religion and peace essay structure

Religion and Peacebuilding

• Volume 1. Issue 2, Spring 2008

Religion, after all, is a powerful constituent of cultural norms and values, and because it addresses the most profound existential issues of human life (e.g., freedom and inevitability, fear and faith, security and insecurity, right and wrong, sacred and profane), religion is deeply implicated in individual and social conceptions of peace. [1]

Scott Appleby explains that the ambivalence of religion lies in the interpretation of the sacred, in imperfect human perception: “At any given moment any two religious actors, each possessed of unimpeachable devotion and integrity, might reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the will of God and the path to follow.” In other words, religion can underwrite both conflict and peace on its own terms. [2] It is an intervening variable that sometimes escalates, sometimes de-escalates conflict behavior. [3] As Appleby notes, “Religious leaders and their followers make choices as to the meaning of the sacred and the content of their faith. These choices, in turn, determine their attitudes toward conflict and violence.” [4]

The ambiguity of religion’s relationship to conflict is better understood when religion is recognized as a type of living tradition, “an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute the tradition.” [5] Even in cases where the mainstream advocates bettering the world through nonviolent means, religions are not monolithic entities. This deserves emphasis here because they are often presented as such, distorting or stalling debate that genuinely engages questions surrounding religion’s role in violent conflict. Violent and nonviolent actors alike claim monolithic authority to justify and advocate as well as to deflect criticism. For instance, religious leaders who condemn violence often seek to distance their religion from co-religionists who have committed acts of terror or provoked violent conflict. [6] While this is an understandable impulse, labeling a religious actor or a religious movement unauthentic is ultimately misleading and unhelpful. As Marc Gopin writes, “The fact is that while I agree that there are great untapped resources for peacemaking and conflict resolution in the world’s religions, there is also a vast reservoir of texts and traditions ready and waiting to be used to justify the most barbaric acts by modern standards of human rights.” [7]

The heterogeneity of the world’s largest religions means that at any time or in any territory, these living traditions might be a source of violence. Yet, it also means that within each of these religions there is room for the normative tasks of conflict resolution. There are existing and developing spiritual practices and theological and ethical resources for hermeneutics of peace. [8] These can be harnessed for engaging the vast majority of the world’s religious peoples—who are not, by the way, violent extremists—in prevention and de-escalation of conflict. They can also play an important role in countering the violent extremism of minority religious movements. In sum, religion can be a source of peace or violent conflict, and its importance and potential strength lies in this ambiguity.

The Need for Reappraisal: Religion and Conflict Resolution [9]

Western modernity, especially as understood through the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, has heavily influenced conflict resolution and international relations. As such, these academic disciplines and their practical applications have incorporated elements of secularization theory [10] and marginalized the influence of religion in their analysis of world affairs. [11] The roots of this tendency can be traced to the development of the modern western understanding of religion, which is markedly different from pre-modern and some non-Western understandings.

Scott Thomas explains that in Europe during the Middle Ages the religious realm conflated with the social and the moral, all of which were sourced from and sustained by community. The sacred and spiritual were an indistinguishable part of a total way of life of social, political, economic, and moral dimensions. In contrast, modernity brought the “invention of religion” as “a set of privately held doctrines or beliefs.” This was a gradual process of three centuries that began with an identification of the spiritual within community belief and practice and then developed such that the spiritual was privatized, considered separate from community structure and authority. [12]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religion becomes mobile, divorced from traditional community life. Thomas writes, “Religio begins to shift from being one of various virtues, supported by practices of an ecclesial community embedded in the Christian tradition, to a system of doctrines or beliefs, which could exist apart from the ecclesial community.” It is this siphoning of sacred and moral authority from its basis in community, necessary for the creation of the secular state, [13] that led to the eventual marginalization of religion in western institutions of politics and international affairs. [14]

While modernity has affected in some ways the entire globe, the privatization of religion has not been a universal experience for the world’s communities. The process and effects of secularization have been halting and mixed. [15] While 78 percent of the world’s states are secular, [16] 78.3 percent of the global population adheres to one of the world’s five largest religions. [17] As summarized by Swatos and Christiano, the central claim of secularization theory is that “in the face of scientific rationality, religion’s influence on all aspects of life—from personal habits to social institutions—is in dramatic decline.” [18] To date, this assertion is problematic at best.

Even in the West where governments, academics, and policy institutes have, to various degrees, minimized or ignored the effects of religion on international relations, religion itself has not disappeared. According to a study by Assaf Moghadam, for example, the trend toward secularization in Western Europe is “not entirely uniform.” [19] This statement refers to geographical distribution of religious adherence and to indicators of religious behaviors and values. [20] Observing the distinction between the two, Grace Davis calls Europeans an “unchurched” people rather than secular. Analyzing data from the European World Value Survey, she argues that the dramatic decrease in religious attendance since the 1980s has not been accompanied by a decrease in religious belief. [21]

In addition to this differentiation between “believing” and “belonging,” Moghadam and others note the rise of spirituality, as opposed to “organized religion.” While those who self-identify as spiritual are sometimes anti-religious, spiritualism includes many behaviors, beliefs, and values similar to those of religion, and thus its popularity contradicts the aspect of secularization theory that triumphs scientific materialism. A preference for spirituality rather than religion has been seen, for example, in the United States where, as Moghadam notes, citizens are likely to subscribe to a “more personal, individualized form of faith.” [22] Yet, in addition to this increase in spiritual concerns, the United States remains very religious in the conventional sense. [23]

Looking to the United States and parts of the non-Western world, scholars debate whether the globe is experiencing a resurgence of religiosity. Moghadam concludes that change over time in religious adherence, behavior, and values indicates a general trend of strengthening in a majority of countries, certainly in the former Eastern Bloc and most likely in large parts of Latin America, Africa, East Asia, South East Asia, and the Middle East. [24] Considering this alongside the decrease in religiosity in the majority of the post-industrial world, some scholars are arguing for resurgence and secularization. [25] Marc Gopin states that the contemporary era is characterized by “an unprecedented level of paradoxical religious movement.” [26]

Whether or not people and nations are more religious today than in the past, religion is a socio-political force that affects local and international events. It can be traced backward through the roots of some of the most intractable contemporary conflicts including conflicts in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, and Kashmir. In new terms of terror, religion has been a factor in events ranging from the bombing of abortion clinics in the early 1990s to the attacks of September 11, 2001. [27] In terms of peacebuilding, religion has been explicitly involved in transformations such as the recovery of post-apartheid South Africa [28] and the nonviolent transitions from authoritarianism to democracy that took place in East Germany, Poland, and the Philippines. [29] More recently, more than 1,000 representatives of transnational as well as indigenous religious traditions gathered for the UN Millennium Summit of World Religious Leaders, which “heralded the world community’s unprecedented recognition of religious peacebuilding.” [30]

Jeffrey Haynes calls religion “a stubbornly persistent” actor. [31] Regardless of whether religion is considered a renewed or persisting global phenomenon, western policy-making and academia are growing more aware of religion’s presence and salience. Lowering of the modernist’s lens—or the development of postmodernism—has allowed for a more in-depth exploration of non-Western cultures generally, and specifically allowed for greater flexibility in encountering religion, both outside the West and in the United States. [32] This awareness needs to be accompanied by corresponding knowledge and skills to overcome what Douglas Johnston calls a “deep-seated tendency to ignore the religious dimension.” [33]

United States policy relating to Iraq highlights the urgent need for reappraisal of religion’s role in international relations and conflict resolution. It also illustrates a significant distinction between religiosity among domestic populations and religious literacy in international affairs. While high numbers of Americans are religious and religious issues have been a part of domestic politics for at least the last fifty years, U.S. foreign policy has been predominately modern and secular. Despite the Christian rhetoric with which the Bush administration pursues its own policy, it has marginalized the validity and importance of religious identity in the Arab world.

According to Michael Hirsch, the Bush administration dismissed veteran State Department Arabists during the crucial months of 2002 and 2003, and instead consulted scholars like Bernard Lewis, author of What Went Wrong? The Clash of Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. This evidenced a determination to “fix” Islamic societies, whose religious behaviors and values are viewed as automatic causes of conflict and obstacles to transitions to modernity. In Hirsch’s words, Lewis (and the Bush administration) has envisioned a “secularized, Westernized Arab democracy that casts off the medieval shackles of Islam and enters modernity at last.” In Lewis’ words, “The Islamic world is now at [the] beginning of [the] 15th century” and “on the verge of its Reformation.” [34]

Secularization was one of the hallmarks of modernity in the West, but it does not follow that in order to be modern, one must be secular. According to critics of Lewis like Richard Bulliet, author of The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, U.S. foreign policy is operating from a fundamental misreading of post-Ottoman Arab identity and history. Instead of the meta-narrative of secular democracy per Western experience, Bulliet suggests a rediscovery of Islam’s traditional role as a constraint to tyranny. Bulliet cautions against rejecting Islam as anti-modern and urges the West to remember its own struggle with the role of religion in civil society, one that continues in America today. [35]

Tradition and Particularity: Foundations of Religious Peacebuilding

Changes in the context of international relations and conflict resolution have been matched by changes internal to many religious traditions. Positive responses to the human rights era, globalization, and fundamentalism have included the growth of the Christian ecumenical movement, increased pursuit of interfaith dialogue, and the development of coalitions across religious, secular, cultural, and geographic boundaries. [36] Within this current of change, some religious leaders and groups have an increased interest and capacity in conflict resolution. While this necessarily involves training in contemporary conflict resolution techniques and approaches, religious actors can also draw upon their identities as participants in a social and spiritual tradition.

Whatever becomes of the secularization debate, the privatization of religion has had as yet its strongest influence only in the West, which represents less than one-sixth of the world’s population. [37] In many parts of the world, conceptions of personhood view the self as socially embedded in traditions at least influenced by religion. [38] Understanding the way identity and morality are formed in this context gives foundation to the concept of religious peacebuilding. The social theory of Alasdair MacIntyre provides a useful vehicle for beginning such an exploration. Grown from Aristotelian thought, it argues for the importance of community in forming, continuing, and rejecting morality and tradition. [39]

For MacIntyre, human identity is forged in narrative-based histories and evolving cultures, and is, thus, a relational concept. In this way, it resembles the African concept of ubuntu, which Desmond Tutu describes this way: “A person is a person through other people.” [40] MacIntyre’s understanding of rationality is also relational in that it is dependent on tradition. Contrary to the dictates of the Enlightenment, “What makes it ‘rational’ to act in one way and not another is the conception of the good embodied in a particular social tradition or community.” [41] Moral identity, then, is not based upon a set of rules employed by rational actors; rather, it exists in social practices that have developed in community and through tradition, including, of course, religious tradition. Put more simply, working toward moral ideals is a way of life rather than a series of independent decisions.

Understandings of identity and rationality like those put forth by MacIntyre are helpful in resolving conflict in non-Western and some Western contexts in that it can validate parties’ conceptions of themselves rather than ignoring or marginalizing their reasons for their behavior. This fulfills what Gopin calls “the human need for uniqueness … our need for some distinctive identity and meaning system in the context of the mass of humanity and the indifferent character of the universe.” [42] An approach to peacebuilding that can make room for tradition-dependent rationality and social understandings of morality is able to consider parties’ desires to protect “a certain conception of who they are,” which is as important as (and often more so than) a desire to defend what they have. [43]

Acknowledging difference or uniqueness provides metaphoric room or safe space for conflict parties to lower defenses and be introspective, exploring the inclusive and nonviolent resources of their traditions or communities. It can create space for individuals and groups to build “a clear and confident sense of identity” [44] and, thus, the capacity for challenging the exclusive and violent elements of those same traditions. As no tradition is monolithic, whether it contains a religion, a guerilla movement, or a government at war, would-be peacebuilders engage with a variety of moral choices in relationship with members of their community. This transformative process is essential to broad and sustained adoption of peacebuilding strategies and personas.

Grounded in a deep comprehension of their complex tradition, these peacebuilders may consequently have confidence to interact inclusively with the “other,” even to discover common moral paths. This is an essential part of peacebuilding and, as MacIntyre explains, the junction between the particular and the universal:

the fact [that] the self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities such as those of the family, the neighborhood, the city, and the tribe does not entail that the self has to accept the moral limitations of the particularity of those forms of community. Without those moral particularities to begin with there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, the universal, consists. [45]

Social understandings of religious and other types of moral community begin by pointing out that people develop in context—that is place, time, environment, relationships. Yet the end of a process of engaging with such understandings, especially in contexts of peacebuilding, may be much broader than the borders of any one tradition. [46]

Particular context is important in limiting or de-escalating mutual fear of extinction by providing space for the unique self to exist and affirming that this self will not be consumed. Gopin explains that, in addition to the need for uniqueness, human beings have a need for integration, “to merge with the larger world” and to find “an overarching unity to existence.” Instead of being balanced by recognition of others’ needs for uniqueness, this second need is sometimes pursued with violent means; individuals or groups try to consume the whole world or remake it in their image. [47] Even when this need is not manifest violently, recognition of it can cause fear of loss of identity and so be an impediment to peacebuilding.

MacIntyre writes, “Particularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated. The notion of escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims which belong to man as such … is an illusion and an illusion with painful consequences.” [48] Modern understandings of identity must be infused with social understandings if fears of extinction are to be taken seriously. Valuable attempts at discovering shared standards have often been undermined by rhetoric and policies that ignore the importance of particularity. Denial of the particularity of modernity is especially insidious in its correlation with myths of universalism. [49] Consequently, “[m]any people around the world—not just religious people—perceive [universalism] as secular cultural imperialism or evangelism.” [50] Given that totalitarianism has often hidden under the guise of quests for the best possible world, it seems that it is better simply to find improved ways to live in the world as it exists, with its multitude of complex and varying traditions.

The invention of the secular state through Westphalia was a peaceful solution for a region suffering from the ravages of the “wars of religion” (1550-1650). Similarly, there are many reasons to praise the development of international organizational structures and concepts such as universal human rights that, though strongly influenced by religious thought, [51] were actualized through the secular nation-state model. Yet, as Alasdair MacIntyre, Hannah Arendt, and many others have argued, people live and experience the world through particular communities. While some of these do display the bifurcation of life into spiritual and secular spheres, many more have not fully separated behavior (ritual and daily life) from belief (spiritual and moral values and metaphysical experiences). It is within this framework that religious actors are often a more suitable proponent for peace than their secular peers to the extent that the latter are versed exclusively in individualistic and scientific materialist understandings of international relations and conflict resolution. It is because of this that religious actors can play a positive role in conflicts with and without religious dimensions, not when they “moderate their religion or marginalize their deeply held, vividly symbolized, and often highly particular beliefs,” but rather “when they remain religious actors.” [52]

Academic Policy Definitions of Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding is an enterprise that is more often described than defined. Perhaps this is because it is undertaken by a wide variety of actors whose strengths and capacities enable them to build peace in different ways. Michael Pugh traces peacebuilding practices back to the Cold War in the confidence building [53] work of NGOs such as the Mennonite Central Committee, the Society of Friends, the movement for European Nuclear Disarmament, and the UK-based Centre for International Peacebuilding. [54] As early as the 1960’s, Johan Galtung began to describe peacebuilding as “the practical implementation of peaceful social change through socio-economic reconstruction and development.” [55] Since then, Galtung has promulgated the idea that peacebuilding involves radical change to overcome contradictions that lie at the root of conflict. [56]

The emphasis on root causes and structural change has been a lasting aspect of discussions of peacebuilding. However, Stephen Ryan has found that Galtung’s definition suffers from the lack of a relational dimension. Ryan has emphasized the need to change negative conflict attitudes in society; particularly, he focuses on the grassroots level. [57] Bringing together Galtung and Ryan’s analysis, John Paul Lederach has characterized peacebuilding as “a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships.” [58] In doing so, he has made a strong place in the discourse for peacebuilding that addresses the structural, relational, and cultural aspects and causes of conflict.

At about the same time that Lederach was broadly defining peacebuilding, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali narrowed the term in his 1992 Agenda for Peace. Bringing the weight of international attention to peacebuilding, Boutros-Ghali associated it with post-war reconstruction. He defined post-conflict peacebuilding as “actions to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.” [59] These goals were initially aligned with military demobilization and political transition to participatory electoral democracy, still core components of UN peacebuilding. [60]

In subsequent years, Boutros-Ghali expanded his peacebuilding concept to include a development approach. In the wake of this expansion, Pugh wrote in 1995:

In the context of UN-authorized peace support measures, peacebuilding can be defined as a policy of external international help for developing countries designed to support indigenous social, cultural and economic development and self-reliance, by aiding recovery from war and reducing or eliminating resort to future violence. [61]

Over ten years later, this definition still stands as a good synopsis of peacebuilding at the level of the United Nations. On June 23, 2006, the United Nations held the inaugural meeting of its Peacebuilding Commission. On its website, the commission states that it will focus on “the link between immediate post-conflict efforts on the one hand and long-term recovery and development efforts on the other.” [62]

Most academics and policy-makers agree that peacebuilding entails a multi-layered approach involving many sectors and including local, national, regional, and international actors. [63] Given this scope, it seems logical that peacebuilding will be defined in subtly, if not largely, different ways by its different actors. While both Lederach and Boutros-Ghali acknowledge the breadth of the concept, they each present a narrow description of practice that focuses on their respective spheres of influence.

Lederach’s pyramid of peacebuilding actors includes three levels—top, middle-level and grassroots leaders—yet, he is known for emphasizing “middle-out” and “bottom-up” approaches. [64] In a recent work, entitled A Handbook of International Peacebuilding, Lederach lauds the expansion of conflict resolution (since the 1970’s) to include “alternative dispute resolution, mediation, conciliation, violence prevention, early warning systems, community reconciliation, nonviolent peacekeeping, trauma healing, second-track diplomacy, [and] problem-solving workshops.” He concludes the description by saying that he has mentioned “only a few of the many arenas of today’s range of peacebuilding activities,” yet it is significant that his handbook focuses on largely community-oriented processes. [65]

On the other hand, the UN Peacebuilding Commission has been designed to work with UN peacekeeping operations and “the international network of assistance and donor mobilization including the World Bank.” [66] From this perspective, peacebuilding is more heavily involved in issues of security, governance, and economic recovery. [67] Such activities do not necessarily exclude community or grassroots input; in fact, their sustainability relies in part on multi-level participation. [68] Nonetheless, the UN and its partners do not build peace in the same way as conflict resolution practitioners such as Lederach. Both are involved in peacebuilding, and they can work together, but as actors with different access, resources and capacities, they have different emphases.

Galtung associates peacebuilding with “positive” peace, meaning the cessation of structural and cultural violence or the creation of a “self-sustaining peace.” [69] Yet, in its task of consolidating the gains of peacemaking and peacekeeping, for instance as part of UN missions, peacebuilding must be concerned as well with the “negative” task of preventing relapse into conflict. In seeking the maximum goal of positive peace, actors must be wary of how their efforts will affect the negative peace. Elizabeth Cousens writes, “Perhaps the greatest challenge for the international community in trying to assist war-torn societies is to be ruthlessly modest about its ambitions.” She specifically mentions the goals of economic liberalization and democratization, stating that the volatile processes they entail make it imperative that international actors consider carefully the form and timing of such efforts. [70] In Peacebuilding as Politics, Cousens and Chetan Kumar argue that international peacebuilding “should focus on those factors that allow stable political processes to emerge and flourish.” [71]

Considering limited material and political resources for peacebuilding efforts, Cousens and Kumar stress the need for the international community to set priorities. They argue that conflict resolution should be privileged as a means for sustaining negative peace and enabling capacity to manage current and future conflict without recourse to violence. While peacebuilding as defined by Galtung tends to focus on redressing specific causes of violence, Cousens and Kumar explain the importance of focusing principally “on a society’s political capacity to manage tensions arising from these causes.” [72] They suggest focusing on what I. William Zartman and others characterize as the “reinstitution of political life.” [73]

Cousens and Kumar advocate peacebuilding that is more limited in scope and less rigid in outcome. Kumar writes, “International peacebuilders should not focus primarily on prescribing or operating specific political structures but on facilitating or enforcing the conditions that constitute an appropriate context for these structures to emerge.” [74] In other words, peacebuilding should be process-oriented. A key element of political process is healthy, legitimate political relations. Here, Kumar cites Lederach’s concept of vertical capacity, an emphasis on “responsive and coordinated relationships up and down the levels of leadership in a society.” [75] He argues that the international peacebuilding role is to promote the enabling of relational factors (dialogue, public security, and participation) through which appropriate political structures can be built.

As a final note on academic and policy definitions of peacebuilding, it is useful to consider stages of conflict and length of engagement. The United Nations has limited peacebuilding to post-conflict situations. Referring to the importance of prevention and to Galtung’s emphasis on structural change, Pugh points out that peacebuilding can occur at any time, [76] and this is how Lederach, Cousens, Kumar and others understand the concept. [77] As for the duration of peacebuilding, all concerned agree that it should address long-term concerns. In theoretical terms, this can imply an open-ended commitment and indeterminate timescale. However, as Cousens and Kumar have explained, this perhaps cannot be the case with international involvement. [78] The UN and other major donors or agencies should be tasked with specifically targeted, short- to medium-term objectives that will establish conditions in which internal actors can build long-term peace.

Defining Religious Peacebuilding

Religious peacebuilding is typically of the type associated with Lederach, [79] namely community-oriented processes that are relationship-centered and participatory. In some ways, peacebuilding is “a relatively new label put on an old idea”; [80] community-based work to build healthy and peaceful societies has long been essential to many religious traditions. Still, religious peacebuilding is a developing concept. Most of the literature regarding religion and peacebuilding is in the form of case studies, that is stories of specific events, groups, and individuals. There is much work to be done before there is an adequate academic understanding of what a religious approach to peacebuilding might entail. Similarly, the field of peace studies awaits cumulative studies of the contributions of religious actors, communities, and institutions—a way of assessing the “value-added” of religion to conflict resolution. While efforts have begun, this is difficult, in part, because of the sheer number and diversity of actors often involved, [81] and also because social scientists are in need of better tools for holistically engaging religion and its effects. [82]

On the one hand, religious peacebuilding is simply peacebuilding done by religious actors. This has a variety of social and political implications but does not involve a distinct set of activities. On the other hand, religious peacebuilding is an endeavor to work within religious traditions and religious contexts through unique activities, such as intrafaith and interfaith dialogue and education. [83] Peacebuilding as a process internal to and across religious traditions is vital, especially when contemporary conflict and violence involves religious actors.

While acknowledging the importance of both types of religious peacebuilding, this essay focuses on that which religious actors, often working with secular partners, engage in with religious and secular groups in contexts of religious and non-religious conflict. [84] Religious peacebuilding will be defined here as peacebuilding 1) motivated and strengthened by religious and spiritual resources, and 2) with access to religious communities and institutions. The first part of the definition is a subjective description that is difficult to quantify or evaluate, but which is significant nonetheless. Its presence may be manifest in many different ways, some more or less discernible. Peacebuilding with the benefit of access to religious communities and institutions is significant, according to the particular relationship of a religious tradition with its host society. Appleby explains that the “historical record and reputation, size, resources, ethnic composition, and public and political presences of the religious body in question [affect] its representatives’ chances for success in conflict resolution.” [85] Some religious individuals and groups work as “independent contractors,” but most are embedded in various levels of community and institutionalization.

As explained previously, the identity of religious actors is integral to the character of religious peacebuilding. However, it is important for categorical explorations to focus on peacebuilding as a process, rather than focusing on the religious peacebuilders themselves. A limited typology of religious peacebuilding includes methodology, motivation, legitimacy, and connection to context; the category of methodology is further divided into philosophy, tools, level of engagement, and length of engagement.

