidation of neoliberal peacebuilding and the hegemony of liberal and realist paradigms in international peace formations. But Richmond, in his multiple expositions of “bottom-up” peace formations, also illuminates the ways in which Marxist, postcolonial, feminist, and indigenous peace practices facilitate everyday modalities of what he calls “hybrid peace” that disrupt, maneuver, innovate, and improvise within (neo)liberal hegemony (Richmond and Mitchell 2012). Richmond’s intervention is but one in a broader critical study of the liberal peace tradition, which includes suspicion of the so-called “turn to the local” in peace research and practice. This turn gained particular momentum in the 1990s and 2000s, and reflected a growing recognition of the limitations and outright failure of top-down approaches to peacebuilding (e.g., Paffenholz 2015). Notably, the “local turn” only constituted a novelty within peace research and policy circles. On the ground, as peace studies scholar Lisa Schirch (2019) underscores, organic peacebuilding existed prior to its “discovery” by the global North. Not only that, as research in the field of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding has shown, religious people, networks, and institutions always inhabited peace practices, even while sanctioning a whole spectrum of violence (Omer, Appleby, and Little 2015).

Double myopia

The “local turn” also converges with and informs the consolidation of international agendas that synergize development and peacebuilding work. This is reflected in the analyses of those engaged in such work on the potential instrumentality of “soft” power, the correlations between “underdevelopment” and violent conflict, and in their arguments that, without more comprehensive approaches, growing regional and global insecurity also threatens capital. Indeed, the U.N. 2030 Agenda (ratified in 2015) illuminates this synergetic push and, in its emphasis on public-private partnerships, reveals the neoliberal undertones of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that capture this new agenda and its concrete objectives. The neoliberal undertones also appear in the devolutionary logic of development programs, their focus on “responsibilizing” local marginalized communities (sometimes through a variation on microfinancing schemes), and the diminishment of democratic ethics and praxis into the language of “best practices” and “benchmarking.” ³ The PVE paradigm and the discovery of “soft power” as a component of peace-qua-security (encompassing human security as well) also coalesces with the “discovery” of religious actors (often synonymizing the so-called “local” with the “religious” or the “traditional”) as instrumental for implementation. This realization generated a proliferation of “religion” initiatives (Karam 2017) and the emergence of a class of “religioncrats.”

The professionals (or “religioncrats”) operating within the “religion industry” in international and global relations populate “expert religion” in public discourse. These religioncrats engage in “religious mapping,” convene “religious actors,” and theorize ways to tap into “religious resources” effectively to advance certain objectives, often framed under the rubric of religion as “soft power.” ⁴ This sphere of “expert religion” is sponsored by multiple governments, the World Bank, and major granting agencies, such as the Department of International Development in the UK (DFID) and the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID), to name just a few examples. ⁵ It generates prestigious gatherings, such as the G20 Interfaith Forums (since 2014), which correspond with the “secular” G20 gatherings, ⁶ intergovernmental bodies, as well as global organizations and networks designed for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and action. ⁷ This postsecular rejection of secularist myopia nonetheless entails myopic approaches to the violent legacies of peace.

Within this doubly myopic framework, the religious “actor” (a reductive designation operationalized within the religion industry) is no longer prophetic, but NGOized and “invited” into policy and development circles as a “stakeholder,” one amongst others. This neoliberalization of the “religious sector” not only pertains to Christianity, of course, but also pertains to what David Chidester (2014) calls “imperial comparative religion.” This is because it domesticates, depoliticizes, and conceals historical injustices which are tied to the construction of the category of world religions. The same goes for the “local turn” and its domestication of religious actors to advance a spectrum of development/peacebuilding objectives. The language of “development,” as noted, now intersecting with “peacebuilding,” is a contemporary manifestation of the long history of European promises of salvation.

While a full exposition of the scholarly engagement with the concept and praxis of neoliberal peace is beyond the scope of this article, the pertinent point is that the neoliberal phase of peace is in continuity with, rather than a departure from, the Eurocentric reshaping of theological cosmology into totalizing geopolitical discourses. ⁸ The lack of scrutiny of the ways in which the contemporary neoliberal moment and its functionalist deployment of religion relates to the roots of colonial global designs allows the “religion industry” to thrive unabated. Hence, insights from decolonial scholarship that trace such genealogies to the symbolic moment of 1492 help elucidate the enduring force of the concepts, institutions, and discourses associated with the liberal peace tradition.

Decolonial demystification

Through the decolonial labor of demystification, religion is mostly analyzed as a site of imperial design rather than as an emancipatory resource (e.g., Dussel 1993; McClintock 1995; Mignolo 2011b). It is Eurocentricity that imbues the concept of peace with a violent totality. Through this decolonial prism, the SDGs function as contemporary manifestations of peace-qua-development and as a violent totality, even if Agenda 2030 presents itself as a benevolent global agenda. The pretense of a global “roadmap” for human flourishing conceals the SDGs complicity with histories of marginalization, deprivation, dispossession, and other legacies of coloniality that continue to this day and are engrained into the experiences of those targeted for “development.” A Christian universalizing cosmology is a central culprit in this legacy of “peace” and thus needs to be interrogated as a part of any effort to decolonize religion and the practices of peace.

