Religious Peacebuilding

The discourse of religious peacebuilding emerged following years of concentration on the relationship between religion, conflict, and violence. Much of the scholarship characterized religion as absolutist, divisive, and irrational. Underlying this characterization is enlightenment, orientalizing and civilizational thinking allegedly grounded in the so-called religious wars between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which other scholars have since dismissed as a myth. This perspective seemed to later find confirmation in religiously articulated violence and terrorist attacks by groups that identify as religious such as the 11 September 2001 attacks. At the turn of the twentieth century, other scholars began to accentuate the positive contribution of religious actors and motifs in preventing and transforming conflict and violence and facilitating reconciliation after conflict. This marked the emergence of the discourse of religious peacebuilding. The preceding scholarship has advanced the debate on religion and violence and peace by stressing the importance of historicizing the category religion. However, the scholarship has not extricated itself from a modernist paradigm and thus remains beholden to a homogenizing narrative of modernity as an intellectual and political project. This chapter seeks to widen our understanding of religion, violence, and peace by arguing for an intersectional, critical, and discursive approach to peacebuilding, which unearths the dominant architecture guiding religious peacebuilding, such as ideas of modernity, progress, and historicism