Methodology

What philosophical underpinnings distinguish religious peacebuilding? It can be said that religious peacebuilding works within, rather than adjacent to or opposed to, spiritual elements of culture. According to Gopin, conflict resolution theories, such as human needs theory and social psychological/psychoanalytic approaches, are alone inadequate, especially in certain contexts. [86] Religious peacebuilding can build on these philosophical approaches, adding existential dimensions through spiritual language and activity. A more subtle philosophical aspect of religious peacebuilding might be humility, in recognition of the difficulty and complexity of peacebuilding vis-à-vis human capacity. [87] Generalizing, the anthropology of religion states that humans cannot have all of the answers and that human action is often insufficient. [88] In other words, religion is based on the perception or belief that humans need god/s. Taken to the extreme, this can lead to fatalism and paralysis. Taken in measured doses, it leads to an understanding of the importance of determined, small steps and the futility of the grandiose. [89] In the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, humility is an appropriate reminder that “we are workers, not master builders, ministers not messiahs.” [90] In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “We are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord’s hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord.” [91]

Tools. Religious peacebuilding operates with different tools than does secular peacebuilding because of its inclusion of spiritual issues. Overall, peacebuilding activities are the same in religious and secular organizations; but as Julia Berger writes, “Spiritual guidance, prayer, and modeling are a unique feature of RNGO [religious non-governmental organization] operations.” [92] Religious peacebuilding entails focus on interiority or “the inner life of the individual,” [93] which might be manifest in the use of tools such as ritual [94] and myth. [95] These tools are not exclusively religious, but to the extent that secular peacebuilding is related to belief in scientific materialism, it may be incompatible with their use. Similarly, religious peacebuilding may be more likely to employ tools of imagination in envisioning new possibilities and facilitating empathy. [96] Scholars such as Lederach and Walter Brueggemann write that the “moral imagination” and the “prophetic imagination” are essential to peacebuilding. [97] Religious peacebuilding might also emphasize the importance of prayer, silence, or meditation. A Clingendael Institute/Salam Institute study accredited a large part of the success of a meeting between Muslim and Christian leaders in Sudan to the inclusion of prayer and readings from the Koran and the Bible. It highlighted the presence of a prayer team, whose “sole purpose was to pray and fast during the four days of the meeting, praying for the success of the deliberations.” [98] Lastly, concepts such as forgiveness and restorative justice are often more resonant when employed in combination with theological and/or spiritual understandings of their application. Of course, there is no formula for using spiritual tools, and each case must include “local cultural analysis wedded to political insight.” [99]

Level of Engagement . In terms of levels of engagement, religious peacebuilding can be located in the grassroots, middle-level, and elite levels of organization. Potentially, it can involve all of these levels, which are likely to be linked through religious networks. In the world’s largest religions, religious peacebuilding can occur at local, inter-communal, national, regional, and international levels, which can network and exchange support and information horizontally and vertically. On the local level, it is often part of the “small-scale and usually unpublicized initiatives” praised by Judith Large. Religious peacebuilding can be compatible with or the same as indigenous peacebuilding. Because of this, it has the capacity to challenge cultures of violence through what Betts Fetherston calls the “anti-hegemonic, counter-hegemonic and post-hegemonic.” [100]

Length of Engagement. In terms of length of engagement, religious peacebuilding is markedly different from the efforts of many secular NGOs and of the international community, as described by Cousens and Kumar. Religious peacebuilding has the capacity to function long-term because it can potentially operate from the base of and integrate into a permanent presence within a community. Berger writes, “In some cases, religious networks and infrastructures are more stable than local or national governments—providing channels of information and resource distribution in the absence of state-sponsored alternatives.” [101] Secondly, religious peacebuilding is a potentially long-term process because it can be based on different funding mechanisms. Some local peacebuilding programs are directly and exclusively funded by local churches, mosques, and temples. National and international RNGOs are more susceptible to the attention span and priorities of international donors, [102] yet even they can be partially or completely funded by national and international religious networks. This is significant because religious leaders have different time horizons than donor governments. Bishops, for example, retain their office for life, whereas politicians must be responsive to electoral constituencies and annual budget cycles. In addition, the fraternal and structural ties of religious networks raise the probability of interaction, which can increase mutuality and consistency of priorities and expectations.

The second category in this typology is motivation. From a survey of seventy religious peacebuilding actors, the Clingendael and Salam Institutes found that “religious values and principles seem to provide a mandate” for building peace and preventing conflict. [103] Like many such suggestions in literature on the subject, this begs the question, are religious mandates stronger than secular mandates? For instance, how is the Mennonite mandate for peacebuilding different, in effect, from the Marxist mandate? This is a question that demands further research, yet one might begin by considering the practice of religious martyrdom. Mark Juergensmeyer writes, “In most cases martyrdom is regarded not only as a testimony to the degree of one’s commitment, but also as a performance of a religious act, specifically an act of self-sacrifice.” [104] Contemporary reference to martyrdom conjures images of suicide bombings, a form that inflicts as well as absorbs violence. However, one could also refer to the hunger strikes of Mahatma Gandhi or the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in protest of the Vietnam War.

For this typology, it may be more useful to consider, instead of the strength of motivation, the ways in which motivation is transmitted and renewed. In this respect, religious peacebuilding is distinct because of its relationship to myth and ritual. Archbishop Oscar Romero’s death, often considered a “witness for peace,” is a case in point. [105] Before his 1980 assassination, Romero said, “I have frequently been threatened with death. As a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” [106] This statement is evidence of a tradition-specific belief in the power of myth as a motivating force. It came true in that Romero’s martyrdom inspired others to strengthen and continue their struggle against oppression. The image of a priest shot at the altar while celebrating Mass, the primary sacred ritual of the Catholic tradition, galvanized not only local but also international outcry regarding human rights abuses in El Salvador. Romero has become a mythical figure who remains a source of motivation for Catholic and non-Catholic activists worldwide. In the methods of Catholic tradition, he is the unofficial patron saint of the region and official canonization processes are moving forward.

The third category of this typology, legitimacy, depends on many cultural and historical circumstances; yet, some generalizations can be made. To the extent that spirituality is accepted and deemed important, communities and conflict parties may perceive religious peacebuilding as legitimate because it addresses spiritual elements of conflict. This may be compounded if peacebuilding actors are perceived to have purely social and spiritual—and not political—intentions. In addition, religious traditions claim moral authority. If this claim has currency, it can facilitate an embrace of peacebuilding processes. The tendency to invest legitimacy in religious actors is often exhibited not only by those within a specific tradition, but also by the larger community, especially when leaders are charismatic and institutions are competent. [107] This is increasingly probable if religious peacebuilding builds on a long record of social service activity and/or relief and development work, as it often does. [108]

Finally, the last category in this typology of religious peacebuilding is connection to context. Obviously, when peacebuilders are working within their own communities or with communities of the same religious tradition, they will benefit from pre-existing knowledge of at least some aspects of the religious and cultural context. The same may be true to a lesser extent when actors adhere to different religions but share a religious worldview. Communicating using religious texts and traditions can make it easier to introduce or strengthen concepts of peace. [109] This does not necessarily exclude secular actors. It does mean that all actors must overcome varying degrees of unfamiliarity and be willing to facilitate peacebuilding within the context they are working. Gopin writes, “Religious adherents must see that their way of looking at reality is being directly addressed by the content and method of conflict resolution.” [110]

In addition to connection to philosophical and cultural context, religious peacebuilding benefits from a connection to personal, communal, and institutional networks. This is especially true of indigenous religious peacebuilding, but also true for interventionist religious peacebuilding. Berger observes, for example, that “unlike secular NGOs, which must build their networks from the ground up, RNGOs often attach to existing infrastructures from which to recruit human and financial resources.” [111] Through their existing connections, religious actors may be well situated to draft volunteers, challenge religious and secular traditional structures, and communicate with governments. [112] However, the quality and type of access to religious communities and institutions is dependent on many factors. Relevant matters include: the availability, quality and content of religious education and spiritual formation; the diversity and positive engagement of actors such as local leaders, high-level clergy, NGOs, organized movements, and high-level councils; the powers and responsibilities of leaders and the degree of communication they have with their constituencies and any existing hierarchies; and the range and engagement of organizational levels (local, subnational, national, regional, and/or international). [113]

Listing this multitude of factors begins to illustrate the complexities that determine the impact of religious peacebuilding. The cumulative effect may be one in which religion plays a significant role in portions but not all of society, or, as can be the case with large, transnational traditions, religion may permeate every level of society—institutionally, socially and culturally. In that case, the significant elements of authority, ideology, spirituality and fraternity are all at the disposal of religious peacebuilding. Yet, impact is still determined not only by the degree of religious presence, but also by the degree of experienced peacebuilding capacity. To delineate the possible environments that might shape peacebuilding, Appleby describes three modes of action: crisis mobilization, saturation, and external intervention. In the first instance, existing religious presence is inexperienced but spontaneously adapts to peacebuilding necessities. In the second, an indigenous peacebuilding community of offices, programs, and professionals has emerged and persisted over time. Part of the institutional and social landscape, this peacebuilding is shaped by prevailing political and social conditions and external actors, but not wholly dependent on them. In the last mode, external actors intervene in conflict situations, usually at the invitation of one or more of the conflict parties, to work with existing capacity in the service of present needs and the sometimes distant goal of eliciting and enabling an indigenous peacebuilding community. [114]

Strengths of Religious Peacebuilding

Religious peacebuilding has at least four strengths. First, religious peacebuilding is a vehicle for addressing the spiritual aspects of conflict experience. This strength lies in the perception of spiritual need on the part of those affected. [115] Prior, during, and after conflict, people struggle with existential questions and suffer spiritual as well as physical and psychological trauma. [116] Religious traditions, through their philosophies and spiritual tools, offer language and other means with which people can interpret their experiences. [117] According to MacIntyre’s understanding of human identity as narrative-based, the myth and storytelling intrinsic to religion can be especially important. [118] As Gopin writes, “Narrative is the path into the individual psyche and the collective memory of human beings.” [119]

Second, religious peacebuilding can counter violence that is rooted in religious and/or communal identity by virtue of its foundation in tradition-dependent rationality and morality. As discussed earlier, this worldview can result in inclusive processes that create safe spaces for peacebuilding, enabling a willingness to relate to the “other.” Religious peacebuilding can also encourage participation in peacebuilding by virtue of its non-secular worldview. People who feel marginalized by peacebuilding that is sometimes “hard secular” or scientific materialist can perhaps better relate to processes that include religious or spiritual dimensions.

Third, religious peacebuilding offers a moral alternative during times of state collapse and times of war, especially when the peacebuilders are from a religious tradition that has a large and stable presence in a society. This was the case, for example, when the Roman Catholic Church joined in the advocacy for democracy and human rights reform in Brazil, Chile, Central America, the Philippines, South Korea, and elsewhere. [120] This was the case when U.S. churches opposed the start of the war in Iraq. Massaro notes that the official leadership of many American denominations—including President Bush’s own United Methodist Church—vocalized opposition. [121] This is not an example of effective religious peacebuilding in terms of preventing war; however, the presence of these Christian actors has strengthened the U.S. peace movement, especially in countering perceptions of the Iraq War as a “Christian war.” [122] As explained by Chris Hedges, a voice of moral alternative can be especially important in the context of modern, secular nation-states. He writes:

Because we in modern society have walked away from institutions that stand outside the state to find moral guidance and spiritual direction, we turn to the state in times of war. The state and the institutions of state become, for many, the center of worship in wartime. To expose the holes in the myth is to court excommunication. [123]

Of course, religious traditions are often a more or less willing accomplice in the justification of war. Nonetheless, when they find it necessary and are able to oppose a nation-state heading to war, religious peacebuilding can offer people the power of an alternative, often combined with the comfort of affiliation with a long-standing authority.

Fourth, because of their numerical significance and multi-level presence, religious traditions offer vehicles for internationalizing peacebuilding and conflict resolution. This is possible through the networking and sharing of best practices among peacebuilders [124] and through religious education, which takes daily form in preaching and school teaching. The ambivalence of religion, among other factors, dictates that the latter may be problematic; however, to the extent that local manifestations of religion accept and teach the peaceful doctrines of their traditions, they can contribute to the development of indigenous peacebuilding, or what Appleby calls the saturation mode of peacebuilding. Herein, perhaps, lies the greatest potential of religious peacebuilding: the capacity to transcend the boundary of peacebuilding as a field of external expertise.

Challenges of Religious Peacebuilding

The greatest challenge to religious peacebuilding is the ambivalence of religion. Ambivalence undermines the perception of the enterprise and enables intra-religious sabotage of its progress. The challenges of religious violence not withstanding, however, there are many points of criticism within the developing processes of religious peacebuilding.

Literature on the subject commonly refers to four obvious challenges. First, some religious peacebuilding situations require additional skills and knowledge of contemporary peacebuilding theory and practice. Like others in the peacebuilding and NGO sectors, religious actors would do well to advance professionally, [125] increase accountability to people on the ground, [126] and continue to limit the potential to do harm. [127] In some locations, religious leaders are the only leaders in the community, or are perceived as such by members of the community. To the extent that local groups are more likely to approach such leadership to facilitate peacebuilding, religious actors may join the field more often without the benefit of professional training and experience. [128]

Second, some individuals and groups will be hesitant or averse to working with actors of a different religion or categorically opposed to the intersection of religion and peacebuilding. The Community Sant’Egidio, an organization of Catholic laity, has mediated conflict in Guatemala, Kosovo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. It is often cited as an example of an explicitly religious organization that is adept at using non-religious discourse, or second-order language, in creating a space where religious affiliation is not a factor in partnering with secular actors. However, the success of such models not withstanding, at times religious actors will simply be unwelcome or inappropriate. In conflicts where religion plays a major part, religious peacebuilders may have an advantage in understanding the context, yet be unable to gain sufficient confidence from conflict parties. Not all conflicts are amenable to “insider-partial” mediation. [129] An IPRO report finds, “It is paradoxical that when the need for religious peacemaking may be the greatest, the challenges also seem to be the largest.” [130] In addition, sometimes religious actors will find it difficult to work with their co-religionists. [131] It should not be assumed that the ties of religion are necessarily stronger than, for example, the ties of nationalism or ethnicity. [132]

A third challenge is the potential perception that religious peace actors are proselytizing, actively seeking to attract religious membership or to induce conversion. While there are times when it is appropriate to use religious and spiritual tools, they are only beneficial and effective when applied with acute sensitivity to context. It is difficult to generalize about the ways religious actors negotiate this challenge. Appleby compares World Vision and Catholic Relief Services (CRS), two U.S.-based organizations that evolved into large “sophisticated relief and development operations” during the 1970s and 1980s. During this evolution, World Vision retained its evangelical character, while CRS minimized its religious identity. This is illustrated by the fact that World Vision requires acceptance of a statement of faith as a condition of employment, [133] while CRS generally lacks such a requirement. [134] According to Appleby, World Vision devotes resources and programs to the topic of “evangelism and leadership” and trains Protestant church members to work in relief operations. In contrast, he notes that CRS favors “ecumenical, interreligious, and cross-cultural dialogue” above work designed to increase capacity within Catholic communities. [135]

The CRS model of religious peacebuilding makes it easier to dismiss accusations of proselytizing. However, it is not clear that World Vision’s understanding of its role and mission is inherently problematic. Human resource practices and capacity building within a religious tradition are not necessarily indications of proselytizing. Indeed, even as World Vision understands its work as evangelizing (preaching the gospel) through service to the poor “as a demonstration of God’s unconditional love,” it explicitly asserts that it does not proselytize. [136] Nonetheless, World Vision may face difficulties when working with non-evangelical communities because of the NGO’s confessional nature. One of the inherent challenges of being a religious organization in this field is that both unwarranted and valid accusations of proselytizing raise challenges to peacebuilding.

Fourth, according to the standards set by Western liberal institutions, some religious peacebuilding organizations are arguably incoherent voices for human rights insofar as they exclude women and homosexuals from full participation in society and/or religious institutions. Again, it is difficult to generalize, but many of the world’s religions have poor records in this regard, and these issues are subject to oversight, obstinacy and confusion. Stances on women and homosexuals may make it difficult for religious actors to partner with other peacebuilding agencies, especially on matters related to women’s participation and AIDS prevention. [137] However, the corollary of this might be that religious actors share views with local actors and thus make good partners for them. One can note that academics and policy experts continue to debate the potential and form of universal application of western liberal norms of gender equality, especially because attempting to force culture change can have unintentional negative effects on relationships and peacebuilding efforts. [138]

Religious peacebuilding is a relatively new focus for scholarly research and reflection. Nevertheless, numerous authors from the conflict resolution field note the considerable spiritual and theological resources for peacebuilding that can be drawn from the major religions. [139] Correspondingly, each of these traditions has its own examples of religious peacebuilding. [140] One might consider Quaker conciliation during the Nigerian Civil War [141] or the Buddhist dhammayietra movement in Cambodia. [142] Some of the most creative and effective religious peacebuilding is done by inter-religious groups, which are surprisingly great in number. [143] For example, Muslim and Christian leaders of the Inter-Religious Council of Sierra Leone brokered negotiations between the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and the ousted president Ahmed Tajan Kabbah and then played a key mediating role in the summer 1999 peace negotiations. [144] In Bosnia, local Catholic and Muslim clerics enabled their communities to pursue and sustain local cease-fires. [145] In the Middle East, an organization of Israeli and Palestinian women works on dialogue, education, and advocacy through ongoing community projects and large programs such as the five-day event “Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States.” [146]

Despite numerous success stories, religious peacebuilding is still asserting its validity amidst religious violence and in a largely secular culture of academia and policymaking. The task of this essay is to acknowledge the ambivalence of religion while asserting, nonetheless, its socio-political importance. The process and effects of secularization have been halting and mixed, yet the persisting relevance of religion has not been matched by sufficient religious literacy in Western international relations and conflict resolution. Current academic and policy definitions of peacebuilding emphasize a determination to be non-prescriptive and long-term oriented. As defined here, religious peacebuilding is well suited to enact such designs—in its capacity for multi-layered, long-term work based in permanent and semi-permanent relationships with people in conflict zones.

Though there are substantial challenges that must be addressed, religion can offer considerable contributions to peacebuilding efforts. At least, religion should be included in matters of conflict and peace because its adherents represent numerically significant portions of society. At most, its inclusion increases the possibility of further contextualizing and internationalizing peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Religious traditions are vehicles for this in their existing networks, through which peacebuilders can share best practices, [147] and in religious education, which takes daily form in preaching and school teaching. [148] The ambivalence of religion, among other factors, dictates that the latter may problematic. However, to the extent that local manifestations of religion accept and teach the peaceful doctrines of their traditions, they can contribute to the development of indigenous peacebuilding or what Appleby calls the saturation mode of peacebuilding. Herein lies the greatest potential of religious peacebuilding: the capacity to transcend the boundary of peacebuilding as a field of external expertise.