Undoing the link of religion to empire becomes, indeed, a site of critical decolonial peacebuilding that is of immense relevance to religion and the practices of peace. Religions need to subject themselves to decolonial scrutiny so that they can participate meaningfully in a decolonial peace. Queer theologies, in particular, subvert the cosmological imperialism and homogenizing impulses of Christianity, positing such theological praxis as politically critical for decoloniality. To decolonize, thus, entails delinking religion and empire through queering (e.g., Althaus-Reid 2003).

A theology becomes decolonial if it opens itself up to polydoxy, multitudes, and a pluriversality that breaks up modernist dualisms (e.g., Kwok 2012, 69–92). Emancipatory pathways within a decolonial framework entail relationality and interculturality, or “interreligiosity,” because “justice” is not self-referential and the resources for a more just cohabitation of space and time require norms beyond singular religious traditions and historical narratives. Hence, Santiago Slabodsky (forthcoming) criticizes liberation theology’s desire to undo the system from within the system. Instead, he proposes a method of “double critique”: one directed externally, at coloniality, and the other directed internally against reactionary elements within the traditions themselves. Doing so expands the scope of dialogue partners beyond one’s borders/boundaries. This relational approach is profoundly distinct from the reactionary theological critiques of modernity as a declension narrative ⁹ and to genealogical critiques, which refuse to explicate positive ethical and political visions.

Among scholars of religion, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2014a) applies these decolonial analytic tools to the study of religion by mediating between the genealogical study of religion and decolonial scholarship. Accordingly, colonialism depended on dehumanization, enslavement, exploitation, and genocides. This dehumanization, or “non-being” in Sylvia Wynter’s (2003, 264) formulation, bears a complex relation to religion as an anthropological taxonomy and to its theological hegemonic underpinnings, and remains relevant to an analysis of the religion industry and its deployment of religion for advancing peacebuilding/development. This is especially the case since, as Maldonado-Torres (2014a, 653) underscores, the subontology or the cultural production of “alleged differences in the degree of humanity … would survive the formal elimination of colonialism, and would continue to define relations among people in the modern world up to the present.” Maldonado-Torres’s account of the relationship of Christianity to modernity/coloniality paves the way for bringing the critical study of religion into the intersectional study of global systems of racialization.

In contradistinction, in fields such as peace studies, which do bill themselves as focused on the actual needs of survival and “flourishing” (even if within the neoliberal rationality and enduring exploitative global matrices), there is not sufficient examination of the roots of the global cultural production of racial difference. Instead, peace studies operates within the liberal myopia that conceals the complex intersection between religion and race in the production of enduring global racialized relations. Religion and the practice of peacebuilding operates within a postsecular myopia. To the degree that scholarship in peace studies grapples with its eurocentricity, it fails to engage with “religion” as a critical category in the construction of a subontology or non-being. Nor do religion, religiosity, and decolonial (queering) theologies appear to peace studies scholars as potential emancipatory resources. Decolonial interventions in peace studies remain beholden to liberal normativity. We can see this in how these interventions segregate “religion” as a distinct field of praxis. This segregation relies on secularist and functionalist accounts of religious traditions, institutions, and networks (for example, Sabaratnam 2013). Any analysis of the contemporary practices of religion and peacebuilding/development that myopically engages with the intricate role of religion in coloniality is implicated in its enduring force, regardless of how well meaning and at times even religiously motivated the pursuit of religious engagement may be.

At the same time, because the epistemological scrutiny is so comprehensive, decolonial scholarly interventions in religious studies and in other disciplinary spaces tend to bracket consideration of religion’s participation in anticolonial forces (Yountae forthcoming) as well as the actual needs for survival of people inhabiting the global South. Therefore, if decoloniality is to become a (queering) peace praxis focused on radical political imaginations, it needs to grapple not only with the legacies of orbis christianius (Mignolo 2009, 41), but also with the marginalized people whose religiosity functions transformatively to alleviate suffering and violence in empirically measurable ways. So too do the “religion industry” and its religioncrats for whom the animating question is not survival but effectiveness need to dispel their amnesic construction of religion as good, or at least useful, in order to imagine decolonial peacebuilding. Indeed, decolonial theory should not shy away from an engagement with the concept of peace because of its entanglement with liberal discourse.

The choice of the cases in the global South where religioncrats deploy religion constructively to tackle violence and promote peace illuminates the complexity of religious and cultural agency in ways that move beyond instrumental and reductionist accounts that render it useful for enhancing the global neoliberal regime. As highlighted in the introduction, in both Kenya and the Philippines, religious and racial taxonomies, missionary practices, and colonial dispossession undergird contemporary “postcolonial” issues of marginalization, poverty, and violence. Both contexts have likewise provided fertile grounds for religious engagement facilitated by, and cross-pollinated with, religioncrats’ centralizing efforts to partner with religion and enhance evidence to justify further investment in its partnership with the religion sector to pursue whatever objectives are articulated in the SDGs or other global designs.

What are interreligious peacebuilding practices?

Catholic Relief Services (CRS) exemplifies efforts to systematize interreligious action as peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian relief. As a transnational faith-inspired actor, CRS has operationalized a lens called “Integral Human Development” (IHD), which pushes beyond technocratic development paradigms and integrates insights from the subfield of the ethics of development. The latter is most notably associated with Martha Nussbaum (2011) and Amartya Sen’s (1999) capabilities approaches. IHD helps CRS frame its focus on indigenous nonviolent methodologies for conflict transformation and reconciliation in order to redress root causes and to promote CRS’s global strategy to augment “marginalized communities …. [to give them] more influence on the systems and structures that facilitate greater social equity and inclusion” (Chassy and Bolton 2018). It is within this IHD framework that CRS has likewise integrated an elicitive approach to grassroots peacebuilding, which essentially sees itself as empowering local communities to generate their own conflict mapping and to recover, discover, and cultivate their own ways to redress communal problems.

