Women Religion And Peace Building

This book explores the peacebuilding ideas and experiences of Maasai and Gusii women of faith in Kenya. Women of faith across the world have long demonstrated their leadership in peacebuilding. They have achieved this despite their underrepresentation in formal peacebuilding systems and the persistent lack of consideration for their critical contributions, and in the face of insecurity and violence against their very bodies. Their efforts include daily practices of sharing resources, building social cohesion, promoting human relations, and interlinking psychological, social, political, and spiritual encounters. This book provides a gender-responsive peacebuilding framework that leverages the intersectionality of womens diverse identities and roles as they navigate both secular and religious spaces for peace. The book will appeal to researchers and teachers as well as practitioners and activists. Jaqueline Ogega (Ph.D., University of Bradford, UK) is a social scientist with extensive experience in international development, peacebuilding, and humanitarian relief programming and field research. She is the Senior Director of Gender Equality and Social Inclusion at World Vision USA, and the Co-Founder and president of Mpanzi: Empowering Women and Girls. She is the author of Home Is Us, a story about hope and resilience.

Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen examines the obstacles and opportunities that women religious peace builders face as they navigate both the complex conflicts they are seeking to resolve and the power dynamics in the institutions they must deal with in order to accomplish their goals.

This book explores the peacebuilding ideas and experiences of Maasai and Gusii women of faith in Kenya. Women of faith across the world have long demonstrated their leadership in peacebuilding. They have achieved this despite their underrepresentation in formal peacebuilding systems and the persistent lack of consideration for their critical contributions, and in the face of insecurity and violence against their very bodies. Their efforts include daily practices of sharing resources, building social cohesion, promoting human relations, and interlinking psychological, social, political, and spiritual encounters. This book provides a gender-responsive peacebuilding framework that leverages the intersectionality of women’s diverse identities and roles as they navigate both secular and religious spaces for peace. The book will appeal to researchers and teachers as well as practitioners and activists.

In the wake of September 11, 2001 religion is often seen as the motivating force behind terrorism and other acts of violence. Religion and Peacebuilding looks beyond headlines concerning violence perpetrated in the name of religion to examine how world religions have also inspired social welfare and peacemaking activism. Leading scholars from the Aboriginal, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions provide detailed analyses of the spiritual resources for fostering peace within their respective religions. The contributors discuss the formidable obstacles to nonviolent conflict transformation found within sacred texts and living traditions. Case studies of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Cambodia, and South Africa are also examined as practical applications of spiritual resources for peace.

This title provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the scholarship on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. Extending that inquiry beyond its traditional parameters, the volume explores the legacies of colonialism, missionary activism, secularism, orientalism, and liberalism. While featuring case studies from diverse contexts and traditions, the volume is organised thematically.

An investigation of what consolidating religion as a technology of peacebuilding and development does to people's accounts of their religious and cultural traditions and why interreligious peacebuilding entrenches colonial legacies in the present. Throughout the global south, local and international organizations are frequent participants in peacebuilding projects that focus on interreligious dialogue. Yet as Atalia Omer argues in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, the effects of their efforts are often perverse, reinforcing neocolonial practices and disempowering local religious actors. Based on empirical research of inter and intra-religious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, Omer identifies two paradoxical findings: first, religious peacebuilding practices are both empowering and depoliticizing and, second, more doing of religion does not necessarily denote deeper or more critical religious literacy. Further, she shows that these religious actors generate decolonial openings regardless of how closed or open their religious communities are. Hence, religion's occasional usefulness in peacebuilding does not necessarily mean justice-oriented outcomes. The book not only uses decolonial and intersectional prisms to expose the entrenched and ongoing colonial dynamics operative in religion and the practices of peacebuilding and development in the global South, but it also speaks to decolonial theory through stories of transformation and survival.

Although religion is almost never a root cause, it often gets pulled into conflict as a powerful element, especially where conflicting parties have different religious identities. Every faith tradition offers resources for peace, and secular policy makers are more and more acknowledging the influence of faith-based actors, even though there remains a tendency to associate religion more with conflict than peace. In this text, practitioners from different faiths relate and explore the many challenges they face in their peacebuilding work, which their secular partners may be unaware of. The contributors are all practitioners whose faith or religious experience motivates their work for peace and justice in such a way that it influences their actions. Their roles are diverse, as some work for faith-based institutions, while others engage in secular contexts. The multiple perspectives featured represent multiple faiths (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish), diverse scopes of practice, different geographic regions. Each chapter follows a similar template to address specific challenges, such as dealing with extremist views, addressing negative stereotypes about one’s faith, endorsing violence, developing relations with other faith-based or secular groups, confronting gender-based violence, and working with people who hold different beliefs. In this text, practitioners from different faiths relate and explore the many challenges they face in their peacebuilding work, which their secular partners may be unaware of. They provide a comprehensive view of the practice of peacebuilding in its many challenging aspects, for both professionals and those studying religion and peacebuilding alike.

Peace on Earth: The Role of Religion in Peace and Conflict Studies provides a critical analysis of faith and religious institutions in peacebuilding practice and pedagogy. The work captures the synergistic relationships among faith traditions and how multiple approaches to conflict transformation and peacebuilding result in a creative process that has the potential to achieve a more detailed view of peace on earth, containing breadth as well as depth. Library and bookstore shelves are filled with critiques of the negative impacts of religion in conflict scenarios. Peace on Earth: The Role of Religion in Peace and Conflict Studies offers an alternate view that suggests religious organizations play a more complex role in conflict than a simply negative one. Faith-based organizations, and their workers, are often found on the frontlines of conflict throughout the world, conducting conflict management and resolution activities as well as advancing peacebuilding initiatives.