Atalia Omer

The Hermeneutics of Citizenship as a Peacebuilding Process: a multiperspectival approach to justice

Abstract The hermeneutics of citizenship entails not only recognition of religion as a potential resource for reinterpreting sacred warrants for violent engagement or as a motivating force propelling certain individuals to act toward attaining the nonviolent transformation of conflicts and post-conflict healing. But also this approach stresses the importance of incorporating post-colonial theoretical tools and subaltern voices to the analysis and practice of religious peacebuilding. Broadening the conversation in such a way denaturalizes seemingly axiomatic formulations of how conceptions of nationhood relate to religious or ethnic identifications and narratives and to structures of domination and control. This paper firstly seeks to supplement and offer a theoretical challenge to the religion and peace literature. Secondly, the paper argues that reimagining the relation between religion and nation may provide a mode for conceptualizing peacebuilding. Subsequently, it advances an integrative and multiperspectival approach to questions of peace and justice.

In the Critic vs. Caretaker Dichotomy A Magic Dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, Policing “Religion” (A Rejoinder to Merinda Simmons)1

AbstractThis essay rejoins Merinda Simmons’s protection of Russell McCutcheon’s critic vs. caretaker dichotomy in her response to my “Can a Critic be a Caretaker Too? Religion, Conflict and Conflict Transformation” (JAAR 2011). While Simmons aims to preserve McCutcheon’s binary as a purportedly benignly unavoidable opposition, I expose the perils of epistemic anti-realism at the heart of that dichotomy, as well as the fetishizing of discourse analysis and ignorance of real world cases which hold this would-be field defining dogma in place.

When ‘good religion’ is good

Abstract The article interrogates the assumptions and arguments proposed by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in Beyond Religious Freedom and her contribution in the present issue of the JRPP. Hurd destabilizes and historicizes the universal claims of the discourse of religious freedom, rendering it an instrument of domination and manipulation. The article critiques this approach for its power reductionism toward religion as a category. Engaging Hurd’s heuristic formulations of ‘governed’, ‘expert’ and ‘lived’ religion, as well as Hurd’s ‘two faces of faith’ framework, the article offers counter-arguments developed from the perspective of religious peacebuilding and broader constructive approaches to change processes and conflict transformation. It is argued that Hurd’s analysis of the instrumentalization of religion in ‘expert’ and ‘governed’ policy domains lacks a recognition of the hermeneutical contestation extant in religious traditions and motivations, and the internal pluralities of religion that this contestation involves. Hurd’s critique offers a prism through which to elucidate our examination of some discursive traps underpinning the language of the promotion of religious freedom. However, the practices, actors, and meanings understood in the praxis of interfaith peacebuilding stand as tangible examples of constructive religious agency that challenge the assumptions underpinning Hurd’s project as a whole.

Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East: Re-Orienting Israeli Social Mapping:

Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.