• 1. Abdul Aziz Said and Nathan C. Funk, “The Role of Faith in Cross-Cultural Conflict Resolution” (presented at the European Parliament for the European Centre for Common Ground, September 2001), 1.
• 2. Scott Appleby, Th e Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 30.
• 3. Andreas Hasenclever and Volker Rittberger, “Does Religion Make a Difference? Theoretical Approaches to the Impact of Faith on Political Conflict,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 649.
• 4. Appleby, 164.
• 5. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1997), 204-205.
• 6. Daivd Little, “Religion, Conflict and Peace,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 31, no. 1 (2006), 98.
• 7. Marc Gopin, “Religion and International Relations at the Crossroads,” International Studies Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2001), http://www.gmu.edu/departments/crdc/docs/relandiratcrossroads.html.
• 8. For a discussion of diversity in theological attitudes and correlating political implications, as well as evolving intersections of religious ethics and praxis in addition to dogma, see Cecilia Lynch, “Dogma, Praxis, and Religious Perspectives on Multiculturalism,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 741-759.
• 9. This essay adopts Ramsbotham and others’ understanding of conflict resolution as a generic or umbrella term that includes conflict management and conflict transformation as well as the processes of peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. In this view, conflict resolution encompasses everything from prevention to the farthest goal of reconciliation. Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), chapter 1.
• 10. This theory is perhaps most famously expounded by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , yet it can also be found in the works of Comte, Durkheim, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Toennies, Voltaire and others. Jonathan Fox, “The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945-2001,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 6 (2004): 715.
• 11. In “The Missing Dimension,” Edward Luttwak gives historical examples concerning Lebanon, Vietnam, Sudan, and Iran. Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8-19.
• 12. Scott M. Thomas, “Taking Religious and Cultural Pluralism Seriously: The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Society,” Millenium: Journal of International Studies 1, no. 3 (2000): 816-22. Thomas explains: “The modern concept of religion begins to emerge in the late fifteenth century, and first appears as a universal, inward, impulse or feeling toward the divine common to all people … The varieties of pieties and rituals are increasingly called ‘religions,’ as representations of the one (more or less) true religio common to all, apart from any ecclesial community.”
• 13. It is helpful to note that secular (non-religious) does not necessarily mean anti-religious or non-spiritual.
• 14. Thomas, 821-22.
• 15. For contemporary discussions of secularization theory, see Jeffrey Haynes, “Religion and International Relations in the 21st Century: Conflict or Co-Operation?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2006): 535-541. Also, see Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. and Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
• 16. According to data from the U.S. State Department’s 2002 "International Religious Freedom Report," 141 of the world’s countries (78 percent) do not have a state religion. Further, over 70 percent of countries make no reference to religion in their constitutions or quasi-constitutional documents. Almost 60 percent seem not to favor a particular religion through financial support. Assaf Moghadam, “A Global Resurgence of Religion?” paper No. 03-03 (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2003), 53, 55, 47.
• 17. Year 2000 data from David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World , 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Cited in Moghadam, 3-4.
• 18. William H. Swatos, Jr., and Kevin J. Christiano, “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” 209, as quoted in Moghadam, 36.
• 19. “Of the fourteen Western European countries that have been examined in this study, eight (Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Britain, and Iceland) have shown signs of a decline in religiousness. Three countries (Finland, Ireland, Italy) appeared to experience a rise in religiosity, while no conclusions could be reached for Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark because of contradictory trends. … In Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Britain, and Iceland, most criteria measured indicated a trend towards secularization, although some criteria indicated the opposite. In Germany, for example, respondents suggested a heightened importance attributed to both God and to religion, even though all other indicators showed a decline of religious behavior and values. Moghadam, 23.
• 20. For the list of indicators of used by Moghadam, see pages 16-18.
• 21. Grace Davie, “Europe: The Exception that Proves the Rule?,” in Peter L. Berger, 68.
• 22. Moghadam, 20, 68.
• 23. According to a 2002 Pew Forum survey, 41 percent of Americans attend a religious service weekly. Cited by Moghadam, 20.
• 24. Moghadam, 41.
• 25. For example, Martin Riesebrodt, “Secularization and the Global Resurgence of Religion,” Paper presented at the Comparative Social Analysis Workshop (March 9, 2000), University of California, Los Angeles, cited in Moghadam, 66.
• 26. Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5.
• 27. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
• 28. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider Books, 1999), 218.
• 29. Little, 96.
• 30. David Little and Scott Appleby, “A Moment of Opportunity? The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict” in Religion and Peacebuilding , ed. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 3.
• 31. Jeffrey Haynes, “Religion and International Relations in the 21st Century: Conflict or Co-Operation?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2006): 539. Also, for a discussion and listing of religion’s international political influence in the years 1945-present, see Haynes, 539-541.
• 32. Fox writes that Western academia and policy have been able to marginalize religion because “their paradigms, rather than empirical observations, guided their understandings of the topic.” Fox, 718.
• 33. Douglas Johnston, ed., Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. This page includes discussion of the U.S. failure to recognize religious dimensions causing a failure to predict the Iranian revolution. See also Luttwak, 12-14.
• 34. Michael Hirsch, “Bernard Lewis Revisited: What if Islam Isn’t an Obstacle to Democracy in the Middle East but the Secret to Achieving It?” Washington Monthly (November 2004), http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.hirsh.html.
• 35. Hirsh, Washington Monthly ; Richard Bulliet, Islamo-Civilization, Agence Global (18 November 2004), http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=319.
• 36. Appleby, 218, 281-2.
• 37. Appleby, 3.
• 38. For a discussion of cultural differences between Western and non-Western conceptions of personhood, see Kevin Avruch, “Introduction: Culture and Conflict Resolution” in Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives , ed. Kevin Avruch, Peter W. Black, and Joseph A. Scimecca (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 9.
• 39. This discussion assumes a moral dimension, rejecting the strict realist assertion that only interests are relevant to decision-making in international relations and conflict scenarios.
• 40. Tutu, 35.
• 41. Thomas, 827.
• 42. Gopin, 5.
• 43. Thomas, 827.
• 44. Gopin, 132.
• 45. MacIntyre, 221. Emphasis in original.
• 46. Many religious scholars and leaders have dedicated themselves to finding shared or “universal” understanding among the world’s major religions. Such work has resulted in documents such as the “Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights,” the “Bangkok Declaration,” and the “Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions.” Gerrie Ter Haar, “Religion: Source of Conflict or Resource for Peace?” in Bridge or Barrier: Religions, Violence and Visions for Peace , ed. James J. Busuttil and Gerrie ter Haar (Leidon: Brill Academic Publisher, 2004), 19.
• 47. Gopin, 5-6.
• 48. MacIntyre, p.221.
• 49. Referring especially to contemporary discussions of religion, one author writes, “The Western perception is that ‘we’ are secularized, they are ‘fundamentalists.’ But ‘we’ too are religious in the sense that ‘we’ are not the products of abstract universality but given substantially from our basis.” C. B. Lausetsen and O. Waever, O., “In Defence of Religion: Sacred Referent Objects for Securitization,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20, no. 3 (2000), 737.
• 50. Gopin, 175. Appleby refers to such sentiments in his discussion of “the universal human rights regime.” It is important to recognize that many of the principles associated with human rights are taken from different sources and are variously defined in different cultures. Further, while there is much agreement on the ideals of human rights, how those are put into practice is subject of great debate. Appleby, 248-50.
• 51. People from various religious traditions joined secular counterparts in drafting the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of 1948. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), notably chapter 1, “The drafting process explained,” quoted in Gerrie Ter Haar,18.
• 52. Appleby, 20.
• 53. “Confidence building” in this context is the linking of people across boundaries such as nationality, ethnicity, or religion.
• 54. Michael Pugh, “Peacebuilding as Developmentalism: Concepts from Disaster Research,” Contemporary Security Policy (December 1995) 16, no.3, 321.
• 55. Johan Galtung, “Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking and Peacebuilding,” Peace, War and Defense: Essays in Peace Research , vol. 2, (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, 1975), 282-304, as cited in Contemporary Conflict Resolution , ed. by Oliver Ramsbotham, Oliver, Tom Woodhouse and Hugh Miall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
• 56. Johan Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civiliation (London: Sage, 1996), 112.
• 57. Stephen Ryan, Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (Brookfield, Vermont: Dartmouth, 1990), 50, as cited in Ramsbotham.
• 58. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute for Peace, 1997), 20. This 1997 publication is an expansion of a manuscript published in 1994 by the United Nations University for use in its Education and Training Program.
• 59. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping (New York: United Nations, 1992), 11.
• 60. Ramsbotham, 187.
• 61. Pugh, 328.
• 62. United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, http://www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding/ . The site’s home page reads as follows: “The Peacebuilding Commission will marshal resources at the disposal of the international community to advise and propose integrated strategies for post-conflict recovery, focusing attention on reconstruction, institution-building and sustainable development, in countries emerging from conflict.”
• 63. T. Keating and W. A. Knight, eds., Building Sustainable Peace (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2004), xxxvi, xli. Keating and Knight list, for example, civil society and NGOs, governments, ad hoc criminal tribunals, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Keating, xli.
• 64. Lederach, Building Peace , 52, 151.
• 65. John Paul Lederach and M. Jenner, eds., A Handbook of International Peacebuilding: Into The Eye of the Storm (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), xiv.
• 66. United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, “Questions and Answers on the UN Peacebuilding Commission,” http://www.un.org/peace/peacebuilding/questions.htm.
• 67. ] Keating, xxxiii. It can include: disarming warring parties, decommissioning and destroying weapons, de-mining, repatriating refugees, restoring law and order, creating or rebuilding justice systems, training police forces and customs agents, providing technical assistance, advancing efforts to protect human rights, strengthening civil society institutions, and reforming and strengthening institutions of governance, including assistance in monitoring and supervising electoral processes and promoting formal and informal participation in the political process.
• 68. Colin Gleichmann, et al., Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration: A Practical Field and Classroom Guide (GTZ, NODEFIC, PPC and SNDC, 2004).
• 69. Ramsbotham, 191.
• 70. Elizabeth Cousens, “Introduction” in Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies , ed. Elizabeth Cousens, and Chetan Kumar (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 14-15.
• 71. Chetan Kumar, “Conclusion,” in Cousens and Kumar, 183.
• 72. Kumar, 185.
• 73. Cousens, 12.
• 74. Kumar, 184.
• 75. Kumar, 186, quoting from Lederach, “Just Peace: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace (Utrecht, Netherlands: European Center for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 29-30.
• 76. Pugh, 323.
• 77. Keating and Knight’s 2004 edited volume states that one of the key themes of current peacebuilding literature is relocating peacebuilding to include prevention. Keating, xxxiii.
• 78. Kumar, 213.
• 79. Lederach is known for effective use of “second-order language” that bridges hermeneutical divisions between the religious and secular. While he is a prominent figure among mainstream peacebuilding practitioners, his work has been intimately connected to religion from the beginning, as he has drawn resources from his Mennonite tradition.
• 80. Caritas Internationalis, Peacebuilding: A Caritas Training Manual (2002), 4.
• 81. Appleby, 226. For example, Cynthia Sampson identifies more than a dozen types of actors who contributed to the ending of apartheid in South Africa.
• 82. Sharon Harper and Kathleen Clancy, “The way To Do Is To Be: Exploring the Interface Between Values and Research,” Gender and Development 17, no. 1 (March 1999): 73-80.
• 83. In this second category, a religious leader, community or institution may engage in the following efforts: emphasizing a religious traditions’ values of tolerance and nonviolence; responding to aggression and violence of co-religionists; guarding against co-option of religion by political entrepreneurs; respecting religious freedom; supporting interfaith initiatives; searching for early warning signs; exemplifying tolerance and inclusivity; and providing spiritual resources and hope. Paraphrased from Judy Carter and Gordon S. Smith, “Religious Peacebuilding: From Potential to Action,” in Coward, 294-295.
• 84. This corresponds with conflict resolution scholarship that emphasizes the importance of complementarity and cooperation between various actors, official and unofficial, religious and secular. Nick Lewer, “International Non-Government Organisations and Peacebuilding: Perspectives from Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution,” Centre for Conflict Resolution, Department of Peace Studies, Working Paper 3, October 1999.
• 85. Appleby, 221.
• 86. Marc Gopin, “World Religions, Violence, and Myths of Peace in International Relations,” in Busuttil, 36-42.
• 87. Of course, humility is not a virtue inherent or exclusive to religious approaches to peace. Indeed, bringing god/s into the equation can result in a manner of peacebuilding that is arrogant and imposing, to put it mildly. This potential for cultural and structural violence (as defined by Galtung) is a facet of the ambivalence of religion.
• 88. John Paul Lederach, “Five Qualities of Practice in Support of Reconciliation Processes,” in F orgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation , by S. J. Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Peterson (Radnor, Penn.: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), 198. Highlighting three of the world’s religions, Lederach writes, “Among the greatest of all mandates common to the three Abrahamic religious traditions [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] was the simple phrase of the prophet [Micah]: Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.”
• 89. For reference to the importance of humility in reconciliation, see Lederach in Helmick, 198-199.
• 90. Quoted in Caritas, 2002, 3.
• 91. Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/
• 92. Julia Berger, “Religious Non-Governmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis” (International Society for Third-Sector Research and John Hopkins University, 2003), http://isrc.payap.ac.th/document/papers/paper02.pdf ., 14.
• 93. Gopin in Busuttil, 46.
• 94. Gerrie Ter Haar, “Religion: Source of Conflict or Resource for Peace?” in Bridge or Barrier: Religions, Violence and Visions for Peace , ed. James J. Busuttil and Gerrie Ter Haar (Leidon: Brill Academic Publisher, 2004), 24.
• 95. Gopin in Busuttil, 50-52.
• 96. Gopin in Busuttil, 49.
• 97. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
• 98. Tsjeard Bouth, S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, and Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Faith-Based Peace-Building: Mapping and Analysis of Christian, Muslim and Multi-Faith Actors (Washington DC: Salam Institute for Peace & Justice and the Clingendael Institute, November 2005), p. 40, available at http://www.salaminstitute.org/Resources/salampub.htm .
• 99. Appleby, 168.
• 100. As cited in Ramsbotham, 211; Judith Large, The War Next Door: A Study of Second Track Intervention During the War in ex-Yugoslavia (Stroud: Hawthorne Press, 1997), 4; Betts Fetherston, “Transformative Peacebuilding: Peace Studies in Croatia,” Paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Minneapolis, March 1998.
• 101. Berger, 5.
• 102. Ad hoc funding and shifting expectations of international donors can result in arbitrary change and waste. Bronwyn Evans-Kent and Roland Bleiker, “Peace Beyond the State? NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Mitigating Conflict: the role of NGOs , ed. Henry F. Carey and Oliver P. Richmond (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 108.
• 103. Bouth, 39, section 4.3.3.
• 104. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God , 170.
• 105. Note that the word “martyr” comes from a Greek term for “witness,” as in “witness to one’s faith.”
• 106. R. Brennan Hill, 8 Spiritual Heroes: Their Search for God (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2002), 184.
• 107. For example, Muslims in Sudan welcomed an ecumenical Christian team to mediate the Addis Ababa settlement of 1972. Douglas Johnston, “Looking Ahead: Toward a New Paradigm,” in Johnston and Sampson, 318.
• 108. Appleby, 8; Bouth, 39.
• 109. Bouth, 36.
• 110. Gopin in Busuttil, 44.
• 111. Berger, 18.
• 112. Bouth, 37.
• 113. Also, as an overarching factor, hierarchical structures provide the benefits of multiple points of access, levels of accountability and authority, and proximity to other societal hierarchies such as government. Conversely, autonomous congregations do not suffer hierarchy’s negative aspects, which include the relative inflexibility of bureaucracy and the taint of association with harmful and/or unpopular policies and acts of central bodies or other branches of the religion.
• 114. Appleby, 230-244.
• 115. It does not require “proof” that the spiritual is relevant or, indeed, that it exists.
• 116. For a journalist’s exposition of this in various contemporary conflict settings, see Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2003).
• 117. For a case study example, see William F. Vendley and James L. Cairns, “Religious Dynamics in Kosovo and the Potential for Cooperation,” in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions , ed. William Joseph Buckley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 461.
• 118. The Caritas peacebuilding manual includes exercises based on the biblical stories “Jacob and Esau” and “The Prodigal Son” (Caritas, 2002), 37-46. See also Lederach on his use of the story “Jacob and Esau,” in Building Peace .
• 119. Gopin, 275 (see note 17).
• 120. Appleby, 49.
• 121. Massaro focuses on the Christian actors, though he notes that non-Christian groups were active as well. He lists the Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the American Baptist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Disciples of Christ, and the United Church of Christ, as well as the Mennonites and Quakers. The U.S. Bishops Conference voiced their opposition in letters dated 17 September and 21 November 2002 and statements dated 26 February and 19 March 2003. Massaro, 117-119.
• 122. Reuters, “U.S. Religious Group Condemns Iraq War” (February 18, 2006). This is an article on the U.S. conference for the World Council of Churches.
• 123. Hedges, 146.
• 124. This is part of the mission, for example, of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, http://cpn.nd.edu/.
• 125. Annek Galama and Paul van Tongren, eds., Towards Better Peacebuilding Practice: On Lessons Learned, Evaluation Practices and Aid and Conflict (Utrecht, Netherlands: European Center for Conflict Prevention, 2002).
• 126. For a discussion of the importance of accountability in post-conflict societies, see “Accountability” in I nternational Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction , by Richard Caplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• 127. Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace—or war (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
• 128. Jonathan Goodhand and Nick Lewer, “Sri Lanka: NGOs and peace-building in complex political emergencies,” Third World Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1999): 69-87.This is not exclusive to religious actors. See, for example, Goodhand and Lewer’s discussion about the “anarchy of good intentions” in Sri Lanka.
• 129. Marie Olson and Frederic S. Pearson, “Civil War Characteristics, Mediators, and Resolution,” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 19, no. 4 (2002): 421-446.
• 130. Kristian Berg Harpviken and Hanne Eggen Røislien, “Mapping the Terrain: The Role of Religion in Peacemaking,” International Peace Research Institute (Oslo), July 2005, 5.
• 131. Philip Lewis, “Depictions of ‘Christianity’ within British Islamic Institutions,” in Islamic Interpretations of Christianity , ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). This difficulty can be manifest even in the way “co-religionist” is defined. For example, Wahhabi ideology equates non-Wahhabi with non-believer, thereby denying “co-religion” status to the majority of Muslims.
• 132. Brian Starken notes, for instance, that Tamil and Sinhalese bishops and priests have trouble working together in Sri Lanka. Fr. Brian Starken, C.SSp., Interview with author (July 21, 2006), Dublin. Starken is editor of Caritas Internationalis (1999) and contributing writer to Caritas Internationalis (2002).
• 133. World Vision Statement of Faith, http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/hr.nsf/stable/hr_faith . World Vision Human Resources, http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/hr.nsf/stable/hr_requirements.
• 134. Catholic Relief Services, CRS Frequently Asked Questions, http://www.crs.org/about_us/careers/fellowship_opportunities/faq.cfm.
• 135. Appleby, 272-3.
• 136. World Vision, FAQ, http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/pr.nsf/stable/press_FAQs?Open&lid... . “We understand and respect the cultures in which we work and do not proselytize.”
• 137. It is interesting to note change and mobilization on this issue. For instance, Pope Benedict XVI recently requested a study that could alter the RCC position on the use of condoms in HIV prevention (Tony Barber, “Vatican considers allowing use of condoms in fight against AIDS,” Financial Times, April 27, 2006, 2). Also, religious leaders called for unified and extended responses during a three day event preceding the 2006 International AIDS Conference. Speakers included the Special Advisor for HIV and AIDS with Caritas Internationalis. See press releases, and other writings at Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, http://www.e-alliance.ch/.
• 138. This is perhaps illustrated by debate surrounding the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Appleby, 251-252.
• 139. See Harvey Cox, “World Religions and Conflict Resolution” in Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft , by Johnston and Sampson; Johnston, Faith Based Diplomacy , sections II and III; Ter Haar, Bridge or Barrier; Coward, Religious Peacebuilding; and Bouth, Faith-Based Peace-Building , section II.
• 140. For the stories of sixteen religious peacebuilders from the Abrahamic faiths, see Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, and David Little, ed., Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• 141. Cynthia Sampson, “Quaker Conciliation during the Nigerian Civil War” in Johnston and Sampson, 88-118.
• 142. Catherine Morris, “Case Studies in Religion and Peacebuilding: Cambodia,” in Coward, 191-211.
• 143. William Headley, “Justice But Little Peace: Peacebuilding as a New Social Action Agenda,” Peace and Change 25, no. 4 (October 2000): 494.
• 144. Appleby, 153-4.
• 145. Gerald Shenk, "God with Us? The Role of Religion in Conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia," Research Report No. 15 (Uppsala, Sweden: Life and Peace Institute, 1993), quoted in Lederach, Building Peace , 31.
• 146. D’Souza, Diane, “Creating Spaces,” in Coward, 169-189.
• 147. See, for example, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, http://cpn.nd.edu/.
• 148. Appleby, 10.
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Heather DuBois is the program associate for the Religion and Conflict Resolution Program at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. She has conducted independent research while volunteering with Catholic Relief Services and other peacebuilding NGOs in Mindanao, Philippines. DuBois was a researcher, writer and editor at the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, and also served two years with AmeriCorps VISTA managing the Louisiana Violence Prevention Alliance. Heather holds a masters degree in conflict resolution from the University of Bradford in England.

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By Eric Brahm

September 2005  

We are bombarded on a nearly daily basis with news stories that portray religion as a cause of seemingly intractable conflict the world over. Some, in fact, trace the view of religion as a source of conflict all the way back to the religious wars that ravaged seventeenth century Europe.[1] What does not attract attention is the peacebuilding power of religion. This contribution is often overlooked, in part, because the secular media rarely pays attention to the role of religious peacemakers because their work is often not dramatic enough. However, all of the world's major religions have a significant strain emphasizing peace.[2] Religious leaders and workers have proven to be key civil society actors in many efforts to resolve conflicts, serving as intermediaries or " Third Siders " or helping to facilitate reconciliation . This essay explores some of the ways in which religion has played a positive role in mitigating conflict and offers brief profiles of a few such organizations.

Relief/Humanitarian Assistance

Motivated by a desire to help those less fortunate, many religious-based NGOs are involved in humanitarian assistance . The desire is to relieve suffering, whether due to natural disaster or man-made calamity. Many are also engaged in longer-range development projects. At times, however, these projects have the unintended consequence of creating or exacerbating conflict.[3] That problem, combined with a growing recognition that peacebuilding will aid in the sustainability of humanitarian assistance and development programs, this has led quite a number of these organizations to build peacebuilding components into their work. Humanitarian assistance programs can also help peace by promoting poverty reduction and addressing economic inequality. They may also support the development of civil society organizations that provide venues for peaceful participation and conflict management. A few prominent examples include the following.

American Jewish World Service [ http://www.ajws.org/ ]

The AJWS began in 1985 with a mission of working to alleviate hunger, disease, and poverty around the world. In doing so, it draws upon notions of social justice in Jewish tradition. At present, it makes grants to hundreds of grassroots organizations around the world and hundreds of volunteers participate in projects each year.

Catholic Relief Services [ http://www.catholicrelief.org/ ]

American bishops created the organization in 1943. Inspired by the Gospel tradition, Catholic Relief Services aims to assist the poor and disadvantaged in pursuit of justice. It does so both through direct assistance and in supporting the development of local capacity. Catholic Relief Services has a global network of offices in nearly 100 countries around the globe.

Mercy Corps [ http://www.mercycorps.org/home/ ]

Mercy Corps has been working since 1979 to provide emergency relief. It also supports the development of sustainable communities through assistance in areas such as agriculture, economic development, health, housing, infrastructure, as well as capacity-building amongst local organizations. The organization also spearheads efforts to manage conflict peacefully and encourage citizen participation and accountability.

World Vision [ http://www.worldvision.org ]

World Vision is an ecumenical Christian relief and development organization that has recently recognized the importance of conflict prevention and peacebuilding in both making its relief services obsolete and making its development efforts sustainable. It does so primarily at the community level. "World Vision's research reveals that participatory processes to identify community needs and to promote community development can help prevent violent conflict. These planning processes contribute to peace through bringing community leaders together across ethnic/religious divisions and through intermixing groups that oppose each other."

Faith-Based Mediation/Intervention

Motivated by religious goals of seeking peace, religious leaders and faith-based NGOs have frequently played prominent roles as mediators or other forms of intervention in conflict scenarios. Some religious figures have been able to use their positions of authority to work toward peace and to forward the cause of justice. Pope John Paul II, for example, played a prominent role in Lebanon, Poland, and Haiti. As respected members of society, individual national religious leaders have often been at the forefront of efforts to deny impunity and bring an end to fighting. For instance, local bishops have served as mediators in civil wars in Mozambique, Burundi, and Liberia. The All Africa Conference of Churches [ http://www.aacc-ceta.org/homeEng.htm] brought a temporary end to the Sudanese civil war in 1972 in part through prayer at critical points in the negotiations and by invoking both Christian and Muslim texts. Under many Latin American dictatorships in the 1970-1980s, the Catholic Church was able to criticize the lack of human rights . In Brazil, members of the Church worked with the World Council of Churches [ http://www.wcc-coe.org/] to conduct a private truth commission of abuses under the military government. Some have pointed to the role that Buddhism can play in building peace in Cambodia as it is the only institution respected and trusted by all segments of society.[4] These efforts, however, often do go unrecognized, particularly the important efforts of individuals and groups engaged in Track II diplomacy and working at the grassroots level.

Mediators who are motivated by their faith may face challenges unique to their perspective.[5] It is very difficult to work with those who the faith-based mediator may believe to be morally wrong, if not evil. Furthermore, the mediator may be tempted to abandon their neutral position for ‘an eye for an eye' attitude, should they or their loved ones be threatened. The supreme challenge, although this is by no means unique to mediation, is to find God in others. One advantage they appear to have is their persistence and commitment. Studies have suggested that faith-based NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina have helped overcome conditions that fueled the conflict by bringing people together for such varied projects as soup kitchens, building homes, and organizing choirs. The long-term commitment of these NGOs, these studies find, have contributed to reconciliation.[6]

Some examples of faith-based organizations that engage in mediation or related interventions include:

Quakers (The Religious Society of Friends)

Quaker theology is committed to nonviolence. They began providing relief services in the 1960-1970s and had also gone so far as to sponsor conferences for disputants. Their 1984 involvement in the Sri Lankan civil war, however, led the Quakers in a new direction, namely providing mediation. They came to Sri Lanka hoping to learn more about the conflict, determine if there were development projects they could support, and share their experiences with similar conflicts elsewhere.[7] As the conflict became clearer, the Quakers concluded that mediation might have been beneficial, but no one was filling the role. From that experience, a number of lessons emerged. One was the importance of operating transparently and observing strict neutrality . The Quakers were very concerned about becoming the center of attention. They demanded that their role as intermediary be kept quiet. In their view, their effectiveness depended on not being seen as part of the conflict. In fact, they emphasized their powerlessness in the situation so as to impart on the parties that they had no interest in the conflict. For similar reasons, they refuse to set deadlines for the disputants. In Sri Lanka, they also repeatedly reaffirmed with the sides that their presence was still seen as useful.

The Anabaptists/Mennonites (Peace and Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA)

The Mennonites have also become active in peacemaking efforts.[8] Their belief in nonviolence dates back to their origins during the Reformation in the 1500s. The experience of World War II challenged the beliefs of many American Mennonites who shifted from conscientious objection, which was common in World War I, to participation in non-combat roles. After the war, Mennonites continued in similar roles. Their post-war work in providing relief after natural and manmade disasters led some to suggest that they should focus on the root causes of the crisis. By the mid-1970s, the Mennonite Conciliation Service (MCS) had been established to provide mediation in domestic and international contexts. For example, Mennonites worked in South Africa from the 1970s up to the end of apartheid. While identifying with the oppressed, they also reached out to the Afrikaner community.[9] Later innovations included Christian Peacemaker Teams and International Conciliation Service. Mennonite peacebuilding is distinguished by a number of factors:[10] they are careful not to take control of the process from the parties; they focus their efforts on the grassroots level; they commit to serve as witness and stand with the oppressed; and a determination to commit to long-term involvement should the parties desire it.

Plowshares Institute

The Plowshares Institute, based in the United Methodist Church, has spent three decades conducting faith-based peacebuilding training around the world. Their goal is to impart conflict transformation skills from a spiritual and moral perspective. In South Africa, the Plowshares Institute has worked with four other South African NGOs to bring together leaders from opposing sides in order to train them to facilitate communication and cooperation across social divides. In total, they identified some 1400 grassroots leaders in South Africa. The grassroots leaders were first trained to see conflict as an opportunity for systematic change and to build relationships that help transform conflict. Before South Africa's 1994 national all-race elections, Plowshares brought together South African police and anti-apartheid activists that had been mistreated by the police in order to challenge stereotypes and facilitate collaboration through such methods as cross-role playing, in which those on opposing sides adopting and advocating their opponents' points of view.

World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) 

The World Conference of Religions for Peace was founded in 1970 as a venue for dialogue amongst the world's religious leaders to identify common concerns, formulate plans of action, and articulate a vision of the future. Amongst other things, WCRP has mediated dialogue among warring factions in Sierra Leone, worked to advance reconciliation in Bosnia and Kosovo and to assist the millions of children affected by Africa's AIDS pandemic.

Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is an interfaith organization that recognizes the essential unity of all creation, works toward a just and peaceful world, and recognizes the transformative potential of religion in realizing such a vision. Founded in 1914, the organization now has branches in 40 countries. In one example of FOR's work, in 1984 the Little Sisters of Jesus in the Philippines asked FOR to train Filipino civil society leaders training in the theory and practice of active nonviolence because they feared the country was headed for civil war.

Community of Sant'Egidio

Sant'Egidio, a Rome-based Catholic lay organization, has made significant contributions to peace processes in such far ranging places as Mozambique, Burundi, Congo, Algeria, and Kosovo through a peacemaking approach that is deeply rooted in Catholic tradition and theology.[11] Andrea Bartoli, a member of Sant'Egidio describes their work in Mozambique in his interview with Beyond Intractability's Julian Portilla.

Interfaith/Inter-Religious Dialogue

John Paul Lederach, amongst others, has cautioned against assuming that religious (or any other form of conflict) conflict can be avoided. Rather, conflict is a natural outgrowth of human interaction. Recognizing this, there are more or less effective ways of managing conflict. With respect to our present interest, interfaith dialogue would seem an important, often proactive means of minimizing conflict through fighting ignorance and distrust . At its core, inter-religious dialogue brings together those of different faith traditions for conversation. Dialogue can take a range of forms and have a variety of goals in mind. It may involve any level of participant from elites to the grassroots . Through discussion, groups and individuals may come to a better understanding of other faith traditions and of the many points of agreement that likely exist between them. As the short list below suggests, these networks have multiplied as people from different faiths have recognized the importance of communication to facilitate interfaith cooperation and to end religious-based violence. In his interview for Beyond Intractability, Mohammed Abu-Nimer talks about his work in Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogues.

Institute for Interreligious Dialogue , Iran

The institute works for the greater understanding amongst different religious faiths. It does so in part by maintaining a library with resources on different religions and sponsors language classes for those interested in studying Islam. What is more, it holds monthly meetings and is involved in local and international conferences to promote knowledge of other religions.

Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID)

IID works to bring together representatives from different faiths around the world to promote understanding. By learning about other faith traditions, it also builds understanding of one's own faith. It also promotes efforts at religious education to eliminate ignorance.

International Council of Christians and Jews

The ICCJ is an umbrella organization of Christian-Jewish dialogue organizations in nearly 40 countries around the world. The dialogues got going in response in response to the Holocaust. Recently, the ICCJ has been pursuing dialogue with Moslems as well. The organization holds yearly conferences as well as ad hoc consultations.

Muslim Christian Dialogue Forum (Minhaj-ul-Quran), Pakistan

Established in 1998, the organization has sought to promote equal rights for all religious groups within Pakistan. It emerged from Pakistan Awami Tehreek, Pakistani political party.

Society for Inter-religious Dialogue (SIDA), Indonesia

SIDA was a response to the lack of respect for other religious traditions and inter-religious violence in Indonesia in the late 1990s. It aims both the promote understanding and meetings as well as to fight against the hijacking of religious symbols for political gains.

