"A missiological critique of the world council of churches' notion of just peace : its implication and contextual relevance for overcoming violence and peacebuilding in the multi-religious community of JOS, Nigeria".

Ph. D. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2015.The study employed missiological lenses to critique the emerging ecumenical notion of Just Peace as an ideological concept, and also examined its contextual relevance and ecumenical implications as potent theory for overcoming violence and fostering sustainable peace in a multi-religious and multicultural Nigerian Society. The Just Peace concept and process was adopted by the WCC at the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation that was held in Kingston Jamaica in May 2011 as a global ecumenical pedagogical approach for equipping and empowering churches in their missional engagements to overcome violence and build peace in human society. The objective of the research was mainly to critique the Just Peace concept through investigating the extent to which churches in Jos, Nigeria have understood and appropriated the concept in their process of responding to the conflict in their communities. In cognisance of the global challenge in the quest for justice and peace, Just Peace, ecumenical concept of WCC was examined in order to determine its contextual relevance towards building a just and peaceful multi-religious and multicultural context of Jos, Nigeria. In doing justice to the foregoing, the research embraced three ideological theories which formed the theoretical framework upon which the research project was constructed. Konrad Raiser a German global ecumenist and former General Secretary of the WCC offers a missio-ecumenical framework that focuses on ‘a Culture of Life: Reconsidering Peace and Justice’ and William Tom Dickens, a professor of Religious Studies with special interest in inter-religious dialogue offering a covenantal framework that promotes peace among people of faith that embraces the Abrahamic tradition. To reinforce the two euro-centric theories, a third theory emerging from African context was employed, ‘Ubuntu’. In a nutshell, the Culture of Just Peace canvassed in this research compels people of all faith traditions to deliberately perceive and discern rightly that justice and peace are free and priceless gifts of the Almighty God and must not be commoditized or politically transacted in any way or in any form. The Culture compels Christians and Muslims and indeed all people of faiths to question the authenticity and validity all religious teachings suspected to be perverted and divisive that have the propensity to instigate disregard and disrespect for the religious “other”, with the sole aim of building a peaceful and religiously cohesive society for all, and in consistent with the fundamental principles and philosophies of the various religions embedded in the sanctity of human life. Being religious cohesion does not in any way negate the principles of diversity but invites people of different religious affiliation to perceive and recognise that other religions other than theirs affirms life