On one level, closely related to the conflict transformation lens, the elicitive approach unsettles key dimensions of abstract critiques of peacebuilding processes on the ground. The “elicitive” approach positions itself in opposition to prescriptive approaches to peacebuilding because it elicits local and indigenous resources for sustainable and empowering conflict transformation and peacebuilding (Lederach 1996). The elicitive model challenges the prescriptive model for its universalizing pretenses and instead cultivates processes for the self-discovery of indigenous local knowledges, along with local conflict resolution mechanisms and practices. The resources for conflict transformation, in other words, are purportedly already within the communal settings and just need to be articulated and nourished; the role of external interveners is to act as facilitators rather than as trainers who possess the epistemic advantage. To this extent, the conflict transformation lens and its elicitive methodology intersects with other critical approaches informing the “local turn” (Autesserre 2014; Richmond and Mitchell 2012; Richmond 2010).

IHD connects the work of peacebuilding with development and sees itself, at least in Pope Francis’s (2015) articulation, as necessarily engaging in efforts to concurrently redress social exclusion and preserve the environment. However, an intervention as powerful as Laudato Si still perpetuates androcentric norms even as it challenges anthropocentric conceptions of nature (e.g., Flores 2018). Without dispelling such androcentric norms, the embrace of indigenous communities stops short of the task of decoloniality and ends up enshrining gender injustice. The links between gender injustice and indigenous decoloniality, in other words, reveal how the emergence of modernist conceptions of human control over nature relates to and parallels patriarchal normativity. Even further, as decolonial and intersectional feminist and queer thinkers have stressed, gender functions as a basic metaphor of control and subordination, shaping the colonized world according to presumably sacred ontologies and totalizing theologies, which authorize hierarchization through racialization (Lugones 2007). This critique points to intersectionality as a necessary analytic vehicle for rearticulating peace and justice, the absence of which reveals the entrenchment of “peace” within unjust structures and cosmologies.

The example of Laudato Si’, a document that offers a profound critique of neoliberalism and exploitative capitalism, is relevant to my discussion of double critique. It exposes, by its omission, the requirement to connect the turn to indigenous epistemologies with feminist critical emancipatory theory, and also exemplifies that the practice of decolonizing religious traditions is necessary for decolonizing peacebuilding. Appeals to indigenous practices without a double critique may result in the coopting of indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms by a neoliberal framework that acts through a devolutionary responsibilizing logic. In multiple locations in Mindanao, for example, indigenous peacebuilding practices are employed in ways that alleviate the government from taking responsibility for its roles in historical injustice. Such practices could also stand in contradiction to feminist concerns with equality, especially when it comes to the resolution of disputes regarding domestic violence or adultery. ¹⁰ Similarly, elicitive methodologies of peacebuilding are decisively not decolonial if we agree with Aimé Césaire (2000, 32) that decoloniality does not amount to “converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes.” Decolonization, distinctly, for those engaged in decoloial praxis, is “a repatriation of Indigenous land and life…not a metonym for social justice (Tuck and Yang 2012, 21).” Hence, elicitive approaches, without decolonizing and internally pluralizing and queering traditions themselves through double critique, remain instruments of violence and control, even if on the surface they lend authority to localized problem solving. At the same time, elicitive peacebuilding practices challenge this purist and totalizing articulation of decolonial theory. Even if people’s survival and resilience may be a testament to the enormity of neoliberalism’s grip on imaginable reality, at the center of the peacebuilding/development approach is a concern with concrete sufferings of people and their agentic capacity to transform their predicament.

Decolonial accounts of peacebuilding remain captive to the task of epistemological undoing or envisioning of radical political resistance, and thus insufficiently relevant to the precarious lives of many people in the global South. The question, on the one hand, is if decolonial thinking in the study of religion and theology should be concerned with applicability or empirical impact? On the other hand, are elicitive approaches to peacebuilding and donor-driven global and local engagement with religion impactful and transformational even though they entrench coloniality? How might we navigate this paradoxical tension?

On the ground

Because the global engagement with religion is shaped not only by neoliberal assemblages, but also by the securitizing of “bad” religion, the foci of religious engagement have been on devising more effective ways to contain “bad” religion and unlock “good” religion as a partner in advancing peacebuilding and development agendas (e.g., The Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers n.d.).

The morphing of PVE into Preventing and Transforming Violent Extremism (PTVE) solidified the synergies of peace and development outlined especially in SDG16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions) and SDG17 (Partnership for the Goals). ¹¹ Because of its underlying recognition of the relations between structural and direct violence (or radicalization into violent movements and narratives), the PTVE space opens up a new possibility. It intersects with a historical outlook that has immediate concerns with the capacities of multiple actors (including religious ones, by their own definition) to alleviate human suffering, reduce violence, and transform root causes, which they usually understand in a more immediate way as poverty rather than coloniality. When I met key activists in a community center in a Nairobi slum, ¹² they underscored the lack of “livelihood” options and hopelessness—in addition to concerns around religious illiteracy—as major currency used by al-Shabab to radicalize persons and convince them to engage in acts of violence. This recruitment process often involves promises of financial compensation. Indeed, a growing body of analysis around radicalization into violence and the need to redress root causes has paved the way for synergizing development and peacebuilding. It has also mainstreamed religious hermeneutics by creating manuals and other resources for “counter messaging” on-and-offline. Hence, intra-faith hermeneutical countering became a critical mechanism in PTVE as well as in projects meant to enhance livelihood options. Overall, this process exemplifies the securitizing and neoliberalizing of religion and peace.