United Religions Initiatives

Created in 2000, URI has thousands of members representing over one hundred religions, spiritual expressions, and indigenous traditions in more than fifty countries around the world. They are working to build solidarity and facilitate the spread of best practices to build cultures of peace. The centerpiece of the URI is Cooperation Circles, which are regional or virtual teams made up of diverse members who identify concerns and articulate a vision of peace.

[1] Raymond G. Helmick, S.J., "Does Religion Fuel or Heal in Conflicts? In Forgiveness and Reconciliation , Raymond G. Helmick, S.J. and Rodney L. Petersen, eds. (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001).

[2] Henry O. Thompson, World Religions in War and Peace , (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1988).; John Ferguson, War and Peace in the World's Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Homer Jack, ed. World Religions and World Peace: The International Inter-Religious Symposium on Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1968).

[3] Mary Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace or War . 1999 Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers.

[4] Catherine Morris Peacebuilding in Cambodia: The Role of Religion http://www.peacemakers.ca/research/Cambodia/Cambodia2000ExecSum.html

[5] John Paul Lederach, The Journey Toward Reconciliation (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1999).

[6] Can Faith-Based NGOs Advance Interfaith Reconciliation? The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina http://www.usip.org/publications/can-faith-based-ngos-advance-interfaith-reconciliation-case-bosnia-and-herzegovina

[7] Deborah M. Kolb and Associates, "Joseph Elder: Quiet Peacemaking in a Civil War," in When Talk Works: Profiles of Mediators (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994).

[8] Joseph S. Miller, "A History of the Mennonite Conciliation Service, Internaitonal Conciliation Service, and Christian Peacemaker Teams," in From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions to Internaiotnal Peacebuilding , Cynthia Sampson and John Paul Lederach, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[9] Robert Herr and Judy Zimmerman Herr, "Building Peace in South Africa," in From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions to Internaiotnal Peacebuilding , Cynthia Sampson and John Paul Lederach, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[10] Sally Engle Merry, "Mennonite Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation: A Cultural Analysis," in From the Ground Up: Mennonite Contributions to Internaiotnal Peacebuilding , Cynthia Sampson and John Paul Lederach, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[11] Catholic Contributions to International Peace http://www.usip.org/publications/catholic-contributions-international-peace

Use the following to cite this article: Brahm, Eric. "Religion and Peace." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2005 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/religion-and-peace >.

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6 Structural and Cultural Violence in Religion and Peacebuilding

Jason A. Springs is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he also holds an appointment as faculty fellow in the Center for the Study of Religion and Society in the Department of Sociology. His research and teaching focus on ethical perspectives on restorative justice; conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by oppositional forms of moral and religious pluralism for transforming conflict in European and North American contexts; religious nationalism; and lenses of structural and cultural violence for peacebuilding. His articles addressing the role of religion and conflict in modern public life appear in Journal of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Contemporary Pragmatism, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. His broader interests include the ethical and political dimensions of American pragmatist thought and postliberal theology. He is the author of Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010) and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism (2013).

• Published: 04 March 2015
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This chapter makes the case for the necessity of a multi-focal conception of violence in religion and peacebuilding. It first traces the emergence and development of the analytical concepts of structural and cultural violence in peace studies, demonstrating how these lenses draw central insights from, but also differ from and improve upon, critical theory and reflexive sociology. It argues that addressing structural and cultural forms of violence—perhaps especially in non-deadly manifestations—are concerns as central as addressing direct (explicit, personal) and deadly forms of violence for building just and sustainable peace. It argues, further, that religiously informed and/or motivated peacebuilders are especially well-appointed and equipped to identify and address violence in its structural and cultural manifestations. The chapter then examines how concepts of structural and cultural violence centrally inform the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West to cultivate just and sustainable peace in a context as putatively peaceful and prosperous as the United States.

Recent work in religion, conflict, and peacebuilding demonstrates the vast resources that scholars and practitioners working with and/or within religious traditions and institutions can contribute (and have contributed) to transforming conflict, conceptualizing and cultivating justice, and building sustainable peace. 1 What happens when this important engagement between religious peacebuilding and peace studies more generally becomes intentionally bidirectional? What insights, lenses, and approaches emerge from peace studies that uniquely fit the purposes and practices of religious peacebuilding?

This chapter explores ways that the analytical lenses of structural and cultural violence that have emerged in peace studies debates since the 1960s aid in illuminating and addressing religious and cultural dimensions of conflict, violence, and peacebuilding that are of specific interest to religious peacebuilders. These analytical lenses have been powerfully applied across cases pertaining to poverty, development, gender, and race. Yet their application to concerns about religion and peacebuilding are comparatively underdeveloped. 2 I argue that they are equally incisive when applied to religious identity–based forms of violence and injustice, and the social, spiritual, emotional, and psychological effects of those forms. Critical attention to the processes and debates by which these analytical lenses emerged in peace studies will illuminate an array of theoretical points of contact, overlap, and possibilities for mutual enrichment between peace studies as a still emerging field, and the flourishing literature on religion and peacebuilding.

In what follows I demonstrate two ways that developing analytical lenses of structural and cultural violence, and incorporating them into religion, conflict, and peacebuilding, importantly expands and deepens that field. First, I argue that integrating these lenses into the conceptual framework of religion and peacebuilding requires critically revising that subfield’s temptation toward an overly narrow focus upon “deadly violence.” This correction makes possible multifocal forms of critical analysis in religion and peacebuilding, thereby rendering more sensitive and fine-grained the identification and assessment of the manifold forms that violence may take, and the compound and multi-layered effects those forms may produce. Such multidimensionality eludes the prevailing conceptions of violence in religion and peacebuilding insofar as those are conceived primarily (or perhaps exclusively) as physical and/or deadly. At one level, then, the resulting analytical framework becomes more encompassing in the simple sense that it now aims to assess multiple types of violence. It is deepened in the sense that this expansion results in greater nuance and precision both in detecting frequently acute distinctions between forms of violence, and diagnosing the sometimes tacit or non-explicit modes by which those different forms of violence mutually reinforce one another or relate symbiotically.

Second, I demonstrate that achieving analytical command of the lenses of structural and cultural violence is particularly imperative for those who are critically conversant with, or who draw upon and utilize the resources of, religious traditions, practices, and institutions for the purposes of peacebuilding. This is the case for three reasons. First, these lenses illuminate manifestations and effects of violence to which scholars and practitioners laboring in religion and peacebuilding are likely to be particularly attuned and motivated or potentially well-equipped to understand and constructively respond. These forms of violence surface in the account below as deprivation of “identity needs” and “well-being needs.” To this end, the second portion of this chapter examines some thinkers and activists who demonstrate in their work the ways that religious peacebuilding has been (can be) uniquely attuned to structural and cultural violence. I make the case that, in the instances I examine, this attunement derives from the incisiveness, sensitivity, and self-reflexivity afforded by the religious knowledge, religious orientation, and/or religious character of the peacebuilding effort.

At the same time, by no means are “identity” and “well-being” needs exhaustive of the forms of violence with which religious peacebuilders will be concerned, and may find themselves especially well-appointed to address. Neither are these forms of needs-deprivation exclusively the jurisdiction of those who work within or evince a critically reflective grasp of the resources provided by religious traditions. Nor, for that matter, are participants within religious traditions adept at such modes of reflection by default . As these provisos indicate, I deploy the conception of “religious peacebuilder” in a sense that is broader than what one may find in other chapters of this volume. While the figures I examine in this chapter are motivated and informed by their own religious commitments and identification with religious traditions, as I use the term, one need not be motivated by personal religious commitments nor identify or affiliate with a religious tradition to be a “religious peacebuilder.” I include in this category activists, practitioners, and thinkers who acquire proficiency in a religious tradition in order to work with the resources available there—for both critical and constructive purposes—in the interests of reducing violence in its various forms, and cultivating conditions for a just and sustainable peace. Such figures need not be participants in (i.e., self-identifying “insiders” to) the tradition(s) in question in order to be what Max Weber called “religiously musical” in their scholarship and activism. Rather, they may acquire an intimate grasp of a religious tradition, and develop the skills necessary to engage and deploy its features and elements, for ad hoc purposes, and in the interests of developing a conception, or pursuing conditions, of justpeace (which may be consistent or overlap with that of the tradition in question). 3

These provisos lead to the second reason that analytical lenses of structural and cultural violence are imperative for so-called religious peacebuilders. Inclusion of structural and cultural violence lenses in religion and peacebuilding is indispensable because structures and cultures interweave to shape many of the most broadly occurring features of historical religious traditions, for example, symbolic and linguistic practices, rituals, exercises of identity- and self-formation, textual interpretive practices, and institutional arrangements. Lenses that draw light to the ways that violence may embed and exert itself (whether visibly or tacitly) in these forms—even as they strive to contribute to peacebuilding processes—are crucial for those who work in peacebuilding with particular attention to the challenges raised by, and resources especially available to, religious traditions, institutions, practices, and identities. Thus, lenses of structural and cultural violence afford indispensable forms of critical self-reflexivity that are frequently absent from conceptions of inter-religious peacebuilding engagement and dialogue. 4

A correlate of this second reason forms the third basis on which I claim that analytical lenses of structural and cultural violence are of particular value for religion and peacebuilding. These forms of critical self-reflexivity aim to facilitate constructive and practical work at the same time that they persist in diagnostic self-inventory and, ideally, self-correction. They emerged out of concerns surrounding peace building . They were fashioned in order ultimately to contribute to the positive processes of cultivating and fostering the conditions of just and sustainable peace. I make the case that these lenses facilitate an equilibrium between self-reflexive critical analysis, on one hand, and constructive objectives of cultivating conditions of justice and peace, on the other, that are uniquely tailored to the purposes of peacebuilding. This sidesteps temptations to subvert such constructive reflection and practice through interminable systemic analysis of power and domination (a temptation, I demonstrate, to which analyses of power and domination in critical theory are prone). Insofar as peacebuilding initiatives born of, or drawing upon, religious traditions and institutions aim to build constructive alternatives to violence and injustice, lenses of structural and cultural violence serve to critically chasten their efforts at the same time that they facilitate those efforts in indispensable ways.

The Structure and Claims of This Chapter

In Part I of this chapter, I set forth a genealogical account of the emergence of analysis of structural and cultural forms of violence in peace studies. Here I account for the central concepts in and around structural and cultural violence, and provide a critical narrative of their emergence. I examine their theoretical roots and objectives in order to illuminate both their strengths and liabilities in comparison with analytical options with which they share influences and family resemblances (e.g., critical theory, reflexive sociology). I identify the concerns and purposes in response to which these lenses were derived, and reexamine the arguments by which they were contested and refined over ensuing decades. This genealogy culminates in demonstrating how these lenses illuminate the indefensibility—and, in fact, debilitating deficiency—of materialist-reductionist conceptions of peace research, and the security studies orientation that ensued therefrom.

As we will see, the emergence of these lenses challenges peace researchers with the need to recognize and attend to forms of violence and injustice “that work on the soul.” Moreover, they illuminate the necessity of studying and addressing the ways that organized religious traditions, and the array of institutional orders, language and symbol systems, ritual and textual practices, and modes of identity formation that constitute them, may be lived out in ways that enforce, conceal, and perpetuate such violence. Yet they raise a converse possibility that these same complex practices, systems, institutions, and traditions might also be conceptualized, embodied, and deployed in ways that foster peace and combat injustice. As we will see, religiously conversant and religiously motivated scholars and practitioners can be especially well-positioned to identify and address certain forms and effects of violence that the lenses of structural and cultural violence disclose, and the possibilities for peace they intimate.

To substantiate these characterizations, in the second portion of this chapter I examine the work of two figures whom I position within the ambit of religion and peacebuilding: Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West. I demonstrate how each of these thinkers and activists has formulated and deployed modes of criticism that anticipate or parallel those lenses that peace studies scholars theoretically articulated. In each case, the respective thinker critically identifies and constructively responds to what are, in effect, structural and cultural forms of violence. Moreover, the respective interventions are compelled, and rendered especially discerning and incisive, in virtue of the religious commitments and traditions from which their analyses derive. Their analyses anticipate, largely parallel—and in important ways, surpass—the accounts of structural and cultural violence as articulated by peace studies scholars. Each figure accomplishes this separately from the genealogical emergence of those concepts as formal lenses within peace studies proper. And yet the instructive family resemblances are there to be explored and developed. In fact, identifying and developing these resemblances enriches both sets of resources, and contributes to a more integrative vision of the relation between religion and peacebuilding, on one hand, and peace studies more broadly.

I. Violence: The Missing Dimensions of Religion and Peacebuilding

In a pivotal essay in the religion and peacebuilding scholarship, subtitled “The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict,” David Little and Scott Appleby make the case that religious peacebuilding contains unique resources capable of transforming conflict and restructuring societies in the wake of deadly violence. Religious peacebuilding consists of “the range of activities performed by religious actors and institutions for the purpose of resolving and transforming deadly conflict, with the goal of building social relations and political institutions characterized by an ethos of tolerance and nonviolence.” 5 The authors position religious peacebuilding as a multidimensional and multi-phase process in which practices of conflict transformation unfold across moments of conflict management (“the replacement of violent with nonviolent means of settling disputes”) and conflict resolution (“removing, to the extent possible, the inequalities between the disputants, by means of mediation, negotiation, and/or advocacy”), which merge into processes of structural reform (“efforts to build institutions and foster civic leadership that will address the root causes of the conflict and develop long-term practices and institutions conducive to peaceful, nonviolent relations in the society”). 6 Attending to—and, ideally, reforming—the social and political structures that mark out the context of conflict is what Little and Appleby refer to as a “post–deadly conflict phase of the process.” 7

Clearly, these seminal passages advance a multidimensional conception of peacebuilding, with particular attention to how religiously identified or motivated actors and religious traditions have contributed, and might contribute, to intervening in circumstances of explicit (or direct) violence, resolving the violence in question, and cultivating sustainable conditions of peace. Little and Appleby are not content to conceive of peacebuilding in terms of what peace researchers and practitioners have come to call “negative peace”—peace understood as the absence of war or visible, deadly conflict. They focus on the sustainability and quality of the peace that is built, the cultivation of institutions and sociopolitical structures necessary to maintain and promote such peace, and simultaneously, to address the root causes of the conflict that had to be contained in the first place.

At the same time, however, forms of conflict that are deadly provide the orienting concern for Little and Appleby—the focal point around which the other parts of their account orbit. So, for instance, attention to the structures and root causes of the conflict in question occurs during—indeed, largely constitutes—the “post–deadly conflict phase” of the process of peacebuilding. Concern for the impact of structural conditions and causes of violence prior to the eruption of deadly conflict is not prohibited on this approach. In fact, it is to be encouraged. And yet, in their approach, attention to such causes and conditions would, nonetheless, be motivated by the liability of those to give rise to conflict that is deadly. In this pivotal sense (and perhaps others), deadly conflict presents a conceptual center of gravity—an orientational spin—for the analytical attention and practical interventions of religious peacebuilding.

On the one hand, there is an important reason for their emphasis on deadly conflict. If deadly violence erupts, analyses and interventions that aim to assuage or contain it may be, at that particular point in time, the most pressing item on the peacebuilding agenda. And yet, on the other hand, an orientation to physically deadly conflict, while crucial, risks limiting the scope of religious peacebuilding, which Appleby and Little actually aim to develop and expand. It is at this point that efforts to integrate religion and peacebuilding set the stage for a mutually instructive engagement with peace studies more broadly, as well as with resources afforded by critical theory and discourse analysis.

A Genealogy of Violence in Peace Studies Since the Sixties

Questions over the extent to which deadly conflict ought to provide the impetus and orientation for peace theory, analysis, and practice have fueled wide-ranging debates among peace scholars since the 1960s. This question has, at once, sustained disagreement about, and inspired innovation and development of, some of the most pivotal analytical tools that peace studies has to offer to the related concerns of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding.

In his 1964 essay on the subject, sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung identified “negative peace” as “the absence of violence, the absence of war,” and positive peace as “the integration of human society.” 8 He later sharpened the concept of “negative peace,” defining it as “the absence of organized violence between such major human groups as nations, but also between racial and ethnic groups because of the magnitude that can be reached by internal wars.” Positive peace he further positioned as “a pattern of cooperation and integration between major human groups.” 9

Negative peace (peace understood as the absence of explicitly violent conflict) is, on its own, an inadequate conceptualization of the aims and objectives of peacebuilding. At the same time, however, it remains indispensable as a concern. In other words, to conceptualize and pursue peace in its “negative dimension” (i.e., containment, reduction, cessation of direct and physical forms of violent conflict) is still necessary and, in many cases, urgently so. And yet, however compelling the pursuit of such objectives, at no point could it be sufficient by itself. Rather, negative peace must be embedded within, and pursued in tandem with, positive peace. “How narrow it is to see peace as the opposite of war, and limit peace studies to war-avoidance studies, and more particularly avoidance of big wars or super-wars (defined as wars between big powers or superpowers), and even more particularly to the limitation, abolition, or control of super-weapons,” Galtung wrote. “Important interconnections among types of violence are left out, particularly the way in which one type of violence may be reduced or controlled at the expense of controlling another.” 10

Such claims aim not simply to expand the scope of peace studies and practice beyond the debilitatingly narrow boundaries of security studies and international relations. The more fundamental conceptual point is that addressing immediate conflict situations and presenting forms of direct and personal violence must be combined with the simultaneous pursuit of social justice. “Peace” conceived or pursued in the absence of an intentional and sustained, simultaneous pursuit of justice (understood relationally, in terms of mutual recognition, reciprocal accountability, protection against the violation of basic rights, even integration between persons and groups) limits itself to the cessation or suppression of direct violence or overt conflict. Holding explicit and direct forms of violence in abeyance—keeping order or “keeping the peace”—is entirely compatible with and often accompanies conditions of injustice, repression, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and myriad other forms of dehumanization. The latter constitute what Mohandas Gandhi described as akin to “the seeds of war”—often precursors to explicitly violent conflict but also, simultaneously, warfare of its own kind. 11 Moreover, insofar as such conditions become normal and are institutionalized, attending only to direct and explicit forms of violence in pursuit of negative peace is most assuredly to leave the roots of the violent conflict extensively in place.

There are further lessons to derive from this formulation. Even to mis-order the relation of positive to negative peace—to give an orientational emphasis to “negative peace”—risks making peace studies “crisis-driven.” It risks raising concern for justice and attention to the deeper causes and conditions of peace only after the fact; after attention-demanding direct violence has erupted in some particular circumstance. The analytical lenses emerging in peace studies challenged this imbalance. “There is no temporal, logical, or evaluative preference given to one or the other,” Galtung argued. “Social justice is not seen as an adornment to peace as absence of personal violence, nor is absence of personal violence seen as an adornment to peace as social justice.” 12 Peace researchers and practitioners would need to combine and promote both dimensions of peace—(“the absence of personal violence with the fight against social unjustice” [ sic ] 13 ). This gestured toward the symmetry—indeed, the conceptual interdependence—and orientational normativity that peace scholars and practitioners would strive to convey with the neologism justpeace several decades on. 14

This bidimensional account of negative and positive peace necessitated a multifocal lens for re-conceptualizing and identifying violence. The term structural violence came to refer to indirect, unintentional, or nonphysical forms of violence. At its most general level, the term denoted the causes and conditions of the gap in human functioning and flourishing between the potential and the realized or actual—“those factors that cause people’s actual physical and mental realizations to be below their potential realizations.” Calling such forms “structural” identified a form of violence that is perpetrated apart from the purposeful or goal-directed action of a particular actor or group, but rather, occurs through the normal functioning of the social system. Usually, traces of such violence show up as vast differentials of power, agency, need-fulfillment, or well-being (among other indicators). The causes of these differentials are inscribed in social structures that result in drastic deficits in “life chances.” “Individuals may do enormous amounts of harm to other human beings without ever intending to do so, just performing their regular duties as a job defined in the structure,” Galtung argued, “. . . [or] as a process, working slowly in the way misery in general, and hunger in particular, erode and finally kill human beings.” 15 He elsewhere explained:

Thus, when one person beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper class as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are not concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another. 16

So formulated, structural violence lenses aim to detect and analyze violence that does not manifest itself physically or visibly ( “to the naked eye”). In part, it aims at violence “that works on the soul”—“lies, brainwashing, indoctrination of various kinds, etc. that serve to decrease mental potentialities.” 17 Its conceptualization of such processes is indebted to appropriations from critical theory. And while this debt is not frequently recognized, it is actually important to understand. For precisely what is appropriated from critical theory, and what is refused, sheds light upon the crucial difference between structural violence and analyses of power and domination that often fall under the heading of “critique.”

The Virtue of “Under-Theorizing” Peace Studies?: Critical Theory and the Roots of Structural Violence

Critical theory appeared as a mode of social and political analysis in the inter-war years in Germany. It emerged from the complex integration of Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalist political economy, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Max Weber’s account of the ascendancy and predominance of the “legal rational” ( Zweckrationalitat ) administration of society and “dis-enchantment” of the modern world (e.g., the extirpation of religious understanding as a necessary ingredient in the working of the natural and social world, and its relegation to the sphere of private and personal life), among other analytical resources. Though different, these resources overlapped in their capacity to lay bare the fact that the emergence of the modern world presented itself as—and was widely presumed to embody—the triumph of reason over archaic superstition, science’s mastery of the natural world through experimental methods of prediction and control, modern industry’s manifestation of that scientific mastery, and the liberation of the sovereign, self-determining individual from the shackling duties imposed in previous epochs by roles dictated within religious and cultural traditions and communities.

Yet these (purportedly) fulfilled promises of the Enlightenment actually concealed insidious forms of un-freedom, self-alienation, and repression. Thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse distinguished “critical theory” from “traditional theory” in virtue of its basic objective of “human emancipation”—seeking to unfetter people from their captivity to the illusion that Enlightenment forms of knowledge (e.g., the predominance of scientific positivism and instrumental means-ends and cost-benefit forms of rationality) and modern modes of life had made them rational and set them free within an increasingly rational and free society. In overcoming archaic vestiges of history, the Enlightenment had actually internalized and insidiously re-instantiated much of what it believed it had eliminated.

Critical theory sought to expose people’s alienation from their true interests. What people (mis)recognized as forms of freedom actually manifest forms of social repression and domination to which those people were subject, but were less and less equipped to recognize. One aspect of critical theory’s emancipatory impulse was relentless “ideology critique.” Such critique deploys modes of criticism (sociological, economic, psychotherapeutic, political, and so forth) that seek to expose the ways that seemingly given and stable attitudes, ideas, practices, and institutions actually mystify and conceal the relations of power that constitute them, and normalize the forms of social domination in which they result. Critical theory, thus, aimed to expose modern and allegedly enlightened forms of social organization and individual identity as, in fact, forms of false consciousness or “ideological illusion” (processes in which “the real motive forces impelling [a thinker] remain unknown to him” 18 ). The critique of ideology aimed to unmask concealed modes of domination and repression in the present in hopes of redeeming the seeds of utopia that the Enlightenment had actually contained. 19

The subtle influence of critical theory on early developments in peace studies has significant implications. First, these resources enabled recognition that forms of structural violence may manifest as negative constraints that are not readily visible (e.g., psychological, spiritual, and emotional conditioning that delimits and prohibits whole ranges of potentialities). At the same time, and more importantly, insights from critical theory enabled recognition that structural violence may also exert itself in the social processes in and through which individual consciousness is positively shaped and formed (where, for example, persons are seemingly rewarded for participation and cooperation, thereby cultivating the kinds of habits, desires, dispositions, personalities, and consciousness valued by the influencers or influencing structures). This illuminated the need for powerful and systemic critiques of, for instance, consumer societies’ capacities to form and cultivate desires, and to generate perceived needs and ideals that only that form of society purports to be able to fulfill. 20

Of course, the impulses of critical theory that fuel criticism of these forms are prone to characterize structural repression and systemic domination as so pervasive as to produce a form of practical paralysis in the critic herself. Typically, this results from either a critical-analytical refusal to speak constructively and practically at all (for fear of implicating oneself—however inevitably—in some version of the very thing one is subjecting to relentless analysis), or finding violence and domination so pervasive that it becomes, in effect, impossible to identify (or perhaps even conceive of) circumstances that are not saturated by it in multiple varieties. To make the move from “the relentless criticism of all existing conditions” 21 to constructive—and ostensibly practicable—prescription would be to open oneself to the relentless interrogation of critical theory itself. 22 Thus, on one hand, incorporating elements of critical theory into structural violence ensures rigorous analysis that cuts deeply beneath surface-level appearances, and into the social and historical processes by which apparently fixed realities are constituted. At the same time, concern for practical results and constructive applicability required newly enriched—even newly imagined—conceptions of peace and justice that could steer clear of the Pandora’s box of analytical temptations to which critical theory and its heirs are prone (namely, fetishizing critique, and ultimately, forms of practical impotence that quickly ensue therefrom).

Is Structural Violence Really “Violent” If It Is Not Deadly?

