Interrogating Religion and Peacebuilding

Interrogating Religion and Peacebuilding challenges the dominant narratives that frame peace as a civilizational ideal. At a time when millions demand an end to war, occupation, and systemic oppression, this volume gathers diverse voices in a transnational and decolonial conversation. The contributors interrogate how “peace” is too often deployed as a mirage—reproducing systems of exclusion and violence under the guise of stability, order, and reform.

Exposing the coloniality embedded within hegemonic peace discourses, contributors reveal how imperial power configurations transform freedom into occupation, democracy into exclusion, and security into violence. Through critically self-reflective engagement with both religious and secular worldviews, contributors propose that peace is not an abstract ideal, but a deeply political construct shaped by empire, enforced through intervention, and justified by a faith in modernity’s civilizing mission. Rejecting both reformist inclusion and idealized neutrality, these essays embody a political commitment to the tormented, the resisting, and the marginalized.

From “post-conflict” pacification to imperial “peace deals,” contributors unmask peacebuilding as often war by other means—while advancing liberative spiritualities that reimagine peace as justice from below. This book is not merely critique—it is a call to transformation.

Jude Lal Fernando is Associate Professor at the Irish School of Ecumenics, School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies in Trinity College Dublin and the Director of the Irish School of Ecumenics. He is the author of Religion, Conflict and Peace in Sri Lanka: The Politics of Interpretation of Nationhoods, and the editor of Resistance to Empire and Militarization: Reclaiming the Sacred and Faith in the Face of Militarization: Indigenous, Feminist and Interreligious Voices.

Santiago Slabodsky is an Argentinean sociologist who currently holds the Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and served as the inaugural associate director of the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University in New York. He is currently co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons, based in South America and associate editor of the journal ReOrient: Critical Muslim Studies, the UK.