“Livelihood” (denoting employment but more often mere survival) is the concept donor agencies circulate to label a variety of projects. This very vocabulary is then articulated ubiquitously in peacebuilding sites by “beneficiaries.” Underlying a plethora of PTVE programming and initiatives is a recognition of the “peace” potential of material survival, self-transformation into “productive” human membership, and the cultivation of “counter-messaging” skills as mechanisms for resilience (a neoliberal keyword that nonetheless also reveals a real embodied orientation of people’s refusal to give into despair and fatalism). The “intra-faith” space, therefore, constitutes a means of surveillance and securitization. PTVE exemplifies yet another site where conflict transformation is beholden to coloniality even while engaging in elicitive methodologies. But it is a site that cannot simply be dismissed through this prism. One realizes this when one is confronted by teachers, religious scholars, and participants in PTVE programs whose transformative processes they often interpret as spiritual praxis. This is certainly not the same as simply learning how to “play the game” and become implicated within global violent discourses (neoliberalism) to advance one’s own survival. For many of those I met in the PTVE space, such praxis also meant saving their religiosity and reclaiming it. This reclaiming becomes a locus for resilience and hope which, ironically, turns religiosity into an even more effective instrument of colonial pacification. This irony does not limit its effectiveness as a means of religious peacebuilding. Highlighting the PTVE space here clarifies the synergies and links between religion and peacebuilding and development praxis.

CRS’s focus on interreligious peacebuilding was developed through the peacebuilding/development synergetic prism and, most extensively, in Mindanao, the Philippines. Their intention was to follow the elicitive method oriented by IHD and implemented via partnerships with local organizations. Through a methodology designed to generate an intercommunal dialogue of action, ¹³ CRS filled the landscape of Mindanao with examples of “solidarity,” or connector projects, that improved communal life. Such intercommunal projects constitute a “dialogue of action.” These dialogues of action include building a footbridge over a river for the safety of schoolchildren, or devising ways to dispose of waste that eliminate disease and make for more sanitary conditions. Other activities include the creation of zones of peace or Ginapalad Taka, which were initially created amid violence and through the leadership and initiative of local communal leaders such as Father Bert Layson (2014). Fr. Bert experienced his own self-transformation from hatred to an embrace of interreligious peacebuilding through his work in pursuit of the mission of the church in Mindanao.

Mike, one of his Muslim counterparts and partners in the region, expressed a similar sense of inter-communal solidarity, reminiscing about how, when he had experienced hardship and displacement, Fr. Bert offered him a place to pray in the church. ¹⁴ This same Muslim man, who leads a local Mindanaoan organization focused on peace and development work, spoke about his process of overcoming hate and of the need to get rid of this “baggage.” For him, interreligious dialogue constitutes a critical practice for creating a basic threshold for intercommunal action, the restoration of peaceful relations, and the empowerment of people to reach a minimal threshold of economic survival and communal sustainability. This threshold depends on being open to decolonial love, a praxis and an instrument of social transformation emerging from the underside of Western modernity or the lived realities of coloniality. This opening to decolonial love shapes liberationist horizons (Drexler-Dreis 2015; Sandoval 2000). This opening, Drexler-Dreis (2015, 255) explains in his exposition of James Baldwin’s notion of decolonial love, reveals itself in the concreteness of a loving relationships “on the exteriority of modernity,” and amounts to a form of a political praxis of resistance.

The Ginapalad Taka and cultures of peace seminars in the region of Pikit where Fr. Bert works, similar efforts of peace education in Zamboanga City under the auspices of Fr. Angel and the Peace Advocates of Zamboanga, interfaith work on peace such as the Bishop-Ulama Conference (which was formally launched already in 1996 in Cebu City), and the mandatory annual Mindanao Week of Peace’s activities, all reveal an emphasis on grassroots and religious buy-in, problem solving, and an individualizing theory of change. These activities generate islands of peace, sustained through openings toward decolonial love, which is itself a spiritual and political praxis (see also Simpson 2013). Accordingly, intrapersonal transformation and overcoming the hate and fear of the other constitutes a pivotal mechanism for peacebuilding. It entails connecting to the core of religious traditions as resources and a motivation for imagining peaceful cohabitation. Through this prism, “faith” becomes a vehicle for peacebuilding and social cohesion, telegraphed in the Mindanaoan context through the tri-people formula (Christians, Moro Muslims, and Indigenous Peoples) that offers a vision of harmony. ¹⁵ Some of my interviewees resented the deployment of “harmony” because of its potential to erase sociocultural complexities and histories of injustice. ¹⁶ Still, the testimonies of people’s self-transformations as a result of a variety of intra- and inter-faith practices, and the way such processes enhanced social engagement, presents the critical study of religion with an urgent question: how religion and the practices of peace in the global South unsettle purist rejections of religion and peace as thoroughly violent due to the colonial underpinnings of both. A further interrelated question to ponder has revolved around whether only feminist, intersectional, and queer religiosity can participate in imagining a decolonial peace. Hundreds of intra-personal and inter-communal transformational narratives attribute causality to participants’ re-grounding themselves in thin, yet causal, conceptions of their identity (religiosity/culturality) as peace and love. ¹⁷ Openings to decolonial love, in other words, rely on thin rather than queer religiosity, and this is where the irony resides.