From their inception, the lens of structural violence faced criticisms of being too vast, too encompassing, and allegedly, too normative. Is there some particular benefit in identifying a particular form of injustice as a type of violence ? Or is this simply a case of the peace researcher and peacebuilder projecting her preconceptions onto the world around her? “From many points of view,” wrote one critic, “an explicit recognition of the notion of ‘violence’ as a normative concept, with a meaning varying according to the value structure of the user, would have its advantages. It would at least reduce the possibilities for semantic manipulation, resulting in quasi-scientific propositions about what violence ‘really is’. It would be clear that ‘violence’ is simply the cause of what the user of the term does not like.” 23

Kenneth Boulding—economist, peace researcher, and Galtung’s key critical interlocutor—complained of the attenuation of analytical precision and the practical clumsiness that typically follow when one’s critical lenses become overly holistic, as he claimed that Galtung’s multi-variant account of violence had. 24 Boulding wrote:

The metaphor [of structural violence] is that poverty, deprivation, ill health, low expectation of life, a condition in which more than half the human race lives, is ‘like’ a thug beating up the victim and taking his money away from him in the street, or it is ‘like’ a conqueror stealing the land of the people and reducing them to slavery. The implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there is some truth to the metaphor, in the modern world at least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a very different phenomenon from poverty.. . . There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence.. . . Violence in the behavioral sense, that is, somebody actually doing something to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a ‘threshold’ phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of a pot.. . . The [structural violence] concept has been expanded to include all the problems of poverty, destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems which are only peripherally related to the structures which produce violence. 25

Boulding argued that attending to processes of dehumanization, poverty, and sociopolitical exclusion should not be the objectives of peace research unless they are deployed so as to lead directly to explicit violence that is intentionally perpetrated by some actor or group against another. Without such identifiable parameters, the analytical purposes of structural violence—while certainly noble—were far too vast and, at best, only tangentially related to “actual” violence (i.e. agent-originating, intentional, objective-directed, and deadly). The result was researchers’ asking important questions, but questions conceived and articulated in a way that obscured the possibility of answering them.

One response to such charges is to answer them on their own terms, delineating precisely whose interests and purposes structural violence serves, and how its manifestations contribute to the “threshold conditions” for direct violence of which Boulding spoke. So, for instance, the sociologist Peter Uvin rearticulated the category of structural violence to entail “the joint occurrence of high inequality, social exclusion, and the humiliation characteristic of symbolic violence.” 26 This account avoids the unwieldy diffusion of violence as (allegedly) anywhere and everywhere, for instance, by acknowledging the unavoidability of some inequalities in a world characterized by finite resources. Only when material inequality becomes viciously disproportionate, and is concurrent with forms of exclusion and humiliation, do those conditions amount to structural violence.

Exclusion may take more visible forms in discrimination based on racial, sexual, ethnic, and other characteristics. These may occur through processes, structures, and actions that “actively deny rights and entitlements to certain categories of marginalized people,” either officially or informally. 27 At the same time, exclusion may exert itself in seemingly more justified or inevitable forms (e.g., legal forms of exclusion 28 ). This latter frequently occurs as a predicate of unavoidable inequalities. High inequality (e.g., some living in abundance and super-abundance while many others go hungry) raises difficulties on its own. However, if some having more is predicated upon others having less—if it is a condition achieved and maintained in virtue of others having less—then that inequality is induced owing to the structure of the relationship, and simultaneously imposes a form of exclusion. 29 High inequality and exclusion—distinguishable for analytical purposes—are likely to emerge interdependently and to reinforce one another. Economic inequality that manifests itself in political and socioeconomic structures (either officially or in effect) quickly devolves into exploitation.

To take but one possible example, insofar as vast economic disparity translates into vastly greater social and political access, influence, and public voice for those who possess resources, and that disparity in resources is used to protect and augment the power of those in power (thereby further perpetuating disparities), such conditions of inequality amount to de facto exclusion of those who have less. These high inequality–exclusion dynamics result in political influence and governance being dominated by a highly enfranchised, wealthy few. In such cases, what is, in fact, oligarchy and plutocracy may be justified or disguised by the fact that the political context in question remains “democratic” in name (and in certain of its surface-level operations). Though impoverished, marginalized, and incapacitated, people recognized as citizens in such circumstances have, in principle, rights of free expression, political participation, and a vote. While these rights may be invoked as indicators of the justness of the political context, they actually camouflage—and aid in perpetuating—massive structural violence (extreme inequality that is structurally interlocked with exclusion) masquerading as substantive justice and democracy.

Uvin’s third ingredient of structural violence reaches beyond the explicit violation of rights. It encompasses the myriad of processes through which denials of dignity and attrition of self-worth and self-respect, sometimes subtly or tacitly, occur (i.e., psychological, spiritual, or emotional effects that can be categorized as “humiliation”). This treats the effects of poverty (for example) in the form of identifiable effects and experiences of social inferiority, isolation, physical weakness, vulnerability, powerlessness, and the psychological effects of poverty. “Poor people are acutely aware of their lack of voice, power, and independence, which subject them to exploitation. Their poverty also leaves them vulnerable to rudeness, humiliation, and inhuman treatment by both private and public agents.” 30 Such an example makes evident how this lens illuminates dynamics and forces that may exert themselves in contexts in which human and civil rights are legally in place, and in some cases, even where a seemingly theoretically robust and much-discussed account of “justice” is in force. 31

Answering Boulding’s criticisms on their own terms (in effect), Peter Uvin parsed the ways that structural violence promotes, and is liable to lead to, direct or “acute” violence. The constitutive features of structural violence contribute directly to the “threshold conditions” of direct violence along four primary vectors. 32 First, those who are structurally subjugated are liable to use explicit forms of violence, such as rioting, violent protest, or revolutionary or insurgent activity, in attempts to challenge and change the structures that oppress them. Second, those who benefit from the structures are liable to use violence to preserve them (police or military enforcement of unjust laws involving the use or threat of violent force to preserve “law and order,” “keep the peace,” and hold the status quo in place). Third, where certain resources are scarce or unavailable due to conditions held in place by structural violence, competition for those resources is liable to lead to direct violence between marginalized groups. Fourth, rather than generate solidarity among subjugated groups by, for instance, fueling efforts to challenge and alter oppressive structures, structural violence tends to highlight and balkanize the identity boundaries of structurally subordinated groups, harden those boundaries, and turn the groups against one another. Structural violence is prone to produce scapegoating of purportedly inferior groups, a process which often results in explicit violence.

These are indices of how structural violence relates directly to forms of acute and deadly violence. In each case, the diagnostic lens of structural violence aims to identify and lay bare the complex, subterranean root systems from which direct violence is likely to spring. The objective and unique contribution of this analysis is to identify, assess, and thereby aid in addressing acute violence at the levels of its causes, conditions, complex background, and histories.

But what if structural violence does not lead to direct or deadly violence? Is it no longer a primary concern of the peacebuilder? In such cases, one responds to Boulding’s behaviorist (agent-specific and objective-directed) constraints upon violence not by striving to meet the challenge on its own terms, but rather, by further expanding and enriching the multifocal conceptualization of violence, and its role in articulating peace interwoven with justice. Positive peace—the reduction of direct violence and simultaneous pursuit of justice—cannot be limited to treating physical violence and deadly conflict at its roots (addressing its causes and conditions). It requires more.

Thus, Galtung expanded his earlier appeal to the somatic basis for conceptualizing violence (the differential between the potential and actual in physical functioning) to include a “spiritual/mental” focus as well. In fact, it was necessary to overcome the deficiencies of the “materialist bias”—or tendency toward material reductionism—to which both peace studies and development studies gravitated. 33 This required recalibrating the definition of violence to refer to the deprivation of basic needs—“Avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible”—in four basic categories: survival, well-being, freedom, and identity. 34

“How difficult I find it to see what is right in front of me”: The Emergence of Cultural Violence 35

Recasting the definition of violence illuminates the arguably more insidious layers of structural violence, namely, its normalizing functions. In many cases, the power of structural violence consists precisely in its capacity to hold exploitative, repressive, and dehumanizing conditions in place without producing direct or deadly violence . In fact, frequently, it is in virtue of not leading to direct violence or deadly conflict that structural violence avoids drawing attention to itself in ways that direct forms of violence typically do, thereby attracting the recognition and intervention of those concerned to understand and combat direct violence (or structural violence identifiably related to direct violence). Direct violence may be resolved, successfully managed, or held at bay in ways that actually contribute to maintaining, perpetuating, or even increasing structural violence.

For instance, direct violence is only one reaction to being deprived of basic needs. Other reactions to structural violence, not involving direct violence, are all the more insidious and destructive because the possibilities of active resistance and explicit violence are pre-empted or seemingly resolved. Such reactions may include quiet acquiescence to conditions of poverty, exclusion, and humiliation. They may entail the subjugated groups’ complicity in and even active perpetuation of the very structural processes, practices, and institutions by which they are exploited, incapacitated, and enmeshed in misery. 36 “[Direct violence] is not the only reaction [to needs deprivation],” Galtung came to explain:

There could also be a feeling of hopelessness, a deprivation/frustration syndrome that shows up on the inside as self-directed aggression and on the outside as apathy and withdrawal. Given a choice between a boiling, violent and a freezing, apathetic society as reaction to massive needs-deprivation, topdogs tend to prefer the latter. They prefer ‘governability’ to ‘trouble, anarchy.’ They love ‘stability.’ 37

Galtung came to be persuaded of the analytical insufficiency of the structural violence lens for these purposes. Detecting the violence diffused in impersonal, sometimes unintended, even anonymous operations of social, political, and economic structures was important, but insufficient. In fact, a greater danger—the cunning of structural violence, as it were—is not that the conditions, causes, and effects of such forms of violence are normalized, but that they contribute to processes of normalization. They come to appear, to present themselves, as “natural,” even “necessary” or “inevitable.” They become accepted within—interwoven with—average, workaday, normal perceptions; in effect, they colonize the common sense of both the people benefitting from them and those harmed by them.

Structural violence is sometimes rendered invisible—camouflaged and difficult to recognize—precisely by its apparently uncontroversial, inconspicuous diffusion throughout the routinized functioning of society. Moreover, to illuminate and lay bare the structures in question—and the fact that well-meaning people are complicit in, indeed, often beneficiaries of, those structures—is liable to inspire denial, refusal, rejection of structural analyses by those many well-intentioned and concerned people. Efforts to lay bare structural violence risk hitting too close to home.

The realities of structural violence are not merely neglected because of their everydayness, or denied because they are seemingly uncontroversial or necessary. They are also positively justified and legitimized by conceptions of “the way the world is.” Thus, the great challenge presented by thinking in terms of structural violence is not merely tracking it in the operations of social, political, economic structures, but figuring out how to denaturalize its operations—to render it visible and expose its effects. One analytical challenge particularly important for peacebuilding, then, is to re-conceptualize or counter-conceptualize such dynamics and processes as forms of violence needing to be addressed as such. This re-conceptualization struggles against the grain of what presents itself as the natural, necessary—and, perhaps most significantly, seemingly innocuous—ways it has been conceptualized or unrecognized heretofore. For these purposes, Galtung derived a further analytical lens—that of cultural violence .

Cultural violence Galtung defined as “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science, that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” 38 He continued, “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right, or at least not wrong.. . . The study of cultural violence highlights the way in which the act of direct violence and the fact of structural violence are legitimized and thus rendered acceptable in society.” 39 This development expanded and linked the earlier critical-theoretical dimensions of the account—particularly those addressing consciousness formation—to the “spiritual effects” of structural violence. He wrote:

A violent structure leaves marks not only on the human body but also on the mind and the spirit. [These] can be seen as parts of exploitation or as reinforcing components in the structure. They. . . [impede] consciousness formation and mobilization, two conditions for effective struggle against exploitation. Penetration, implanting the topdog inside the underdog so to speak, combined with segmentation, giving the underdog only a very partial view of what goes on, will do the first job. And marginalization, keeping the underdogs on the outside, combined with fragmentation, keeping the underdogs away from each other, will do the second. 40

This account retrieves and further develops the much earlier incorporation of consciousness formation and enculturation, but aims to further expand these in terms of psychological, emotional, and spiritual impact. These correlate with two importantly different forms of exploitation.

“Exploitation A,” as Galtung termed it, occurs when those subjected to structural violence are so disadvantaged that the effects of the exploitative relationship result in premature or unnecessary mortality, that is, “the underdogs die” (starve, waste away from disease). This form of exploitation is justified or rendered uncontroversial by forms of cultural violence that construe it as (however sadly) “unavoidable,” “tragic,” or perhaps “self-inflicted,” or that let it go unrecognized. 41

Exploitation B occurs when some person or group is left in a permanent, unwanted state of misery. This may include malnutrition and illness, but may not, in these instances, lead identifiably to premature or unnecessary mortality or deadly conflict. 42 Moreover, the invisibility or perceived legitimacy of this form of exploitation may be augmented by that very fact (that such conditions are not “deadly”). One example would be gender-identified violence, in which, statistically, women may have lower morbidity and mortality rates than men (provided that they evade gender-specific perils manifest across many cultures and societies such as gender-specific abortion and infanticide, gender-preferential prenatal care and treatment in the first years of childhood, and so forth), but live subject to arbitrary treatment, lack of voice in decisions directly affecting their life chances, strictly delimited social status, and cultural conditions that promote and perpetuate attenuated self-respect, destructive forms of self-abnegation, and reduced emotional well-being. 43

One vector along which Exploitation B manifests itself is a form of “spiritual death.” In this condition life is experienced as having little or no meaning, engendering apathy and passivity, disengagement, and an abiding sense of hopelessness. This is related to—but importantly distinct from—what Galtung termed a “silent holocaust” (in contrast to a holocaust that aims explicitly to exterminate) by which violent structures gradually exploit, causing hunger and illness that “erode and finally kill human beings.” 44 The miseries born of physical (somatic) incapacitation are horrific. Yet conditions of spiritual misery—apathy, passivity, self-hatred, abiding hopelessness, the fatigue of despair, and Sisyphean struggle for bare survival—would tend not to show up in statistics concerned with deadly conflict or direct violence, as they would not be explicitly linked to premature mortality. This form of spiritual deprivation he called “alienation.”

From Analysis to Engagement: Summary of Part I

So far I have traced the historical emergence and conceptual development of structural and cultural violence in peace studies. At the same time, I have described how these lenses empower multidimensional forms of critical analysis. Such multidimensional analysis, I argued, renders the identification and assessment of violence more sensitive and fine-grained; it enables detecting the manifold forms of violence as well as their modes of interrelation and the different levels at which the effects of violence take hold. I have also demonstrated how these lenses facilitate critical analysis and self-reflexivity that serve constructive objectives, sidestepping temptations to subvert such reflection and practice through interminable systemic analysis of power and domination (the paralysis of analysis).

The upshot is that nonphysical and non-deadly structural forms of violence must become (where they are not already) central concerns of the peacebuilder. These are forms of violence categorized as deprivation of “identity needs” and “well-being needs.” As we have seen, they take forms of alienation and exploitation that “work on the soul.” Under this heading we find categorized forms and effects such as:

processes of consciousness- and self-formation in which “the topdog is implanted inside the underdog” (i.e. “penetration”), and ensuing experiences of inferiority, self-devaluation, self-abnegation, shame, humiliation, and stigmatization;

internalized and self-directed aggression, rage, and despair;

invisibility or negligibility through social and legal marginalization and voicelessness (civic or social death);

diminished agency, disempowerment, and isolation through exclusion, segregation and partition (“segmentation”);

the denuding of nurturing communal bonds and nourishing relationships (“fragmentation”);

stereotyping and/or scapegoating, and the ensuing experiences of being terrorized, hunted, or endangered; existential angst resulting from pariah status;

Sisyphean conditions void of care and compassion, and interlaced experiences of abiding hopelessness, purposelessness, and lovelessness; misery-induced apathy and passivity;

the effects of efforts to anesthetize spiritual, emotional, mental suffering (substance abuse, alcoholism, dependency and addiction, and so forth).

These are examples of forms and effects of violence that the lenses of structural and cultural violence bring to light. All of them deprive people of basic needs. None of them need be deadly. In fact, some of these forms of violence are more widespread and persistent precisely because they are not deadly. The cultural violence lens illuminates cultural practices, perceptions, and convictions that camouflage, justify, or normalize these forms and effects, making them seem natural, necessary, or right—or “at least not wrong,” if not altogether invisible.

In what ways are these analytical lenses especially fit for the interests and purposes of religiously informed or religiously motivated peacebuilders? How is it that they are acutely effective in illuminating manifestations and effects of violence to which those working in religion and peacebuilding are likely to be particularly attuned to and motivated or well-equipped to understand and constructively address? I answer these questions by turning to specific examples in which religious peacebuliders have demonstrated acute awareness of, critically diagnosed, and provided constructive prescriptions for structural and cultural forms of violence.

II. Structural and Cultural Violence in Religious Peacebuilding: Parallels and Precursors

As is often the case, the analytical lenses and insights developed by theorists follow on the heels of the insights and experiences of practitioners on the ground. In many ways the most seminal studies of structural and cultural violence are but analytically articulated footnotes to the work that activists and practitioners already firmly grasped and powerfully articulated. In this second section I examine two examples of such activists: Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West. My examination will seek to answer two questions in each case: 1) How are his efforts to combat injustice and to cultivate justpeace consistent with and describable in terms of the above accounts of structural and cultural violence? 2) How does his work as a “ religious peacebuilder” (his knowledge of, engagement with, and motivation born of religious traditions) equip him to be acutely attuned to the forms and impact of such violence?

Martin King: From Racial Inequality to Cultural Homicide

Central threads of my genealogy of the emergence and development of structural and cultural violence in peace studies find robust antecedents in the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, some years before Galtung first invoked the field-demarcating distinction between negative and positive peace (1964), King had deployed such a distinction to explain and justify to Southern moderates and liberals the tactics of civil disobedience used by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (e.g., boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and so forth) in 1961. The white moderates and liberals he addressed were sympathetic to the movement’s aims, but were decidedly gradualist in their ideas about how racial segregation should be altered. Many such Southerners claimed that race relations had been peaceful for many years and that explicit forms of Jim Crow segregation needed measured reform, but ultimately that “only time can solve this problem.”

King acknowledged the surface-level appearance of tranquil race relations, but explained that the student movement was intentionally in revolt against the “negative peace” that had suffused the Southern United States for many decades. 45 The movement aimed not at desegregation, but at the full-fledged integration of black people in American life. Anything less would be cosmetic integration, and as a result, superficial democracy. In revolting against negative peace, the movement aimed to dramatize repressed tension and deploy that tension—nonviolently, but disruptively— in order to bring latent conflict out into plain view, to illuminate the full depths of injustices and confront them directly so as to transform them constructively. King describes the absence of explicit tensions, conditions under which black people quietly accepted their plight, using the term “negative peace.” The movement aimed to struggle for “positive peace.” Peace of this sort was not merely the absence of hostility and conflict. It would be “the presence of justice and brotherhood.” 46

Though Galtung never cites King’s use of the “positive/negative” distinction and the “presence of justice and integration of groups” as a source, the similarity of their terms is startling. Galtung is credited by many peace researchers as the originator of these ideas, but clearly he is not. 47 From where does King derive these concepts? Working as a Christian theologian and Baptist preacher, King derives them from his interpretation of Jesus’s claim that he has “come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34–39). King reads this as Jesus’s rejection of negative peace, with its characteristic complacency and impassiveness that typically gets portrayed as tranquility. As King has it, whenever Jesus comes, “conflict is precipitated between the old and new. . . [and] struggle takes place between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” In this, Jesus’s coming precipitates the struggle for positive peace: the pursuit of justice, brotherhood and sisterhood, and the kingdom of God. 48 In short, King derives his integrated account of positive and negative peace from Christian Scriptures. This exemplifies what King’s fellow civil rights activist Andrew Young refers to as his use of “biblical critique.”

The implications of King’s articulation of the student campaign as a “revolt against negative peace” and “struggle for positive peace”—its explicit confrontation of latent tension, suppressed conflict, and repressed injustices—meant that, eventually, he would have to take up what peace researchers would come to identify as violence perpetrated structurally and culturally. Here again, King derived a conception of structural change from Christian Scripture, specifically, the story of Jesus and Nicodemus (John 3:1–21). King interprets Jesus’s instruction to the lawyer Nicodemus that in order to be saved he must be born again to indicate that his “whole structure must be changed.” The structural implication for King’s context meant that the “thing-ification” of black people under 244 years of slavery continues to exert itself through the economic exploitation of people of color, and of poor people more generally. Moreover, economic exploitation at home relates to international investments and interests that must be preserved and protected militarily. King’s point is that these strands of oppression are tightly interwoven (related structurally) and must be addressed in tandem. As a result, he declared—echoing Jesus’s instruction to Nicodemus—“America, you must be born again!” 49 On these bases, King came to expand and deepen his interests and purposes beyond the pursuit of equality in the face of racist and discriminatory laws—beyond what he called as late as 1966 the “racial revolution to ‘get in,’” and receive a fair share economically, educationally, and in social opportunities. 50

By August of 1967, King realized that positive peace required training his attention on the structures and cultural conceptions that held discriminatory dispositions, habits, manners, and mores in place long after discriminatory laws had been wiped from the books. He spoke of the pursuit of justice that is available only by coming to the full recognition of—and struggling to transform—the systemic injustices that hold discriminatory and prejudicial structural relationships and patterns in place. To transpose this into terms of my genealogical account in Part I , “Violence: The Missing Dimensions of Religion and Peacebuilding,” King recognized the depths that were obscured by the meagerness of what the words “discrimination” and “prejudice” had come to signify. He recognized the necessity of addressing the cultural processes, dispositions, and symbolic practices that prop up and perpetuate the forms of exclusion, humiliation, and subtler (but no less radical) inequalities that persisted even after the revolution of equal rights and legal recognition effected by the civil rights movement.

Several years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace, and standing alongside President Johnson as witness to the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the passage of the Voting Rights Act one year later, King called for mobilizing against the persistence of what he identified as the “cultural homicide” of black people. With this phrase, he illuminated the forms of violence that exert themselves through language, embodiment, and consciousness formation. He pointed to the fact that average, workaday ways of speaking—as well as the meanings of words held firmly in place by Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus—were laced with, and perpetuated, abiding forms of inferiority and self-abnegation layered into the consciousness and inscribed across the bodies of people of color in the United States after several hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow.

Dynamics of humiliation could not be isolated only in the socioeconomic marginalization or in the legalized inequality and exclusion of groups of people. Rather, the psychological and spiritual dimensions of such types of humiliation provide a kind of cultural mortar holding the elements of structural and direct violence firmly in place. This point of analysis does not simply address the adverse impact of white supremacy that shaped the everyday operations of culture and society. It also lays bare the various examples of what peace studies categories described as processes of “penetration” by which “top dogs” become “implanted” inside the “underdogs” (exemplifying what Galtung would only much later came to call cultural violence). They make forms of structural and direct violence appear natural or necessary—to look, to even feel, right; or at least not wrong. They are manifest in the forms of psychological and spiritual self-abnegation that King described as the results of “cultural homicide.”

In effect, such cultural forms of violence are as debilitating as direct forms of violence. Exposing and challenging them is even more fundamental to pursuing freedom from domination and to developing the capacities by which to cultivate positive conditions of a just and sustainable peace. And yet, cultivating self-respect and self-love was a task that could not be measured by the standards firmly entrenched in a society that had suffered from the cultural effects of white supremacy for so long. Certain forms of subjugation were already inscribed in established standards and ideals. Such work required challenging and transforming the less visible and often internalized metrics of value and beauty by which prevailing structures both legitimized and asserted themselves. These metrics had come to be written, as it were, upon the bodies and shot through the personalities, the unreflective self-conceptions, of people of color subject to cultural violence. They had come to be acculturated and habituated, and inscribed through dynamics of consciousness-formation.

To describe these culturally articulated, seldom reflected-upon metrics of value as internalized is not to suggest that they are impervious to being recognized and illuminated through social-analytical lenses and other tools of redescription, and then critically interrogated and revised. In fact, this is precisely the kind of analysis that lenses of structural and cultural violence facilitate. King brought such analysis to bear by way of his training in and the resources of the Christian theological tradition.

As we saw in the genealogical account above, structural/cultural violence lenses’ sensitivity to the inscription of person-diminishing violence in and through consciousness formation has roots in the tradition of critical social theory (Herbert Marcuse and his Frankfurt School forebears). From where did King derive his equally incisive analysis of violence in and through consciousness formation? Again, in this case, we must look to the analytical resources he drew from the Christian theological tradition and Jewish philosophy.

King’s conception of human personhood, the ultimate origins of human dignity in the personhood of God, and what these conceptions necessitated of justice were based upon his commitment to theological and philosophical personalism. Thus he invoked St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas in appealing to the moral law to which all human laws are accountable for their justness ( “An unjust law is no law at all”). At the same time, to give concrete content to the implications of this principle, he employed the terms of personalism. 51 Laws that degrade human personality are unjust, and those that protect and honor its dignity are just. On this basis, all segregationist laws are unjust because they “distort the soul and damage the personality” of all the people affected by them. Those who benefit from segregation are endowed with the false perception that they are superior. Those who are subjugated by segregationist laws absorb a false sense of subordination and inadequacy. King borrowed the terms of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber to make the point that such personality-degrading laws “substituted an ‘I-it’ relationship for an ‘I-thou’ relationship.” 52 This consigns persons to the status of things, or at least to the status of “less than fully human.” As King had it, the degradation of human personality “distorts the soul.” This is consistent with what peace researchers later came to refer to as “violence that works on the soul.”

From King’s Christian theological perspective, such violence obscures or attempts to deny the reality that the human person bears the image of God, and that, in virtue of this image, his or her dignity and inestimable value inheres in his or her personhood by default. Such violence “distorts the soul” by projecting as real the unreality, or promoting internalization of the lie, that the person is not born out of God’s extravagant agapic love (and thus is not created with intrinsic dignity), when in fact, he or she is. This nature and basis of personhood mean that persons have been created for the purposes of giving and receiving forms of love through mutual recognition and mutual respect, reciprocal accountability, and humanizing and constructive relationships that derive therefrom. Laws, social and political structures, and cultural processes consistent with this reality will protect and promote human dignity and value, and protect against all forms of arbitrary and dehumanizing treatment. Moreover, King’s understanding of agapic love meant that, in the fight for justice, even one’s enemy was to be recognized as a bearer of dignity, to be respected, and whose well-being was to be pursued. To pursue his opponent’s well-being through nonviolence meant that the struggle for justice should promote the liberation of King’s opponents from the blinding, spiritual sickness of white supremacy, in the hope of opening possibilities for reconciliation. Most importantly, agapic love impelled King to call for loving the person who participates in evil (i.e., loving one’s enemy), while simultaneously hating and struggling against the evil in which that person participates. 53

In virtue of these insights, King recognized dehumanizing cultural formations as violence that must be combatted and positively countered in order to build positive peace interwoven with justice and the integration of human groups (“brotherhood and sisterhood”). As King addressed these motifs, structural and cultural forms of violence pertain to the condition of the human soul, inseparable as it was (as he understood it) from the psychological, emotional, and physical. Such a position refuses the possibility of construing “the spiritual” in abstraction from (as somehow wholly separable and discrete, or secreted away within or transcending) the mundane.

In re-describing these elements of King’s work in terms of religious peacebuilding, we find further support for my central claim that modes of consciousness formation are central to the concerns of peacebuilding not simply insofar as they might relate to direct violence or deadly conflict. Rather, the forms and effects of cultural violence are, in themselves, just that: forms of violence. They hold injustice and humiliation in place at the same time that they hold forms of deadly or direct forms of violence in abeyance. They render populations docile, and by generating psychological and spiritual apathy, those people accept their own marginalization—their having been rendered invisible, negligible—as normal.

Cornel West: Nihilism as a Spiritual Condition

We are now in a position to see how the lenses of structural and cultural violence, as they make visible dimensions of consciousness formation, relational needs, and identity needs, may illuminate the spiritual impact of cultural violence. Just such analytical motifs inform the criticism of the structural impact of poverty and culture of consumption deployed by the philosopher, social critic, and activist Cornel West. Once the parameters of religious peacebuilding are expanded to include structural and cultural (in conjunction with direct) forms of violence, West’s work can be seen to fall squarely within the category of religious peacebuilding.

Among contemporary thinkers and activists, it is West who perhaps most clearly carries forward the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He takes prophetic streams of the Christian tradition as indispensable for analyzing and responding to the catastrophic conditions that compel activists and practitioners to strive for justice and decrease violence in all its forms. His reasons for drawing upon religion are both political and grounded in his existential commitments. “The culture of the wretched of the earth is deeply religious,” he explains. “To be in solidarity with them requires not only an acknowledgment of what they are up against but also an appreciation of how they cope with their situation. This appreciation does not require that one be religious; but if one is religious, one has wider access into their life-world.” At the existential level he explains that Christianity is, for him, an enabling tradition. It provides the ground for hope in the face of the tragic realities against which he struggles. And yet, he does not advocate an uncritical and undiscriminating reliance upon Christian tradition. It must be persistently subjected to self-reflexive analysis and critique. 54

It is the prophetic dimensions of the Christian tradition that compel West to seek solidarity with the wretched of the earth. The prophetic also provides resources by which he assesses the causes and conditions of the wretchedness in question. This entails a struggle for justice and the reduction of violence. In his critical and self-reflexive retrieval of resources from the Christian tradition—motivated and normatively oriented by Jesus’s instruction for any who would follow him to live and work in solidarity with the oppressed (e.g., Jesus’s words, “Just as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto me,” Matthew 25:31–46)—West models a form of “religious peacebuilding.”

What do West’s “religiously musical” solidarity and profound personal conviction enable him to identify that reflects the distinctive fit between the aims of a religiously informed or motivated critic and activist, and the uses of structural and cultural violence lenses? Religious resources inform West’s diagnosis, his prescription for change, and the grounds of his hope in the midst of catastrophic conditions that are dismissed as self-inflicted or tragically unavoidable, or else are casually ignored.

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse and ensuing “great recession,” West points out, “The catastrophic conditions and circumstances right now, in light of corporate elites and financial oligarchs, with greed running amok, looting billions and billions of dollars, when 21 percent of America’s children live in poverty—that’s a crime against humanity.” 55 And yet, to identify as forms of violence the savagely and disproportionately high rates of incarceration, infant mortality, unemployment, and crime among people hovering around and beneath the poverty line, and people of color more generally, is to diagnose only one part of the relevant violence. As West has it, these conditions must be addressed in terms of their spiritual dimensions—insight afforded him uniquely in virtue of his recognition of the role of religion and the existential nature of his own religious commitments. It is in virtue of his religious commitments, as well as his use of the prophetic streams of the Christian and Jewish traditions, that West sees that these conditions cannot be accounted for solely in terms of poverty, racial inequality, and material destitution. Rather, adequate diagnoses require recognition that these conditions are interwoven with and interdependent upon a form of the spiritual condition of nihilism. West explains:

I am not just talking about the one out of five children who live in poverty. I am not just talking about the one out of two black and two out of five brown children who live in poverty. I am talking about the state of their souls. The deracinated state of their souls. By deracinated I mean rootless. The denuded state of their souls. By denuded, I mean culturally naked. Not to have what is requisite in order to make it through life. Missing what’s needed to navigate through the terrors and traumas of death and disease and despair and dread and disappointment. And thereby falling prey to a culture of consumption. A culture that promotes addiction to stimulation. A culture obsessed with bodily stimulation. A culture obsessed with consuming as the only way of preserving some vitality of a self. You are feeling down, go to the mall. Feeling down, turn on the TV. The TV with its spectator passivity. You are receiving as a spectator, with no sense of agency, no sense of making a difference. You are observing the collapse of an empire and feeling unable to do anything about it.. . . A market culture that promotes a market morality. A market morality has much to do with the unprecedented violence of our social fabric.. . . You need market forces as necessary conditions for the preservation of liberties in the economy. But when the market begins to hold sway in every sphere of a person’s life, market conceptions of the self, market conceptions of time, you put a premium on distraction over attention, stimulation over concentration, then disintegrate [ sic ] sets in.. . . We are talking about larger cultural tendencies that affect each and every one of us. It takes the form of self-destructive nihilism in poor communities, in very poor communities. The lived experience of meaninglessness and hopelessness and lovelessness. Of self-paralyzing pessimism among stable working-class and lower working-class people. 56

These lines offer a glimpse of what it looks like to identify and assess the impact of poverty in terms of spiritual deprivation. As West illuminates these effects, they can neither be reduced to terms of social psychology, nor socioeconomic class. Rather, “nihilism” gets repositioned as something more fundamental than a philosophical doctrine. In light of my genealogy in Part I , we can describe it in terms of the spiritual effects of structural and cultural violence. As West has it, nihilism is “the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most importantly) lovelessness. . . . Nihilism is a disease of the soul.” 57

How does this vision inform West’s prescription? “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care,” he responds. “Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—and affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.” 58 Like King, West is quick to point out that the love ethic he prescribes has nothing to do with sentimental emotion, or being kind and gentle. An adequate conception of Christian love—and its implication that Christians must take responsibility for the justness of the structures and conditions in which they live here and now—recognizes the indispensability of seeing the complex interrelation of love with justice and power. “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic,” King wrote. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” 59 Such an analysis opens horizons for the peacebuilder whose conceptualization of violence needs to be deepened and broadened. It opens necessary horizons for the work of peacebuilders addressing not only physical violence, but violence in all its forms.

What Does “Religious Peacebuilding” Accomplish that Social Psychology Does Not?

To those for whom religious traditions are unfamiliar, so much of what these lenses detect may sound like merely social psychology: cultural and structural forms of violence affect the psyche, mental functioning, and emotional health. These interweave with, and are dimensions of, the spiritual, ethical, and emotional concerns of the religious peacebuilder. At one level, this is accurate. These forms of violence admit of varying descriptions, and different descriptions may help illuminate different features and the multiple levels at which response is needed. And yet, they cannot be reduced to social psychology without a loss of their content, without becoming something other than what they are.

The effects of nihilism, meaninglessness, and hopelessness might be anesthetized with Prozac and Wellbutrin, much like some people self-medicate their effects with illegal drugs, alcohol, and other forms of dependency and addiction. And yet, as West and King make the case, ultimately, nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can only be countered by lived practices of love, care, compassion, personal integrity, and self- and other-respect. Can these only be provided by the Christian tradition or exclusively by religious traditions more broadly?

As I argued previously, a peacebuilder need not be personally religious to intervene in and respond to violence and despair. However, as the examples of King and West indicate, religious peacebuilders can be especially well-equipped to perceive, diagnose, and respond to these facets of human existence and the forms and effects of violence that “work on the soul.” In the cases I examined, acute awareness of structural and cultural forms of violence comes to light by looking at the inescapability of power through the lens of agapic love. Must one be Christian to agree? In my judgment, the answer must be “no.” While clearly grounded in Christian theological particularity (i.e. irreducibility), King also deployed the concept of love at the level of what may be described as an “intermediate norm”—a normative orientation for practice and analysis that might accommodate (or find analogical agreement with, or overlap for ad hoc purposes with) a number of normative conceptions articulated within other religious, ethical, or cultural traditions. Of course, it is important to note that this conception of analogy (or intermediate normativity) seeks agreement redescriptively and provisionally—at an intermediate level, and for ad hoc purposes—rather than reductively. In other words, it is not asserting that particular claims and traditions are “reducible” to a more basic unified conception of, say, “the sacred,” that all of these different traditions are, at their core, “really about the same thing” or are “paths up different sides of the same mountain,” or even that different traditions’ central concepts and claims translate easily into each other without remainder. For example, the conception of agapic love that King and West share is not identical to, yet is in many ways consistent with, Gandhi’s commitment to “ahimsa”—meaning literally “non-injury,” but which Gandhi came to construe as a positive state of nonviolence toward the world. 60 At an intermediate level, the relational implications of agapic love, arguably, similarly accommodate the human rights–oriented conception of love as mutual respect and the inviolable implications of human dignity. 61

At the same time, a strong caution is in order for any who would engage in peacebuilding from religious and theological quarters. These activists and critics must be especially aware of the temptation toward esoteric insider-speak and similar postures and languages directed at a religious or theological “ghetto” to which some intra-traditional or intra-communal religious discourse is prone regarding matters of justice and peace. King and West speak forthrightly—at moments, quite explicitly—from, and in the terms of, their primary tradition-specific, theological motivations. Each is simultaneously eclectic and improvisational, pragmatic, strategic, and multilingual—even while normatively oriented by their commitment to be faithful—in how they articulate their claims, and how they enrich and compound their analyses. These capacities enable them to avoid the great temptation (and, for many, the great pitfall) of religious voices in conflict, war, and peacebuilding: the temptation of preaching to themselves. These powerful exemplars demonstrate that anyone who would approach peacebuilding from within religion-specific traditions, and (in these cases) Christian theological commitments, must hold their theological commitments, understandings, and practices flexibly and conversantly at the same time that they engage and enrich their own accounts with the conceptual tools of non-theological resources and conversation partners. Moreover, on this point, there is a lesson to be taken from Johan Galtung.

Galtung was not a religious peacebuilder. And yet, he stood within the predominantly social-scientific, quasi-positivist, security studies–oriented enterprise of peace research that was emerging in the middle of the twentieth century, at the same time that he cut deeply against it. He challenged and pressed beyond the deficiencies of the conception of conflict, violence, and peace that prevailed at that time. As my genealogical account above makes clear, this required moving beyond the safety of rigid academic disciplinary boundaries and becoming multilingual and conceptually innovative. Galtung rejected materialist reductionism and opened peace studies to the spiritual, emotional, and psychological dimensions of peacebuilding. In doing so, he opened vistas within peace studies that had long been unfolding and that are ideally suited for the dynamics of religious peacebuilding today.

The purpose of this chapter has been to identify, genealogically explicate, and juxtapose several analytical tools and research currents within peace studies that are uniquely compatible with the interests and purposes, contents and resources of religiously conversant peacebuilding. I have sought, further, to examine what the idea of “violence” entails when one holds justice and peace together as a normative orientation (“positive peace” or “justpeace”). Those convinced of the necessity of holding justice and peace in tandem (who recognize that each is essential to the other) cannot afford to limit their analytical vision to an exclusive or even orientational focus upon conflict that is deadly. Nor, I have argued, can we risk an easy compartmentalization of these analytical lenses. The assumption that if social structures and cultural understandings and practices have not identifiably contributed to deadly conflict, then they need not be tracked and addressed, ultimately truncates the full scope and interests of positive peace.

Read charitably and with attention to their concern for altering the “roots of the conflict” as those persist in social, institutional, and procedural forms, Little and Appleby set forth an analytical framework that is consistent with the full breadth of concerns that I have brought to light in this chapter. But their pull toward deadly conflict seems orientational—it serves as a conceptual center of gravity—and therefore overly constricts the focus and potential impact of religious peacebuilding. Something weighty is at stake in this point of difference, namely that to the degree that deadly conflict is orientational for peacebuilding practice and theory, the range of concerns that the peacebuilder must take up is delimited. A primary focus on deadly conflict causes peacebuilders to neglect those points at which the forms of violence and its effects take on psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. 62

The implication is that structural and cultural forms of violence ought be the objects of peace research and religion and peacebuilding not simply as they are understood to be causes and conditions of direct, deadly violence, but also as equally orientational objects of analysis in themselves. Such analytical tools and practical interventions offer a multi-focal, and expansive analytical conceptions of non-deadly conflict and violence. In this way the lenses and concepts of structural and cultural violence facilitate probing for, attending to, and strategizing about how best to intervene in conditions of structural and cultural forms of conflict which are not explicitly deadly, but are, as such, not only violent, but all the more insidiously so.

Once structural forms of violence are given equally orientational weight to direct and deadly violence, we arrive at a further enriched understanding of the concept of justpeace —now understood to entail the reduction of violence in all its forms (i.e., direct, structural, cultural, deadly/non-deadly), and the simultaneous pursuit and cultivation of justice in the full range of its varieties (e.g., social, distributive, restorative, reparative, and so on). A risk attendant to overlooking or downplaying the effects of structural and cultural forms of violence is that efforts at peacebuilding will be out of synch with the logic of “justpeace.” In short, there is actually much at stake in the seemingly minor semantic difference between focusing upon “deadly violence” as opposed to “violence in all its forms.” Not only does the multidimensional lenses for identifying and assessing violence dramatically expand the scope and validity of peacebuilding, but it also draws upon developments in the peace studies literature which are, arguably, most directly relevant to religious peacebuilding.

1. In addition to Gordon Smith and Harold Coward , eds., Religion and Peacebuilding (New York: SUNY, 2004) , see also Robert J. Schreiter , R. Scott Appleby , and Gerard F. Powers , eds., Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010) , David Little , ed., Peacemakers in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Daniel Smith-Christopher , ed., Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007) ; Douglas Johnston , ed., Faith Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) ; Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson , eds., Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) , among numerous others.

A secondary task of this chapter is to locate and map exemplary studies and texts that deploy analyses of structural and cultural violence toward the ends of peacebuilding (broadly construed). I identify and map the literature on structural and cultural violence primarily in the endnotes throughout this chapter. The relevant entries intend to provide the reader with an overview of works assessing structural and cultural violence across several subfields of peace and justice studies, with specific attention to such studies in the subfield of religion and peacebuilding.

3. While I do not engage any such figures in the present chapter, in my judgment, Jeffrey Stout, Romand Coles, and John Kelsay fall into this category of peacebuilders who are “religiously musical” though not participants in the religious tradition(s) with which each works. To consider a helpfully instructive example, Stout demonstrates command of the features of Christian ethical and theological reflection in order to both criticize and constructively correct deficient currents internal to that tradition insofar as they relate to his work for justice and democratic practice in US contexts. He has demonstrated at length that, on certain readings of the tradition, its institutions and practices are indispensable for pursuing forms of just and sustainable peace that committed Christian citizens in the United States, and citizens of other religious traditions, or no tradition, can, and should, share interests in pursuing by substantive democratic means. Read in the way I propose, his texts Democracy and Tradition and Blessed are the Organized operate in tandem to exemplify the broadly construed conception of “religious peacebuilding” I am articulating here. In Democracy and Tradition , Stout deployed immanent criticism—a form of criticism in which a critic either takes up and uses the reasoning and resources of his or her interlocutor to demonstrate that the interlocutor’s position is self-subverting on its own terms, or conversely, works more constructively by presuming the premises, reasoning, and resources of his or her interlocutor in order to demonstrate how those move in the direction of the immanent critic’s conclusions. Whether deployed critically or constructively, this form of engagement requires a charitable—even intimate—grasp of the tradition, and high proficiency in engaging and deploying its resources and modes of reasoning. This is one sense in which one may be a “religious peacebuilder” without holding personal religious commitments or identifying as a practitioner of a religious tradition. In Stout’s case, it has led some Christian theologians to identify him as “the church’s best secular ally in America.” For examples of Stout’s “religiously musical” immanent criticism (in its critical mode) see “The New Traditionalism” and “Virtue and the Way of the World,” Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) , chaps. 5–6, and in a more constructive mode see, among others, “A Prophetic Church in a Post-Constantinian Age: The Implicit Theology of Cornel West,” Contemporary Pragmatism 4, no. 1 (2007): 39–45 , and Stout’s contribution in Jason Springs (ed), Cornel West , Richard Rorty , Stanley Hauerwas , Jeffrey Stout , “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition ,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 2 (2010): 413–448 . For Stout’s exposition and argument for the indispensability of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious communities, in addition to nonreligious civic groups, in the United States for cultivating justice and reducing violence through grassroots democratic, broad-based community organizing—an account largely inspired by the work of Saul Alinsky and consistent with the aims and approach of strategic peacebuilding—see Stout’s   Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) , esp. chap. 18.

For an overview that maps the variety of ways that the field of religion and peacebuilding has suffered from a dearth of critical reflexivity, see Atalia Omer’s “Religion and Peacebuilding” in the present volume.

5. David Little and Scott Appleby , “A Moment of Opportunity? The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict,” in Religion and Peacebuilding, ed. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 5 .

Little and Appleby, “A Moment of Opportunity?,” 5–6.

Little and Appleby, “A Moment of Opportunity?,” 6.

8. Johan Galtung , “An Editorial,” Journal of Peace Research 1, no. 1 (1964): 2 .

9. Johan Galtung , “Peace,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , Vol. 11 , ed. David Sills (New York: The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, 1968), 487 .

10. Galtung , “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 293 .

11. It was the integrative and holistic conception of nonviolence that Gandhi drew from multiple religious and ethical traditions that led him to see the draconian excesses of commercialization and commodification—in as far as they find their impetus in human greed—as forms of violence. “An armed conflict between nations horrifies us,” he wrote, “But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects. Many of us in India shudder to see blood spilled.. . . but we think nothing of the slow torture through which by our greed we put our people.. . . But because we are used to this lingering death, we think no more about it.” Gandhi , “Nonviolence—The Greatest Force,” The World Tomorrow , Oct. 1926.

12. Johan Galtung , “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 185 .

  Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 186.

14. John Paul Lederach , “Justpeace: The Challenge of the 21st Century,” in People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from Around the World , ed. Paul Van Tongeren (Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 27–36 . See also Lederach and R. Scott Appleby , “Strategic Peacebuilding: An Overview,” in Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent World , ed. Daniel Philpott and Gerard F. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19–44 (esp. 23–35, and 42 n. 3) .

15. Galtung , “Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research: Ten Challenges and Some Responses,” Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 2 (1985): 145 .

Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 171.

Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 170 (here quoting 169).

18. Frederick Engels , “Letter from Engels to Franz Mehring in Berlin, London, July 14, 1893,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 766 .

19. For an important intellectual history and socio-philosophical exposition of the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay’s   The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996) . Seyla Benhabib offers powerful critical exposition in Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) .

20. See, for instance, Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 170. Galtung invoked Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 text, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) , which, itself, drew upon prior analyses of “mass culture” of which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 2000) (esp. chap. 4) and Erich Fromm’s   Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon, 1941) stand as but two pronounced exemplars.

21. Karl Marx , “An Exchange of Letters,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society , edited and translated by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 1997), 212 .

22. This is exemplified in how the concept of “utopia” (the ideal of “society made rational”) functions in critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer. In order for critique to remain un-assimilated to the domination that saturates the present, it must remain in a negative mode. One maintains this negative posture only by virtue of one’s perpetual engagement in criticism. The utopian ideal can never be stated discursively, that is, articulated in positive and definite terms. While affording indispensable critical resources, arguably, such conceptions of critique and utopia provide far too slender a groundwork upon which to base the constructive objectives entailed in cultivating peace that is just and sustainable. See Max Horkheimer , “Reason Against Itself,” in What Is Enlightenment? , ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 359–367 ; Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 54–56; Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia, 167–171.

23. Kjell Eide , “Note on Galtung’s Concept of ‘Violence,’” Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 1 (1971): 71 .

24. Kenneth Boulding , “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung,” Journal of Peace Research 14, no. 1 (1977): 75–86 (here 85) .

Boulding, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels,” 83, 84.

26. Peter Uvin , “Global Dreams and Local Anger: From Structural to Acute Violence in a Globalizing World,” in Rethinking Global Political Economy: Emerging Essays, Unfolding Odysseys , ed. Mary Ann Tetreault , Robert A. Denemark , Kenneth P. Thomas , and Kurt Burch (New York: Routledge, 2003), 149 .

  Uvin, “Global Dreams and Local Anger,” 150.

28. To give a textbook example: being convicted of a felony in the US criminal justice system results in “legal discrimination”—exclusion from access to public housing and public assistance benefits (e.g., welfare support, supplemental nutrition assistance), prohibition from voting, exclusion from employment and education opportunities, and more insidious forms of “civic death.” See Michelle Alexander’s   The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) , esp. chaps. 4–5.

29. See, for example, Galtung , “Only One Quarrel with Kenneth Boulding,” Journal of Peace Research 24, no. 2 (1987): 200–201 .

Uvin, “Global Dreams and Local Anger,” 150–151.

31. In the final chapter of The Decent Society , Avishai Margalit makes the case that John Rawls’s principles of justice could be fulfilled, and the society still be characterized by forms of institutional humiliation. See The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) , esp. chap. 1 and the conclusion. Along these lines, the restorative justice movement is largely predicated on the claim that many retributive models of criminal justice, and the criminal justice system in the United States in particular, inflict wide-reaching forms of humiliation in seeing that “justice is served.” For exposition of these themes amid the vulnerabilities of the low-wage working poor in the U.S., see Barbara Ehrenreich’s   Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001) .

32. Uvin positions these vectors extensively within the literature and documents them at length. “Global Dreams and Local Anger,” 155–156. See also Uvin’s   Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998) , esp. chap. 6.

Galtung, “Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research,” 145–147.

34. Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 292; see also “The Basic Needs Approach,” in Human Needs: A Contribution to the Current Debate , ed. Katrin Lederer , David Antal , and Johan Galtung (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1980), 55–125 .

35. Ludwig Wittgenstein , Culture and Value , trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 39e .

36. To take a severe example, this was one of the pivotal—and most controversial—insights brought to light in Hannah Arendt’s   Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006) . The “banality of evil” exerted itself most insidiously in the Nazis’ efforts to make the Jews accomplices to the extermination of their people through various bureaucratic, procedurial, and work-a-day ministrations of the Jewish Councils through European communities.

Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 295.

Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 291.

Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 296.

40. Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 299. At this point, the complex interrelation of structural and cultural violence in Galtung’s account overlaps with several basic insights in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s account of “symbolic violence,” understood as the complex interaction between the structurally embodied modes of domination that are internalized by both the dominant and the dominated, such that the latter do not recognize the economy in which domination is embodied as domination, turning whatever resultant aggression may emerge among the dominated inward or toward one another in ways that perpetuate the system of domination. For a particularly powerful assessment of structural violence in US inner-city illegal drug economies and cultures conducted explicitly through the lens of Bourdieu’s account of “symbolic violence,” see Phillipe Bourgois , “U.S. Inner-city Apartheid: The Contours of Structural and Interpersonal Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace , ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Phillip Bourgois (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 301–307 . The challenge presented by Bourdieu’s account is that he so emphasizes the anonymity and structural diffusion of domination that the personal or direct (agent-oriented) dimension gets minimized, if not altogether washed out. As a result, power, domination, and violence become conceived as forces that no one subject to them can really recognize, render explicit, critique, resist, or alter. This difficulty manifests the temptations of critical theory that I mentioned earlier in this chapter. When viewed in terms of the multifocal lens of violence developed here (direct/structural/cultural), Bourdieu’s account risks removing altogether the direct vector of the tri-part relationship (i.e., the personal, agent-originating, and directed), thus portraying any slender possibility of resistance as a by-product of reflexive sociological analysis itself. By contrast, as I am construing it here, the tri-focal lens accounts for anonymous and structurally and culturally diffused forms of violence while retaining their interconnectedness with direct and personal (i.e., agential) forms of violence and domination. Representative statements of Bourdieu’s category occur in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant , “Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence,” in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 167–173 , and Bourdieu , Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), esp. 34–42 . For a treatment of these features of Bourdieu and Michel Foucault and an effort to bring individual agency as a means of critique, resistance, and innovation back to the center of the analysis (in tandem with structural and cultural dimensions), see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , xiv, and especially chap. 4 (“Foucault and Bourdieu”). See also Jason A. Springs , “‘Dismantling the Master’s House’: Freedom as Ethical Practice in Robert Brandom and Michel Foucault,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 3 (2009): 419–448 . For a clear and sympathetic exposition of the deep tensions in Bourdieu’s account regarding the possibilities of constructive change in light of domination illuminated by reflexive sociology (e.g., through the plasticity of the habitus), see David Couzens Hoy , Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 114–139 .

41. Here an exemplary study is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s study of structural causes and conditions for—as well as the cultural bases for widespread acceptance of, inattention to, or mis-recognition of—the exorbitantly high infant mortality rates in Brazilian slums. Scheper-Hughes treats what she calls “invisible genocides and small holocausts” in her text Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) . For a more wide-ranging study that takes Galtung’s account of structural violence as an analytical touchstone, see the work by medical anthropologist Paul Farmer , Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003) .

Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 198.

43. Joshua Price provides a powerful examination of the multiple and mutually interpenetrating layers of various forms of gender-identified violence that mobilizes and applies Galtung’s account of structural violence. This text deploys the lens of structural violence both to illuminate the multiple forms of violence ( “Exploitation A” and “Exploitation B”) that are rendered invisible by the institutionalized category “domestic violence.” See Price’s   Structural Violence: Hidden Brutality in the Lives of Women (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2012) . Price’s study suggests that an integrated analysis of personal and structural violence, and their legitimation and perpetuation through cultural modes of violence, is most liable to adequately lay bare the complexities of the (often silent and internalized) brutalities suffered by women in contemporary US contexts (see, in particular, chap. 2). For additional work on gender-identified structural violence oriented by Galtung’s accounts, see Lubna Nazir Chaudhry , “Reconstituting Selves in the Karachi Conflict: Mohjir Women Survivors and Structural Violence, Cultural Dynamics 16, no. 2–3 (2004): 259–289 ; and Mary Anglin , “Feminist Perspectives on Structural Violence,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 5, no. 2 (1998): 145–152 .

Galtung, “Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research,” 146–147.

45. King , “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. , ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 43–53 (here 50) .

King, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” 50–51.

47. Kathleen Maas-Weigert rightly traces Galtung’s use of these terms with their earlier formulation in Quincy Wright’s   A Study of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 1089–1093, 1305–1307 . In fact, prior to King’s invocation of the terms, Jane Addams had written of the deficiencies of “negative peace” (as the absence of war) and the necessity of “positive ideals of peace” in her book of 1902, Newer Ideals of Peace . See Berenice Carroll and Clinton Fink , “Introduction to the Illinois Edition,” in Newer Ideals of Peace , ed. Jane Addams (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), xvii–xviii . For a helpfully condensed examination of structural violence see Maas-Weigert , “Structural Violence,” in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict , ed. Lester Kurtz (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 2004–2011 .

King, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” 51.

49. King , “Where Do We Go from Here?,” in I Have a Dream: Speeches and Writings that Changed the World , ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper, 1992), 177 .

50. King , “Nonviolence: the Only Road to Freedom,” in Washington , I Have a Dream , 130–131.

51. See King , “An Encounter with Niebuhr (1 Sept. 1958),” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. , vol. 4 , Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–September 1958 , ed. Clayborn Carson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 480 .

52. King , “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (April 1963), in Washington , A Testament of Hope , 289–302. For the crucial philosophical and theological background for King’s understanding of personalism, see Martin Buber’s   I and Thou (New York: Touchstone, 1970) .

King, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

54. West , The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 233–234 . See also West , “Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere , ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 92–100 .

West, American Evasion of Philosophy , 97–98.

56. West , “Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism,” in Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1993), 16–19 . For a more recent example of West engaging these issues of poverty; cultures of consumption and free market fundamentalism; hopelessness and meaninglessness as conditions in which spiritual and material deprivation are wholly interwoven, see West and Tavis Smiley , The Rich and the Rest of Us (New York: Smiley Books, 2012) .

57.   West , Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 14, 18.

58. A piece particularly pronounced in West’s corpus along these lines is “Nihilism in Black America,” in Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 2001) , esp. 22 and 29.

King, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 172.

60. It was in his articulation of ahimsa that Gandhi reinterpreted the classic passages in the Bhagavad Gita typically invoked to justify the obligations of the caste system, and the necessity of engaging in violent struggle and warfare. This stands out as a powerful example of a thinker working within a tradition to read its more orienting values correctively against prevailing readings of passages taken to justify both direct violence and the violent social structures held in place by the Hindu caste system as a whole. “Krishna’s Counsel in a Time of War” of the Gita has long been taken to justify some of the most repellent duties of direct violence (what may become the warrior’s duty to kill even those who nurtured and cared for him). It is also taken to justify and reinforce the Hindu caste system more broadly, and as such, structural violence. Moreover, when deployed for such justifying purposes, the Gita serves as an example of cultural violence. Thus, Gandhi’s efforts to reread and interpret the Gita against the grain of those traditional uses stands as an example of combatting cultural violence from within the particular tradition itself, and with resources (perhaps uniquely) available there. See Gandhi , “Anasaktiyoga: The Message of the Gita,” in The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi , ed. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1929), 125–134 .

61. For an effective example, see the articulation of human rights and other regard by Barbara Deming in “Violence and Equilibrium,” in Revolution and Equilibrium (New York: Grossman, 1971) , esp. 207 and 221. On the complexities of Gandhi’s position, see Thomas Kilgore , “The Influence of Gandhi on Martin Luther King, Jr.” in Gandhi’s Significance for Today , ed. John Hick and Lamont Hempel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 236–243 . For a helpful entry-level account of a non-reductionist approach to conceptualizing what are taken to be the major religious traditions, see Stephen Prothero’s   God is Not One: The Eight Rival Traditions that Run the World—and Why their Differences Matter (New York: Harper, 2010) . For a more technical treatment of inter-religious cooperation that sidesteps the violence done to religious traditions when their differences are construed as surface-level trappings that reduce to shared grounding in “the sacred,” see Mark Heim , Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (New York: Orbis, 1995) . For a fuller theological tradition-specific account of non-reductionist inter-religious engagement and dialogue, see William Placher , Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1989) , esp. Chapters 7–9 .

62. As is clear in the sample of literature I have referenced throughout (though far from exhaustively), engagement in peacebuilding through lenses of structural and cultural violence requires expanding the attention and efforts of peacebuilders to encompass matters of poverty and development (Scheper-Hughes, Uvin, Farmer, Ehrenreich); gender (Price, Chaudhry, Anglin); race, ethnicity, religious identities and institutions (King, West, see also Jean Zaru’s   Occupied with Nonviolence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008) ; the interface of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism ( Atalia Omer’s   When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks About Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Michael Sells’s   The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998) ; and law, criminal justice, and prison systems (Bourgois, Alexander). It trains attention and efforts of peacebuilders equally upon dimensions of environmental peace and justice, though these have not been addressed above. On this topic, see, for example, Rob Nixon , Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013) . Other pivotal resources include James Gilligan , Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1996) and Veena Das , Arthur Kleinman , Mamphela Ramphele , and Pamela Reynolds , Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) .

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United States Institute of Peace

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Religion in World Affairs: Its Role in Conflict and Peace

By: David Smock

Publication Type: Special Report

In recent decades, religion has assumed unusual prominence in global affairs. The horrendous events of 9/11, the conflagration in Iraq, and the aggressive assertiveness of quasi-theocratic Iran only confirm in the popular mind that religion lies behind much of contemporary international conflic

• No major religion has been exempt from complicity in violent conflict. Yet we need to beware of an almost universal propensity to oversimplify the role that religion plays in international affairs. Religion is not usually the sole or even primary cause of conflict.
• With so much emphasis on religion as a source of conflict, the role of religion as a force in peacemaking is usually overlooked.
• Religious affiliation and conviction often motivates religious communities to advocate particular peace-related government policies. Religious communities also directly oppose repression and promote peace and reconciliation.
• Religious leaders and institutions can mediate in conflict situations, serve as a communication link between opposing sides, and provide training in peacemaking methodologies. This form of religious peacemaking garners less public attention but is growing in importance.
• Interfaith dialogue is another form of religious peacemaking. Rather than seeking to resolve a particular conflict, it aims to defuse interfaith tensions that may cause future conflict or derive from previous conflict. Interfaith dialogue is expanding even in places where interreligious tensions are highest. Not infrequently, the most contentious interfaith relationships can provide the context for the most meaningful and productive exchanges.
• Given religion’s importance as both a source of international conflict and a resource for peacemaking, it is regrettable that the U.S. government is so ill equipped to handle religious issues and relate to religious actors. If the U.S. government is to insert itself into international conflicts or build deeper and more productive relationships with countries around the world, it needs to devise a better strategy to effectively and respectfully engage with the religious realm.

In recent decades, religion has assumed unusual prominence in international affairs. A recent article in The Economist asserts that, if there ever was a global drift toward secularism, it has been halted and probably reversed. In the article, Philip Jenkins, a noted scholar from Pennsylvania State University, predicts that when historians look back at this century they will see religion as "the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood and, of course, conflicts and wars." The article then cites statistics from a public opinion survey in Nigeria demonstrating that Nigerians believe religion to be more central to their identity than nationality. Nigerians are thus more likely to identify themselves first and foremost as Christians or Muslims rather than as Nigerians. The horrendous events of September 11, the conflagration in Iraq, and the aggressive assertiveness of quasi-theocratic Iran only confirm in the popular mind that religion lies behind much of contemporary international conflict.

About the Report

Since its creation in 2000, the United States Institute of Peace’s Religion and Peacemaking program has worked with local partners to promote religious peacemaking in many parts of the world, including Sudan, Nigeria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. This report represents reflections on that experience. David Smock has directed the Institute’s Religion and Peacemaking program since its inception. He is also the vice president of the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution .

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Religion, peace and politics Essay

Religion, peace and politics have always been closely tied. Admittedly, the Dark Ages can be regarded as the brightest example of the period when religion was the most potent stimulus in making peace or rather war. Of course, the contemporary world has changed significantly as the society has become more secular.

Nonetheless, religion is still an important part of political life of countries. Numerous conflicts suggest that people are still ready to start a war trying to defend their religious beliefs and traditions. Importantly, religion also shapes ways people employ to reach their goals. It is possible to consider conflicts in such countries as South Africa, Egypt and Burma to understand the correlation between religion, politics and peace in the contemporary world.

In the first place, it is important to note that religion has often contributed to certain division of citizens within countries. Thus, religion contributed greatly to the development of Apartheid in South Africa (Botman 244). The debate on segregation started in the Dutch Reformed Church in the 19 th century. Notably, local people were converted into Christianity and Christian churches were built. Soon, however, local people were prevented from coming to some churches.

A bright example of the process is the way Khoi-Khoi people were deprived of their right to practice Christianity with white people. Khoi-Khoi people invited white people to join their church, but some white congregants addressed church officials to hold separate celebrations (Botman 244).

The Synod considered the matter and it was declared that “it was desirable and according to the Holly Scripture” that white people could attend churches different from the ones attended by the locals (Botman 244). This contributed greatly to the division within the society.

Another illustration of the process of division is Egyptian society. Historically, the society has been divided in two major groups, Muslims and Orthodox Christians. There have always been conflicts between the two groups.

Nonetheless, in the middle of the twentieth century, Abdel Nasser strived for creation of a secular society and this led to decrease in conflicts between religious groups (Hibbard 86). Multiethnic society divided into two major religious groups learnt to live in peace.

However, in the 1970 the political situation changed and a new force came in power. Anwar Sadat employed mechanisms to “promote a Saudi-inspired salafist (or fundamentalist) Islam in Egyptian public life” (Hibbard 86). This led to activation of fundamentalist Islamic groups such as Muslim Brotherhood.

Tension between the groups also increased as Orthodox Christians were afraid of possible violent acts and restriction of their freedoms. The present Egyptian society is still torn into two camps where Orthodox Christians have to defend their right to practice their religion and remain equal with the rest of the citizens.

They are afraid of becoming an inferior class of citizens pursued by the larger group of Muslims. In other words, they are afraid of another form of Apartheid which took place in South Africa. Therefore, it is obvious that religion can shape (in this case, divide) the society, which can lead to numerous conflicts and strive for violent changes.

Hence, it is possible to note that religion is still one of the reasons of conflicts worldwide. Religion is also an integral part of political regime in some countries. The Egyptian case is one of the brightest examples. Fundamentalist Muslim groups strive for a Muslim society where all people share Islamic values.

Admittedly, the most fundamentalist militants also believe that other religions are wrongful and cannot exist in Egypt (Hibbard 92). Therefore, some militants attack Orthodox Christians and destroy their property. This increases tension between the two groups.

As has been mentioned above, religious beliefs have shaped the political regime in Egypt. For instance, in 1980, The Egyptian constitution was amended to make Islamic Law “the principal (or primary) source of legislation” (qtd. in Hibbard 93). Since then, Egypt has witnessed Islamization of all spheres of public life.

Remarkably, Sadat relied on the Islamic student groups and the Muslim Brotherhood to seize power. Sadat also supported development of these groups and similar organizations. Nevertheless, these groups have caused a lot of problems to the political regime as these groups have been responsible for numerous violent acts which negatively affect popularity of those in power.

One of the most recent attacks took place in 2010 when several Muslim men killed seven people and wounded some people after celebrations services on the Orthodox Christmas Eve. This led to other conflicts and violence in the streets. It is apparent that even though the changes started in the 1970s, people are still unwilling to abandon their father’s religious beliefs.

More so, focus on religion contributes to imbalance in political life, which, in its turn, affects economic sphere and wellbeing of all Egyptians. Of course, economic constraints make people to strive for changes in the country. The Egyptian government is unable to break this vicious circle. Thus, there is a strong correlation between religious beliefs and political as well as public sphere.

It is also necessary to note that religion does not only shape the development of societies as it can also affect political struggle. The case of Burma is a good example of the impact of religion on people’s struggle. In the 1980s, people’s life became intolerable as harsh economic crisis led to unprecedented rate of poverty.

According to religious beliefs, people should give food to monks, which is a “primary form of merit-making in Theravada Buddhist practice” (Fink 355). Irresponsible policies and economic measures of the government contributed to the development of severe crisis. People did not have food for themselves. They did not have food to give to monks, and, in other words, to live in accordance with their religious beliefs.

Thus, monks decided to start demonstrations to make officials aware of the intolerable conditions of people. Importantly, monks did not want to make others involved in the demonstrations as they were afraid of possible negative consequences for people. At that, monks could not pose threats to people or cause any harm. Interestingly, religion was also used as a tool as monks refused to take food from those in power or military people who used force to disperse demonstrators.

In 2007, demonstrations started again due to financial constraints the country faced. The primary force of the opponents of the regime was the 88 Generation Students’ Group. Again, monks participated in marches and demonstrations. Importantly, religious beliefs sparked the movement as those in power used force and a lot of monks were badly injured. This led to people’s dissatisfaction and even anger as physical assault of monks is one “one of the greatest sins” in Buddhism (Fink 355). Lots of people joined marches and demonstrations.

It is also important to note that actions of demonstrators were quite organized and peaceful which deprived the officials of opportunity to use force. Notably, different countries supported peaceful marches and tried to make the government take into account protestors’ demands. Therefore, it is possible to trace a global trend as many countries strive for peaceful changes in societies. Obviously, the vast majority of countries condemn violence and societies try to implement the change employing peaceful measures.

Clearly, religion, politics and peace are closely connected in the twenty-first century. People are still eager to defend their right to preserve their religious beliefs and practices.

In some countries, religion is an integral part of political and social life. Thus, there are several Islamic countries where Islamic law is incorporated in the constitution. This does not necessarily lead to tension and violent acts if the population of the country is homogeneous (at least, in terms of religion). However, when there are several religious groups in the society, these groups often have conflicts.

Recent conflicts can suggest that a society constituted by different religious groups and peace are incompatible. Importantly, the world is globalized and countries will have more and more newcomers. It is likely that there will be no homogeneous societies any more. Those newcomers are likely to pertain to different religious groups. Nonetheless, there are lots of examples of peaceful coexistence of different ethnical and religious groups.

For instance, Egypt of the 1950s was a country constituted by several religious and ethnic groups. Thus, one of the best ways to ensure peace within a country is to divide secular and spiritual spheres. Thus, political sphere should be secular as a few countries are now homogenous in terms of religion and ethnicity.

Therefore, all groups should have equal rights to practice their religion. This will also ensure that all citizens will have equal civil rights irrespective of their religious beliefs. Admittedly, people cannot be divided into certain classes according to their religious beliefs or ethnicity. Any unfair division will result in violent acts and unrest.

Though, it is necessary to note that religion can also have a positive impact on political struggle. The vast majority of religions strive for peaceful solutions for any conflicts. Thus, peaceful demonstrations in Burma can be a good example how to struggle for civil rights exploiting peaceful tools only.

Admittedly, citizens have to remind groups in power that the latter are chosen to contribute to the development of the country and should address citizens’ needs. However, it is inappropriate to use force and strive for violent changes in the society as this leads to destruction and numerous negative consequences.

In conclusion, it is possible to note that the cases of South Africa, Egypt and Burma provide numerous important lessons to learn. These are lessons on the correlation between religion, politics and peace. These cases reveal hazards and opportunities for the contemporary societies.

These lessons help people understand that political sphere should remain secular in multicultural and multiethnic societies of the contemporary world. At the same time, political struggle can be based on religious values of peace, cooperation and respect. This will enable people to contribute to positive and peaceful changes in the society.

Works Cited

Botman, H. Russel. “Truth and Reconciliation: The South Africa Case.” Religion and Peacebuilding . Ed. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004. 243-261. Print.

Fink, Christina. “The Moment of the Monks: Burma, 2007.” Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present . Ed. Sir Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. 354-370. Print.

Hibbard, Scott W. “Egypt and the Legacy of Sectarianism.” Between Terror and Tolerance: Religious Leaders, Conflict, and Peacemaking . Ed. Timothy D. Sisk. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. 85-104. Print.

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Bibliography

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Is religion a power for peace or does it cause conflict?

Part of Religious Studies Morals, ethics and philosophy

Religious teachings tend to focus on how people can live alongside each other with love, understanding and compassion. However, there are many different religions and different beliefs, and this can sometimes lead to conflict.

Explore the issues

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Watch Niamh as she examines religious and non-religious teachings about war and conflict.

Video Transcript Video Transcript

Many religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism teach the principle of ahimsa - non-violence or doing no harm. Mohandas Gandhi was a Hindu and his life is a fantastic example of ahimsa in action. He led the campaign for Indian independence from British rule and he did it using non-violent methods of protest.

A famous Christian called Martin Luther King was inspired by Gandhi to use peaceful means of protest to get equal rights for black people in the USA. And as a Christian, Martin Luther King followed the teachings of Jesus who said, if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too, which seems to be saying that Christians should always be peaceful even when faced with violence. So religion can be a power for peace.

But Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs also believe that war is sometimes necessary to defend communities against violence. In that case, there are strict rules for war. In Islam, for example, war must be in self-defence. Fighting must be a last resort. Innocent people and children must not be harmed. Property must not be destroyed and no plants or animals should be killed. But rules like these are often ignored. Fighting is going on all over the world, and religion or at least religious people are often in the frontline. However, you could argue that it's not the religions that are causing the conflict. It's the people.

People might fight because they feel that their rights, their identities, their religions or their countries are under threat. Sometimes they fight because they're scared. Sometimes they fight to get revenge.

But often people fight because they want something: more money, more land, more power. They want change. They want to control what other people do and what other people believe. So they might say they're fighting for a religion, but are they really fighting for themselves?

Many non-religious people, like humanists, would like to live in a secular society, which means decisions would be made without any religious influence but would that stop conflict? Possibly not. People would still fight for power, for their political views, for greed.

So what do you think? Is religion a power for peace or would the world be a more peaceful place without religion?

The Golden Rule

It is often claimed that religion causes conflict and war. It is true that sometimes deeply held beliefs can lead to clashes, and there have been many wars that were caused by disputes over religion and beliefs. However, for many people religion can be a power for peace.

A message of peace and love towards others is at the heart of all of the major world religions. This is called The Golden Rule . It is the principle that you should treat others as you would like to be treated yourself, and it is found in one form or another in every major religion. Most religions prize forgiveness as a strength, and discourage people from taking revenge on those who have wronged them.

Conflict and peace in pictures

Buddhism – A soldier pays his respects

This picture shows a Royal Thai Army officer making an offering during the Buddhist cremation rites of a mother and daughter who were killed in a drive-by shooting. Why would Buddhists, who follow the non-violent principle of ahimsa, consider joining the armed forces?

Christianity – Protesters in America

A Christian protester carries a sign expressing his view that God’s law is more important than man-made law. He is protesting to save a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the courthouse of Alabama state’s judicial building, which was later removed. Can you think of examples where religious teachings might clash with the law?

Hinduism – Children in India learning yoga and meditation

At this yoga and Sanskrit school in the holy city of Varanasi, Hindu boys learn to practise yoga. An important part of this is daily meditation to help achieve inner peace. It is believed that the focus and concentration helps the boys to follow the right spiritual path. How important do you think it is to achieve inner peace, and how does religion help?

Islam – A father and son pray together at the mosque

Peaceful submission to the will of Allah is at the heart of Islam. The action of prostration (bowing down onto the floor) during prayer symbolises this and acts as a constant reminder to Muslims. At the mosque the whole community of Muslims gather together to share peaceful prayer. How do religions promote peace through their day-to-day practices?

Judaism – A protest march in New York, USA

Demonstrators hold placards to express their concern about the rise of anti-Semitic (prejudice against Jews) incidents in New York and across the USA. Demonstrators included representatives from various Jewish organisations, as well as marchers from other religious and non-religious communities. Does religion divide people or bring them together? Why?

Sikhism – A martial arts display at the Golden Temple, Amritsar

Gatka is a traditional Sikh martial art. Gatka was developed as a way to defend Sikhs as well as people from other faiths from aggressors. Is it ever right to take up arms and fight? Why or why not?

Non-religious beliefs – A Humanist bus campaign

Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, caused controversy when she raised money and teamed up with the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) for an advertising campaign on London buses with the words: 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ She objected to Christian adverts on some London buses, which carried warnings for people who rejected God. Should we have complete freedom of speech? Why or why not?

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Religion & Peace Essay On Christianity & Islam

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

OCR Religious Studies A level Essay Structure

Essay structure is very important in OCR as your exams will be completely assessed by essay questions.

The most important thing to say about essay structure is that there are many different types of essay structure that work. As a tutor I’ve seen loads of different types that my student’s teachers have taught them and as an examiner I’ve seen even more.

Ultimately all an essay needs is detailed AO1 explanation/understanding and coherently developed AO2 evaluation/analysis. It needs to detail multiple points of view and come to a reasoned conclusion about which is successful. That’s all an essay needs. How exactly that content is arranged is therefore not the most important thing compared to making sure it is there.

However, there are two essay structures that I think are the best because they really force you to include coherently developed AO2 evaluation and they also work well with structured revision.

Before we get to that you need to understand the difference between general and particular essay questions.

General vs particular essay questions

Some essay questions are general and some are particular.

General questions ask a question about the overall topic. Particular questions focus on a part of the topic.

Example from the Plato topic:

General: Critically assess how we can best make sense of reality. Particular: Assess Plato’s theory of forms’.

Example from the Teleological/design argument topic:

General: Does the universe show evidence of design? Particular: Critically assess Hume’s objections to the design argument

The importance of identifying particular essay questions for AO1 and AO2 marks

The most important thing to understand about this is that for particular questions, you can only get AO1 marks for whatever particular scholar/argument/theory/approach the question is asking you to evaluate.