Sticky notes religion

While interreligious peacebuilding deploys the language of effectiveness and instrumentality in its descriptions of religious actors, institutions, and counter-narratives, its actual endurance and effectiveness relies on the capacity of people to inhabit the potential for decolonial love. I use the language of potential and opening because the “love” inhabited does not demystify the conditions of coloniality. Rather than emancipatory, it’s a survivalist decolonial love. Instead of unmasking levels of historical and structural analyses, decolonial love requires work on personal trauma and intercommunal stereotyping. The latter practices have been a focus of interfaith dialogue, a prerequisite and continuous practice underpinning the “dialogue of action” in the sphere of “non-being.” Indeed, as suggested by the testimonies of people who, through meaningful intergroup engagement, overcame their deeply held anger and hatred, such experiences are critical. They attach spiritual meanings to self-transformative processes that reveal, retrieve, and rewrite social scripts. ¹⁸ The question is: to what degree does interreligious peacebuilding “responsibilize” individual actors without redressing the matrices of power and the depths of historical injustice?

Responsibilization of already marginalized sectors and demographics, as well as the attendant instrumentalization of their local (indigenous) conflict resolution mechanisms, cohere with a neoliberal framework and its devolutionary logic. Religious traditions are retrieved against themselves as mechanisms and sources for overcoming their violent legacies as divisive communal markers. However, this process of retrieval merely inverses the logic of religion’s divisiveness by identifying ways to unlock its capacity to advance social cohesion, a neoliberal keyword. The conception of tradition emerging from interreligious peacebuilding action and dialogue is one of communal demarcating, ending up with “sticky notes” version of religious traditions. A sticky notes version results when local “beneficiaries” of interreligious action, in their bonding processes, produce a poster or a large piece of workshop paper filled with sticky notes that convey the principles, practices, and sine qua non of their tradition or communal identity. They do so elicitively both to articulate their identity internally, and to communicate that identity to participants from other groups. The aim of this practice is to facilitate relationship building and trust in an effort to rescript the common good. This entails an opening to survivalist decolonial love even if not tapping into its iconoclastic emancipatory potential.

Hence, foregrounding interreligious dialogue of action as a mechanism for problem solving facilitates religio-culturalist reductive explanatory paradigms to interpret the causes of violence, conflict, and human insecurity. It similarly emboldens androcentric interpretations of tradition, even if facilitating some accommodation to reforming gender relations, as in the case of the Coast Interreligious Council of Clerics in Malindi, who employed theological proof-texting to illuminate the consistency of their respective traditions with U.N. declarations about the rights of the child. ¹⁹ This neoliberal frame of “empowerment” also explains, in part, the programmatic focus on women, youth, and even children. Similarly, the focus on women in PTVE programs relies on their scripted roles in the social reproductive sphere rather than on a moral commitment to women’s rights and equality. When I asked people centrally active in the PTVE space in Kenya (including female teachers focused on “counter messaging”), they explained the importance of women in preventing radicalization into violence by stressing their social scripts. The urgency of the situation, or the demands of realpolitik, foregrounds androcentric accounts of religion as peace. It treats women as conveyers of belligerence or peace. Accordingly, they function as key “eyes” for identifying “early warning signs” of radicalization into violence. ²⁰ In Kenya, such a designation resulted in potentially criminalizing failures to report apparent early signs of recruitment into violence. ²¹ The criminalization and surveillance that comes out of PTVE exposes the complicity of conflict transformation and elicitive methodologies with coloniality (represented here through the synergies of neoliberal and securitizing discourses), and their reliance on sticky notes accounts of religiosity and culturality. In the same way that Laudato Si’s challenge to anthropocentric norms fails to offer a decolonial articulation because of its enhancement of androcentric norms, a sticky notes approach to tradition prevents decolonialization, even if it focuses on elicitive, hermeneutical, and indigenous processes, because of its reliance on modernist, textual, and reified modalities of religion as a colonial category. Still, elicitive interreligious peacebuilding practices contribute to re-scripting the common good and mitigating hopelessness and hatred in ways that gesture toward survivalist decolonial love. This forces decolonial theory to interrogate its distance from such projects of survival.