So, in the Plato question example, you could only get AO1 marks for your explanation of Plato. You absolutely can bring in Aristotle to that essay if you want, but you can only get AO2 marks for that. This is because Aristotle can only be useful to a particular question on Plato to help you evaluate Plato.

This is vitally important. If you do not do well in your AO1 marks, you are limited in the AO2 marks you can get.

For example in the 2022 Philosophy paper there was a particular question on Aquinas’ 5 th way. Students who didn’t remember Aquinas’ 5 th way properly and quickly moved on to Paley who they understood better would have done badly. They could have written a really amazing essay on Paley and even included really amazing evaluations of the design argument, but without properly explaining Aquinas’ 5 th way their AO2 marks would have been severely limited.

Ethics questions are often particular. A question asking you to evaluate Natural Law ethics clearly requires that you explain natural law. The question might have a focus like telos, the four tiers of law or the double effect, and you would have to explain that in detail too. But those are things you should be including in an AO1 explanation of Natural Law anyway!

So, it is vital that you can identify a particular question so you can make sure to get the AO1 explanation of whatever the question is about in as much detail as you can into your essay.

Then the question is where this AO1 knowledge should go in your essay.

If the essay question picks out a particular sub-topic that it wants you to evaluate, then paragraph 1 must start with that topic.

For example, if the question is on religious experience and asks you to evaluate William James, you could bring up other thinkers like Otto and do a paragraph on him, but for it to be relevant to the question you would need to bring him up for the purpose of evaluating James. The purpose would be to see whether Otto’s approach is better or worse than James’. This can only be properly done if you have already explained James’ approach.

I will now explain the two types of essay structures I recommend and then explain what AO2 evaluation requires.

Essay structure type one: split essay

AO1 & AO2 are split into different paragraphs.

This type of essay plan splits up the AO1 and AO2. Paragraph one is just completely pure AO1. The aim is to get all the detailed knowledge you need for your essay completed in paragraph 1. This is simple because you don’t have the unnecessary burden of thinking about how to break up the AO1 into different parts to start each paragraph with.

Both paragraphs 2 and 3 can then be pure AO2 evaluation.

Paragraph 1: pure AO1 explanation. Paragraph 2: AO2 evaluation. Paragraph 3: AO2 evaluation.

You can begin paragraphs 2 and 3 with AO2 criticisms, whether stand-alone or from scholars or scholarly views who disagree with whatever particular AO1 scholar/theory/argument/perecptive was in the question. Those paragraphs can then be developed with back-and-forth defences, counter-defences, etc.

This type of structure works well for particular questions because you can just get the important AO1 out of the way and then focus on evaluation.

Applied ethics questions are also easier to do with this structure. You get the AO1 explanation of the ethical theory and the application of it to the ethical issue(s) out of the way before then evaluating that theory’s application (sometimes by critically comparing it to another theory’s application) in paragraphs 2 and 3.

Essay structure type two: integrated essay

AO1 & AO2 are integrated into all paragraphs.

This type involves putting AO1 and AO2 in the same paragraph. Each paragraph, or at least the first two, will include AO1 and AO2.

Paragraph 1: AO1 explanation and then AO2 evaluation. Paragraph 2: AO1 explanation and then AO2 evaluation. Paragraph 3: AO1 explanation and then AO2 evaluation.

This type of structure works well for general questions. For example, if you have a general question on the soul topic, e.g. “Does the soul exist?” [40] you could do:

Paragraph 1: AO1: Plato’s views on the soul and AO2: criticism of Plato. Paragraph 2: AO1: Aristotle’s views on the soul and AO2: criticism of Aristotle. Paragraph 3: AO1: Dawkins’ views on the soul and AO2: criticism of Dawkins.

AO2 evaluation requires:

Now that we’ve gone over the types of essays you could do, here are some general comments about AO2 evaluation that pply whatever structure you decide to use.

AO2 evaluation requires starting with a strength or a weakness/criticism or an opposing perspective/scholar/scholarly view to whatever view you explained for AO1. Your AO1 will be either in the first paragraph if doing a split essay structure, or at the start of the paragraph if doing an integrated essay structure.

The first sentence of your AO2 is extremely important. It must link to the question. It needs to have with clear evaluative language and introduce both the evaluation point and its relevance to the question.

You will then have given two sides to a debate. It is optional but you could continue to go back and forth. Regardless of whether you do that or not, you then need to end the evaluation with your reasoned judgement as to which side of the debate is right and why. This will involve either:

• Arguing that the previous criticism is successful.
• Offering a defence against the previous criticism to show why it is actually unsuccessful.

It’s often easier and better to do the second option – defending against a criticism – since you can just learn a defence off by heart beforehand and then just plug it in.

It is good to begin the part where you offer your judgement with the phrase “X argument is un/successful because…”.

Then link back to the question using the language of the question and the paragraph is finished.

Introductions

Introductions are not super important for getting marks but should be there and this is a good recipe to follow for structuring them. Ideally one or at most two sentences for each of these points in this order:

• What the general topic is about (and why it matters)
• What the question is asking about within that topic
• Who is on either side of the debate of the essay question
• What you are going to argue and why.

Conclusions

Sum up the evaluative judgements you reached throughout your essay and explain the overall conclusion that follows from them.

Avoid juxtaposition

Whenever using a scholar/perspective/theory for evaluation, whether for a criticism or defence or counter-defence, etc, you then have to avoid juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is when you put two things next to each other. It’s basically like saying “Here’s a view on the question, and here’s an opposing view”. That is not yet evaluation. Evaluation is when you say which side is right and why.

It doesn’t matter how much back and forth you do in your evaluation, whether it’s simply a view on the question and one criticism or a longer chain, the crucial thing is to avoid juxtaposition; avoid ending the evaluation by stating what a scholar’s views are, even if those views are that the original view is wrong. You need to end your evaluation with your judgement on the success/failure of a theory/perspective/scholar’s views, having given a good reason for that judgement.

Evaluation = who is right, and why?

Make sure your evaluative mini-conclusions at the end of each paragraph which link back to the question fit your final conclusion

Always end a paragraph in a way that fits your conclusion. Your intro should say what your concluding answer to the question is going to be. It’s incoherent for you to conclude one side of the debate is correct if you have a paragraph which ends on a criticism of that side. This is because just leaving it like that makes it look like you don’t have an answer to it, which means you haven’t managed to justify your conclusion. However, it is acceptable to conclude a side is correct even if you end a paragraph with the evaluation that one of the points in support of it fails, so long as when ending the paragraph in the link back to the question you make clear that it’s not an essential point. For example, you could agree with Hume that the teleological/design argument fails, even if in one of your paragraphs you end up evaluating that one of his criticisms of it actually fails. So long as he has at least one criticism which you evaluate as successful, then the design argument fails (if that is indeed what the criticism shows).

Linking back to the question is not as simple as it seems. To get the best marks, it’s often not enough simply to end a paragraph with “therefore this side of the question is true/false”. Often, the final AO2 evaluative point you made to end the paragraph doesn’t exactly say that. It’s important that you notice exactly how your evaluative point is helping to justify your conclusion. For example:

It may be that you have merely undermined one of the arguments for one side of a debate, rather than completely proven the other side. For example, imagine the question is “does the soul exist?” and you spend a paragraph evaluating Plato and decide his arguments for the soul fail. It would be wrong of you to link back to the question by saying “Therefore, the soul does not exist”. Really, what your paragraph has actually shown in a deeper more precise sense is “Therefore, Plato’s argument for the soul fails”. If you evaluate all the arguments for the soul as false and the arguments against the soul as true, then in your final conclusion you would be justified in claiming that we have best reason to believe that the soul does not exist.

Islam – The Religion of Peace

(Adapted from the Review of Religions, March, 1933, Vol. XXXII, No. 3)

Islam is that religious system preached to the world by the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) from the desert of Arabia in the beginning of the 7th Century of the Christian era. Islam, though presented in its most perfect form by the Prophet of Arabia (saw) , did by no means originate with him. It was the religion of all the Prophets of God from Adam (as) up to Jesus Christ (as) . It was as wide in its conception as humanity itself. In fact, any divine teaching that was given to any nation was Islam. But the teachings of the prophets before the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) , were constrained by the limitations of time and local circumstances, and were meant only for the peoples for whose spiritual growth and development they were revealed. Hence, those teachings were not given any independent name. But because the Divine teaching that was given to the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) assimilated all that was imperishable in the teachings of all the prophets before him, and because it was meant for all peoples and all time, therefore God gave it a distinct name, which is Islam. The Holy Qur’an says:

…This day have I perfected your religion for you and completed My favour upon you and have chosen for you Islam as religion… (Ch.5:V.4)

Again it says :

Surely, the true religion with Allah is Islam (complete submission)… (Ch.3:V.20)

The word Islam indicates the very essence of the religious system known by that name. Its primary significance is the “making of peace,” and the idea of peace is the dominant idea in Islam. Islam stands for peace between man and his Creator, between man and his fellow beings and between different religions and communities. Peace is the greeting of one Muslim to another and “Peace” shall also be the greeting of those in Paradise. “The Author of peace” is one of the many names of God mentioned in the Holy Qur’an and the “Abode of Peace” is the destination and the spiritual goal of humanity. It is only natural that a religion which claims to be the Last Divine Message for mankind should offer us some basis on which inter-religious, international and inter-communal peace could be established permanently and without any fear of being disturbed.

The enormities and the most monstrous crimes that man has committed against man have been perpetrated in the fair name of religion. Innocent and honest men have been burned at the stake, stoned to death, buried alive, and drowned in the sea, in the name of religion. Nations have fought against nations to impose their own religious beliefs on their opponents. To stamp out Buddhism, the holy fathers of the so-called peaceful Hinduism sanctioned the wearing of arms against the heretics. The Romans subjected the Christians to every persecution known to man. The storm of savage fanaticism which in the annals of Christendom is called “The Holy Wars,” swept over Western Asia to serve the cause of Christianity. Some so-called Muslims have also wrongly carried fire and sword in the name of religion; Islam however has always respected the freedom of conscience:

Let religion only be for the sake of God . (Ch.2:V.194)

There should be no compulsion in religion… (Ch.2:V.257)

are the express commandments of the Holy Qur’an. The Muslims are strictly enjoined to respect and protect the places of worship of the followers of other religions, even at the cost of their lives. The Holy Qur’an says:

…And if Allah did not repel some men by means of others, there would surely have been pulled down cloisters and churches and synagogues and mosques, wherein the name of Allah is oft commemorated…  (Ch.22:V.41)

The inclusion by Islam of the belief in the Divine origin of all religions and the acceptance of their founders as Messengers of God, in its fundamental doctrines, is the most important and practical step that Islam has taken to remove feelings of bitterness and animosity among the followers of various faiths and to create an atmosphere of peace and goodwill among them.

That the great religions of the world are one in origin and many in form is a truth now widely recognised, but when Islam made its appearance in the world that truth was quite unknown. It was from the desert of Arabia and from the mouth of the man who could not even read and write that the great truth was promulgated that God was the Lord, not of a particular tribe or particular nations, but of all nations, nay of all the worlds. The God Whom Islam requires us to worship is the Lord of all peoples, of all ages and all countries.

He has been equally Merciful and Beneficent to all nations. If He raised Muhammad (saw) from Arabia, He raised Moses (as) from Egypt, and Jesus (as) from Judea; Zoroaster (as) from Iran, and Buddha (as) and Krishna (as) from India. These Prophets were the propagators and disseminators of the same fundamental truths, though their teachings differed in their quality and scope. Hence Islam recognised the truth that all these teachers of humanity were God’s great Messengers and it was made incumbent upon a Muslim to believe in them as he believes in Muhammad (saw) . Ransack the pages of all religious scriptures and you will not find this teaching in them. A Christian may look upon Muhammad (saw) as an imposter, and a Jew regard Jesus (as) as a false Prophet, and a Hindu who believes in the finality of the Vedic revelation may consider Moses (as) a charlatan, but a Muslim ceases to remain a Muslim the instant he ceases to revere any one of them as he reveres the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) . Consistently with these teachings, how can a Muslim adversely criticise Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism when he regards the Old and the New Testament in their original form, the Vedas and the Zend Avesta in their pristine purity as the revealed Word of God? Does not this great principle of Islam strike at the very root of all religious rancour? The Holy Qur’an says:

…there is no people to whom a Warner has not been sent.  (Ch.35:V.25)

And We did send Messengers before thee; of them are some whom We have mentioned to thee, and of them there are some whom We have not mentioned to thee…  (Ch.40:V.79)

According to these verses all great Prophets of God are the spiritual ancestors of a Muslim and their followers his brothers in faith.

Peace between Labour and Capital

The other great problem which is seriously undermining the peace of the world is the discontent prevailing in the working class against the capitalists. Islam claiming to bring about harmony and peace among warring interests has not failed to solve this baffling question also. On the one hand it recognises private ownership because there is no spirit of competition and incentive to progress left without the recognition of this fact, because if those who work harder than others or can bring a superior intellect or higher business capacity into the conduct of their affairs are to be deprived of the just rewards of their labour, all this competition and striving after better results would cease and the world would come to a standstill. On the other, Islam recognises in principle the right of the poor in the wealth of the rich. The Holy Qur’an says that in the wealth of the rich, those who can and who cannot ask have a right.

Islam suggests three remedies to remove the vast disparities of wealth and poverty. Firstly, it enjoins the distribution of inheritance. No man has the power to bequeath the whole of his property to one man, so as to promote its accumulation in a few hands. Under the Islamic Law of inheritance and succession, a man’s property must be distributed among his parents, all his children, his widows, brothers, sisters, and nobody can interfere with or divert this mode of distribution.

Secondly, Islam prohibits the giving and taking of interest. The possibility of being able to raise loans on interest enables people with established credit, to enhance it to any extent they please by borrowing. The huge trusts and syndicates which at present monopolise the sources of the national wealth would not be possible without interest, and wealth would be more evenly distributed among the people.

Thirdly is the institution of Zakat. Zakat is a charge of two and a half percent levied by the Government on all capital, money, precious metals, and merchandise, etc., which a person has been in possession of for one year or over. It is not a tax on income, but is a tax on capital. The proceeds of this tax may be provided to those who possess the necessary business capacity, but who are unable to make a start owing to want of funds. By this institution of Zakat, Islam provides for the discharge of all those rights that the poor have in the wealth of the rich, and thus brings about reconciliation between the haves and the have-nots.

International Peace

The third problem which is destroying the peace of the world is the unsatisfactory condition of the international relations. For the settlement of international disputes Islam lays down rules for Muslim states which contemplate a body like the present League of Nations [replaced later by the United Nations – Editor]. The Holy Qur’an says:

And if two parties of believers fight against each other , make peace between them; then if after that one of them transgresses against the other, fight the party that transgresses until it returns to the command of Allah. Then if it returns, make peace between them with equity, and act justly. Verily, Allah loves the just.  (Ch.49:V.10)

This verse lays down the following principle for the maintenance of international peace: as soon as there are indications of disagreement between two Muslim nations, the other Muslim nations, instead of taking sides with one or the other of them, should at once serve a notice upon them to submit their differences to the ‘peace makers’ for settlement. But if one of them refuses to submit to the League, or having submitted refuses to accept the award of the ‘peace makers’, and prepares to make war, the other nations should all fight it. It is apparent, however, that one nation, however strong, cannot withstand the united forces of all other nations and is bound to make a speedy submission.

Peace between the Rulers and the Ruled

The strained relations of the rulers and the ruled is another factor disturbing the world’s peace. Islam prefers a democratic government but does not preclude any form of government. The Holy Qur’an has used the word Amanat (trust) in describing the Islamic concept of Government.

For a full appreciation, however, of the Islamic concept of the State, it is necessary to quote the verse, which in brief but comprehensive terms, describes the nature and duties of the rulers and the ruled. The Holy Qur’an says:

Verily, Allah commands you to make over the trusts to those entitled to them, and that, when you judge between men, you judge with justice. And surely excellent is that with which Allah admonishes you! Allah is All-Hearing, All-Seeing.  (Ch.4:V.59)

According to this verse, government is a trust, and not in the nature of property, and the rulers are required to rule justly. And another verse of the Holy Qur’an states:

O ye who believe! obey Allah, and obey His Messenger and those who are in authority among you…  (Ch.4:V.60)

enjoins all men to obey those who are in authority over them and thus cuts at the root of all kinds of rebellion and anarchy.

Peace in the Family

By recognising the social status of woman and securing her rights in inheritance, in the guardianship of the children, in the management of the affairs of the family and in worship (in short, in Church and State), Islam has established peace in the family on a firm basis. If men have rights over women, women according to the Qur’an, likewise, have rights over men. According to Islam, women are the keystone of the arch of family life. Unity in the family is essential to a progressive state. Let it not be forgotten that of all religions, Islam alone has accorded woman status which after thirteen centuries of progressive development, working with the legacy of a prior civilisation, under the most favourable circumstances, the most civilised country in the world has not given her. By raising women from the condition of a mere chattel in which they were held before the advent of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (saw) , and giving women their rightful place in society, Islam settled those knotty family problems 1300 years ago which in the present progressive state of woman have wrecked many homes.

Peace among Individuals

Islam has laid down detailed injunctions which regulate the relations of individuals towards one another:

God commandeth you to do justice, beneficence and kindness to kith and kin.  (Ch.16:V.91)

In this verse of the Holy Qur’an God has set forth three injunctions. The first step is the step of justice. A Muslim is enjoined to discharge his duty and obligations quite faithfully and honestly and in the best way he can. No violation of the rights of others is permitted. When justice becomes to him a matter of course, he is required to do more than mere justice. He should be beneficent to others. When beneficence begins to appear to him not a very high stage of morals, he should be kind to his fellow people as a mother is kind to her son.

The first stage of morals is of doing good in proportion to the good received; the second stage is of doing more good than the good received; and the third and the highest stage of morals consists in doing good to others, not in return of a good received, nor in doing more good than the good received, but in doing good as prompted by natural impulse without the expectation of any reward or even any appreciation or acknowledgment.

Nothing seems more ironical than that the religion of which the very name signifies peace, which stands for freedom of conscience, which has enjoined upon its followers to respect the religious beliefs of other peoples and to protect their places of worship even at the risk of their own lives, a religion which has struck at the very root of religious acrimony by requiring its followers to believe in the missions of all the Prophets of God and in the Divine origin of their teachings, a religion which has laid down teachings that if fully acted upon would bring about an era of perpetual peace, should be looked upon as a religion breathing war and preaching hatred and a religion propagated at the point of the sword.

But such really is the prevailing view about Islam. Let there remain no doubt about it that Islam positively forbids the use of force for the propagation of its teachings.

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• ISLAMIC CONCEPT OF THE STATE
• Universal Moral Values, Politics and World Peace
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Essay on Peace

500 words essay peace.

Peace is the path we take for bringing growth and prosperity to society. If we do not have peace and harmony, achieving political strength, economic stability and cultural growth will be impossible. Moreover, before we transmit the notion of peace to others, it is vital for us to possess peace within. It is not a certain individual’s responsibility to maintain peace but everyone’s duty. Thus, an essay on peace will throw some light on the same topic.

Importance of Peace

History has been proof of the thousands of war which have taken place in all periods at different levels between nations. Thus, we learned that peace played an important role in ending these wars or even preventing some of them.

In fact, if you take a look at all religious scriptures and ceremonies, you will realize that all of them teach peace. They mostly advocate eliminating war and maintaining harmony. In other words, all of them hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

It is after the thousands of destructive wars that humans realized the importance of peace. Earth needs peace in order to survive. This applies to every angle including wars, pollution , natural disasters and more.

When peace and harmony are maintained, things will continue to run smoothly without any delay. Moreover, it can be a saviour for many who do not wish to engage in any disrupting activities or more.

In other words, while war destroys and disrupts, peace builds and strengthens as well as restores. Moreover, peace is personal which helps us achieve security and tranquillity and avoid anxiety and chaos to make our lives better.

How to Maintain Peace

There are many ways in which we can maintain peace at different levels. To begin with humankind, it is essential to maintain equality, security and justice to maintain the political order of any nation.

Further, we must promote the advancement of technology and science which will ultimately benefit all of humankind and maintain the welfare of people. In addition, introducing a global economic system will help eliminate divergence, mistrust and regional imbalance.

It is also essential to encourage ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporate solutions to resolve the environmental crisis. This will in turn share success and fulfil the responsibility of individuals to end historical prejudices.

Similarly, we must also adopt a mental and spiritual ideology that embodies a helpful attitude to spread harmony. We must also recognize diversity and integration for expressing emotion to enhance our friendship with everyone from different cultures.

Finally, it must be everyone’s noble mission to promote peace by expressing its contribution to the long-lasting well-being factor of everyone’s lives. Thus, we must all try our level best to maintain peace and harmony.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Peace

To sum it up, peace is essential to control the evils which damage our society. It is obvious that we will keep facing crises on many levels but we can manage them better with the help of peace. Moreover, peace is vital for humankind to survive and strive for a better future.

FAQ of Essay on Peace

Question 1: What is the importance of peace?

Answer 1: Peace is the way that helps us prevent inequity and violence. It is no less than a golden ticket to enter a new and bright future for mankind. Moreover, everyone plays an essential role in this so that everybody can get a more equal and peaceful world.

Question 2: What exactly is peace?

Answer 2: Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in which there is no hostility and violence. In social terms, we use it commonly to refer to a lack of conflict, such as war. Thus, it is freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

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Essay On Religion And Peace

RELIGION AND PEACE Religion, a belief which one follows is often a ‘matter of question’ when it comes to peace. It is a point of serious issue whether religion is one of the greatest justifications of war or it is a force for resolving war and civil unrest. The two natural associates in the minds of humans in time and space, and in different cultures of the world are Religion and Peace. The major religions of the world; Hinduism and Islam , Christianity , Buddhism have concepts of personal and societal peace at the heart of their religious discourses. Religion is often regarded as a propellant of conflict, violence as well as destruction in the world and peace. In order to fully understand the relationship between religion and peace, a more comprehensive study of ‘peace’ other than simply being the absence of war is needed. Peace is something that everybody wants to attain but nobody knows how to achieve it successfully. Religion has a prominent as well as a definite role to play in people's want for peace. The moral principles and values carried in the teachings of great religious scholars are vital factors for the reduction and ultimate elimination of …show more content…

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Michelle Goldberg

What Part of Civil Society Will Trump’s Party Target Next?

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”

Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.

If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”

That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.

Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.

Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, for instance, has targeted a network of Catholic migrant shelters called Annunciation House, accusing them of abetting human smuggling. He also opened an investigation into the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, accusing it of manipulating data in an investigation into Nazi content on the social media platform X. Both these crusades have been blocked by courts, but they demonstrate the right’s ambition to use state power to hound nonprofits that oppose its agenda in ways that recall Hungary under Viktor Orban.

Anti-Israel protests have given Republicans a pretext to strike at liberal donors and organizers the way they’ve already struck at university presidents. As Kleinfeld wrote, authoritarians typically persecute the most controversial activists first: “Illiberal actors choose issues involving unpopular groups and cases with the most morally murky facts to create a permission structure that allows them to shut down a much broader set of activities.”

Demonstrations that seem to lionize revolutionary violence have stoked anxiety and outrage among many Democrats, and they’re often full of rhetoric that’s hard to defend. Some readers, I imagine, would be thrilled to see Students for Justice in Palestine’s resources cut off. Whenever I write about the troubling civil liberties implications of attempts to rein in anti-Israel activism, my inbox fills up with furious insults, as well as thoughtful, plaintive emails from people who feel that the climate in academia has become intolerable for many Jews.

But it’s precisely because the protests regularly transgress mainstream sensitivities that the right finds it useful to target them as part of a broader political project. That’s particularly true at a time when so many left-leaning organizations have aligned themselves with the pro-Palestinian movement. As one consultant who works with progressive nonprofits put it to me, careless activists have given Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.”

Republicans seem to be laying the foundation to do just that. Last week, James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced an investigation into the “money trail” behind the campus protests. “It appears global elites are funding these hateful protests and pop-up tent cities,” he said. “These are the same groups that fund other radical agendas, including diminishing America’s energy production and pushing soft-on-crime policies that harm the American people.”

Meanwhile, the House recently passed, 382-11, a bill that would allow the Treasury secretary to revoke the tax-exempt status of “ terrorist-supporting organizations.” Providing material support to terrorism is, of course, already illegal, and nonprofits that violate those laws should be shut down. But the House bill gives the executive branch the power to make these determinations unilaterally, and the measure is clearly aimed at funding for campus protests.

A November hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee at which the bill was discussed was full of dark insinuations about the forces behind Students for Justice in Palestine, which was presented as a terrorist front brainwashing naïve young Americans. An Arizona Republican, David Schweikert, spoke about the need to look at the tax code to ensure that “charitable giving, pretax monies,” are “doing good in the world and not ultimately financing evil.”

None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.

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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.