Politics of knowledge and politics of reality

The sticky notes approach to religion reveals the extent to which religion’s intervention in peacebuilding lacks theological disobedience, to play on a key decolonial practice of what Mignolo (2011a) calls “epistemic disobedience.” It is certainly the case, in scholarship and practice alike, that theological disobedience is discouraged by epistemic and donor communities (knowledge producers and money granting religionocratic agencies), revealing the privileging of conservative and more “literal” hermeneutics as more authentically “religious.” Rather than facilitating decolonization, the sticky notes approach entrenches coloniality in its contemporary neoliberal assemblages. ²² What does it mean to be epistemologically disobedient? For Mignolo, it entails a border epistemology, or border thinking/sensing/doing, that captures the experiences and consciousness of dispersion, dispossession, and migration among those classified outside the bounds of the supposedly normative human, It captures such thinking/sensing/doing in ways that connect the Third World, the origin point of decoloniality, and (im)migrant consciousness (Mignolo 2011a, 274). Decoloniality and border epistemology subverts the theo- and ego-logical universalizing force through a process of delinking and entirely “changing the terms of the conversation” (275). “Dwelling and thinking in the borders” means living “local histories [and] confronting global designs” (277). 23 What would it mean to employ theological disobedience then? It would entail delinking and queering, but also grappling with the legacies of violence internal to religious traditions and in their historical manifestations. It suggests that decoloniality cannot simply detach from the “religious” as a technology of control that intersects with race and gender. People cannot theorize their religio-cultural embeddedness out of existence, although they can reimagine its meaning and thresholds of belonging. This amounts to an intersectional approach to religion and the practices of peacebuilding that not only interrogates the sites of overlapping oppressions but also the sources of emancipatory ethicopolitical imaginations.

If, among other objectives, decoloniality for indigenous people aims at a regeneration of intangible cultural heritage and an empowerment of cultural bearers and their theoretical and practical knowledges, then decolonizing religious peacebuilding amongst religious traditions implicated with coloniality requires broadening the interpretive space through theological disobedience. One begins by examining decoloniality as a theological praxis that recovers resources within traditions that are emancipatory rather than oppressive and imperial. This recovery constitutes a form of decolonial love because it reveals what the colonial gaze has concealed and erased (Drexler-Dreis 2015). The hermeneutical act of subverting totality, of course, is not only one of retrieval, but also one that is historically located and re-imaginative, allowing multidirectional innovative exchanges. Unsurprisingly, emancipatory theological reflections are often intersectional, queer, and ecofeminist, drawing upon, but also pushing beyond, liberation theology. These approaches take this form partly because of how gender, race, and racialization are integral to coloniality and partly because of an aspiration to imagine otherwise and from the margins (including the religious margins). Foregrounding empire as a key analytic space, postcolonial theological analyses challenge some of the modernist and totalizing underpinnings of liberation theologies (Sugirtharajah 2002, 103–123) where the Bible is read as “unequivocally, unvaryingly, and intrinsically emancipatory,” which has the effect of bracketing “postcolonial attunement to ambivalence … and hence the necessity of incessant critique” (Moore and Rivera 2011, 8).

However, the boundaries between liberation theologies and postcolonial, feminist, and queer theological sensibilities are less rigid and even converge for some interlocutors. Indeed, if liberation theology is to also be decolonial and emancipatory, it necessarily becomes feminist, queer, relational, and embodied (Rivera 2011, 6). Queering liberation theology emboldens the meanings of the prophetic through the iconoclastic (rather than the survivalist) mechanisms of decolonial love.

It is through this complex gendered sensitivity and attunement to coloniality that decolonial or postcolonial theologies are transformational theologies and are thus thoroughly contextual and require re-approaching tradition, from and/or as if from the margins, with fresh and critical eyes. Indeed, the revolutionary, iconoclastic, and revelatory capacity of decolonial love depends on the wretched in the underbelly of coloniality to exceed coloniality’s ontological dehumanizing closure (Drexler-Dreis 2015). The practices of social cohesion in Mindanao such as the Ginapalad Taka disrupts dehumanization and thus constitutes an island of decolonial love even while it is sustained through a neoliberal discourse of an interreligious dialogue of action.

Decolonial praxis, therefore, concerns itself with what Martin Savransky (2017, 22) calls “alter realism,” which “seeks not to represent reality but to set realities in motion.” ²⁴ The decolonial approach refuses to remain merely at the level of critique. It always also entails a politicocultural and economic emancipatory project. ²⁵ Decolonial analyses and anti-imperial orientations cohere with similarly prophetic, decolonial, feminist, queer, polydoxic, and intersectional religiosity. Decoloniality along with emancipatory imaginations point to double critique, border thinking, and to interculturality as pathways for overcoming (Christian/Western) hegemonies. At the same time, should all the people I met on the ground in Mindanao and Kenya be invisibalized from the vantage point of decoloniality because of their “sticky notes” religiosity? By using the word invisibilization, I intend to highlight once again that decolonial theory focuses on actual people in the global South only to the degree that they have the capacity to see all the interconnections of power and domination. This focus precludes the possibility of seeing where and how interreligious peacebuilding praxis, despite its complicity with “global designs,” also exceeds their ideological chains through openings that gesture toward survivalist decolonial love. Indeed, a gap persists between decolonial theory and the people it cares about. Interreligious peace praxis, on the other hand, engages elicitively but through myopia. The effort of this article is to put them into a generative conversation with one another.

Ethics in dehumanizing conditions

Indeed, tracing the colonial underpinnings of peacebuilding agency grounded in religiosity and culturality, and listening to the many people who populate such spaces of interreligious action and intercultural engagement in the global South, also illuminates what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2014b, 706) understands as a form of decolonial politics, or “the ethical orientation of the self in conditions of systematic dehumanization.” I engaged communities of peace in the global South because imprinted in their embodied memories and intergenerational trauma is the violence of coloniality and its construction of “sub ontological difference” among people, violence that relegates them to the “zone of nonbeing,” in Wynter’s formulation (706). Ethics, in other words, like survivalist decolonial love, does not operate on a different scale in the zone of non-being and is not abrogated altogether. Rather “any act that affirms the potential of ethical orientation of a subject in the zone of nonbeing cannot be taken but as an irruption or violent act. This also points to the inseparability of ethics and politics in decolonization” (707). This paves the way for an analysis of how interreligious dialogue has functioned as a vehicle for decolonial ethical relationships among communities divided along religiocultural identity markers. These are divisions rooted in colonial legacies. Their ethical task is to script their “common humanity” through an appreciation of one another’s religiosity and grievances. This re-scripting, even while relying on an anemic conception of the “religious” and the “secular,” which the religion and public life discourse has long debunked for those humans populating the “zone of being,” nevertheless amounts to a form of decolonial politics. Indeed, the refusal to hate constitutes an act of resistance to the colonial logic.

In this analysis, I emphasized Christianity as a discourse and a semiotics, drawing on insights from decolonial scholarship and praxis in order to develop a bidirectional challenge. On the one hand, a decolonial approach to religion and the practice of peace exposes religioncrats and the extensive global networks of engagement with religion as merely a postsecular phase of coloniality in its neoliberal variety. On the other hand, decolonial religion and theology seems to have little to do with the task of survival for many people who inhabit the global South and for whom religion, in its sticky notes registers, operates as a motivation for agentic, transformative peacebuilding actions, and an ethics of plurality.

Indeed, one impetus for this article relates to the abyss between the praxis of religion and peacebuilding, on the one hand, and the decolonial turn, on the other. The one is confined to demands of realpolitik, operates within what is possible and effective, and thus often enhances power structures internal and external to religious communities. The other wields a totalizing account of “peace” as violence and “justice” as a queer alter-reality. In between pragmatism and totality, however, I met people whose religiosity offered a resource for peacebuilding, an ethics of the common good, and openings to survivalist decolonial love. Neither religion nor peace in those contexts are decolonized, intersectional, or feminist, and yet they work in smaller and larger scales to improve the lives of people and reduce their precarity. Existence is resistance, as the Palestinian cry of sumud or “steadfastness” captures.

Existence; not re-existence

Indeed, the critique of epistemological violence at the heart of the construction of the “human” of modernity at the expense of “subhumans” does not mean, as it did not for Edward Said, abandoning the humanistic tradition or, with it, an appreciation of the emancipatory potentialities of the discourse of human and political rights. A humanistic focus on rights, in other words, is not necessarily captive to the colonial stupor. Instead, it opens up horizons for “peace” praxis beyond myopia and beyond decolonial totalities (Said 2004a, 9–10; 2004b). This is peace that exceeds ideological formation. Not unlike postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bolivian decolonial feminist scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012, 104) challenges any decolonial agenda that “would mean denial of the possibility of access to the benefits of citizenship” and, with it, an overly simplistic and totalizing indigenous rejection of Europe as a historically, intellectually, and politically complex entity. This intervention, along with Said’s humanism, illuminates the need to move beyond reactionary accounts that dismantle everything under the cover of their critique of coloniality.

Indeed, in the cases of the Philippines and Kenya, intra- and inter-religious peacebuilding practices entrench the legacies of coloniality through non-intersectional sticky notes accounts of religious traditions authorized by appeals to realpolitik and to thin conceptions of secular humanism, all embedded within neoliberal and securitizing assemblages. Nevertheless, the explicit deployment of the language of human rights in these contexts is not merely cosmetic, but rather reveals how the religion industry takes up the empirical realities of poverty, marginalization, and violence and invests in elicitive (even if not comprehensively decolonial) peacebuilding/development agency and in an ethics of survival and the common good.

When one moves beyond the privilege of abstract decolonial critique to the realities of indigenous and other people on the ground in their historical locations, Cusicanqui’s scolding resonates loudly. For example, when I visited the School of the Living Traditions (SLT, an informal learning space) in Bunawan in Agusan del Sur in Mindanao, women attendees from various regional tribes articulated their appreciation for reconnecting with their cultural practices and lived traditions. Doing so made possible the survival of indigenous values and knowledges. They also sought concrete help with their own hardship, which was born out of poverty and marginalization. ²⁶ Often women do not know if they will survive their pregnancies and labor, and they otherwise also suffer from poor health, loss of land due to financial hardship, lack of access to services (including education), and many other problems they encounter in daily survival. The SLT consequently offers resources and capacity building for generating income (“livelihood”) from embroidery and other traditional cultural productions. These enable the actual survival of culture bearers. For the SLT, as I learned in conversation with the women who lead it, the SDGs do not represent violence as a totality. It sees itself as responding to and working toward the SDGs focused on quality education (SDG 4), good health and well-being (SDG 3), decent work (SDG 8), reduced inequalities (SDG 10), life on land (SDG 15), peace, justice, and strong institutions (SDG 16), and gender equality (SDG 5). The SDGs are not rejected as an instrument of coloniality, even if each of the categories is interpreted through indigenous perspectives. Indeed, to the point of interculturality and double critique, the regeneration of indigenous lived traditions and knowledges and the empowerment of cultural bearers does not mean a romanticized embrace of ahistorical conceptions of cultural practices. Indeed, “oral tradition,” in the words of ethnomusicologist Grace Nono (2018, 207), who has led the SLT together with female tribal leaders, “[becomes] a site for the active reflection and reinterpretation of harmful traditional values toward a more just treatment of Indigenous women.” The same concurrently regenerative and re-interpretive mode facilitates curriculum development on health, where traditional healing methods “are complementary to Western allopathic medicine” (Nono 2018, 213).

This intercultural double critique and historical contextualization operates despite, and in addition to, a critique of mainstream education and healthcare approaches. There is no doubt that the latter constitutes ongoing colonization, compounded by a growing awareness of the loss of ownership over indigenous knowledges and the complicity of Christian missionaries and conversion practices in the erasure of indigenous cultural practices and traditions. ²⁷ Nono (213) added that, in the SLT, “the teaching of Indigenous cuisine, for example, is always accompanied by historicization (that may include discussions of neoliberalism), and the active reframing of these practices in more positive light (not as backward, uncivilized, demonic).” Recovering ancestral practices further contributes to “forging strong support systems” to counter bullying often faced by indigenous people in Mindanao. Indeed, Nono continues to gesture toward decolonial love:

at a time of really ugly neocolonial politics following centuries of colonial domination, to dwell in one’s language on what’s hopeful, positive, and uplifting, i.e. the arts, women’s livelihood, other forms of cultural regeneration, rather than on acts of overt resistance can be the most effective political action one can engage in. ²⁸

Furthermore, “to frame peoples’ politics as depoliticized [and commodified] because they do not take more familiar forms of resistance is, to me, suspect, and reeks of privilege.” ²⁹ Nono here embraces a non-reductive decolonial approach that engages in a process of cultural regeneration and the recovery of traditions through the lens of double critique. Her lived engagement with indigenous communities, for whom much of the vocabulary of the critical study of religion is irrelevant to the struggles of daily life, offers a strong challenge to this line of scholarship. It dispels decolonial theory’s own myopic engagement with the “politics of reality” and with it its aversion to a constructive (and explicitly normative) analysis of religion’s role in “alter-realism.”

If the critical study of religion demystifies the discourse of peace, its rejection of the constructive engagement with religion as “colonial” also “reeks of privilege,” as Nono exclaims. From her place in Agusan del Sur, Nono, herself embodying privilege and a capacity to enjoy scholarly fellowships in places such as Yale and Harvard, stresses that interculturality and interreligious engagement for the purposes of peacebuilding and truly improving lives, needs to proceed intersectionally, rather than through the abstraction of “religion” as a technology useful for intercultural negotiation. Following Tisa Wenger’s (2009) analysis of the imposition of the label of “religion” on indigenous populations, Nono underscores the colonial location of words such as “race” and “gender” and yet recognizes the analytic usefulness of intersectionality, whose theorization depends on such constructs. Nono exemplifies a decolonial approach to religious and cultural engagement that accounts for historical contextuality by engaging in a double critique that resists sequestering “religion” to a peacebuilding engine. Her constructive cultural regenerative work also sheds light on cultural and physical survival by recovering traditional knowledges and practices as sites of existence as resistance. Such practices involve utilizing the mechanisms for intra-culturality where indigenous people examine their cultural resources for survival and, in the process, recover them from colonial erasures. Indeed, decolonial approaches to the empowerment of indigenous people relate, in complex ways, to the long-term potential of the peace process and the Bangsomoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. ³⁰

The analysis of the elicitive method and its employment of interreligious peacebuilding practices exposes how merely eliciting indigenous epistemologies does not go deep enough into people’s capacity to imagine decolonial emancipatory alter-realities; these capacities involve border thinking, theological disobedience, indigenous interculturality, and a sociology of absences and emergences. However, the double critique reflective in the SLT’s navigation and deployment of the SDGs reveals a focus on existence and survival rather than alter-realism. One image will haunt me: a young indigenous woman in her twenties who lost all her teeth due to poor healthcare. For her, the SDGs frame is of greater relevance than a totalizing demystification of coloniality.

The point is not to suggest that the value of theory needs to be measured using empirical impact indices such as the SDGs. Nor is it to contest that the religion industry entrenches coloniality. It does in the many ways I describe above. Instead, I ask: why does decolonial theory ignore the decolonial potential of such spiritual and intercommunal peace practices and engagements that exceed its explanatory frames? I further ask whether the epistemic work of undoing and the radical ethico-political imagination and justice discourse it generates can descend to the barangays in Mindanao and speak in any meaningful way to the visions of peace, justice, survival, and hope among the people I met there, whose islands of peace gesture to decolonial love, through thin rather than queer religiosity. This line of questioning, I contend, can enhance the possibility for decolonial religion and peace praxis as well as cross-pollinate with peace research, religious studies, and decolonial theory.

My focus on the stories of religion and peacebuilding practices unsettles decolonial certainty by asking, together with Nono, whether it reeks of privilege. While decolonial peace theory tends to bracket religion, the broader decolonial literature interprets bad religion as ideology and good religion as queering theology. Neither illuminates pathways for why and how religion works in peacebuilding beyond a simple technology of domestication or neoliberalization. Neither grapples with the empirical traction of androcentric religiosity as enabling a kind of agency that makes peace possible. I think it should. Decoloniality appears alien to the experiences of people in extreme conditions of marginality, violence, and hopelessness, even while their cultivation of mechanisms and peace sensibilities through interreligious peacebuilding engagements themselves may be interpreted as constituting a form of decolonial politics. In addition to empowerment through cultural regeneration, the young woman I met at the SLT’s gathering simply needed teeth!