Symposium Introduction
11.19.25 |
Response
On How Victimized Colombian Communities Become Agents
I am very grateful to participate in this symposium about Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents under Duress in Colombia because my research background as a Colombian theologian has allowed me to know the context of faith-based communities in the Montes de María region (departments of Sucre and Bolívar) as well as in the municipality of Tierralta (department of Córdoba). Furthermore, in November 2023, I had the privilege of attending the meeting in which Janna Hunter-Bowman presented the contents of her book to some leaders of the communities with which she had worked for more than eight years in both regions.
In the first part of this response, I will depict some key elements of Hunter-Bowman’s eschatological interpretation of the peacebuilding carried out by some Christian communities in these two Colombian coast regions. In the second part, I will formulate a first group of questions about the supernatural interpretation of irruptive events by communities self-recognized as messianic ones. Finally, in the third part, I will formulate a second group of questions about the relationship between grassroots communities engaged in peacebuilding and other peacebuilders from the academy, government agencies, and NGOs.
An Eschatological Approach to Peacebuilding by Some Colombian Faith-Based Communities
Hunter-Bowman’s book is an extraordinary example of a theological reflection that starts by seeing closely and listening carefully to the real experiences of faith-based communities to grasp the way God reveals himself/herself through human agency to overcome violence. The author does not present a triumphal vision of the communities nor a static image of them but emphasizes their dynamic role in long-term peacebuilding processes and their capability to manage death-supervening circumstances.
The book shows how the agency of such communities is structured by the now time (kairos) in which they try to survive amidst violence, and the gradual time (chronos) in which they transform structural causes of the violence that afflicts them. Through the interaction of these two temporalities, the messianic divine power gives the victimized communities a new identity as agents.
The constraint experienced by some northwestern Colombian ecclesial communities affected by violence does not reduce their capabilities. On the contrary, as Hunter-Bowman’s work indicates, this pressure generated by violent actors stimulates them to resist in hope and to develop an implicit eschatology. According to the author, the interplay between now peace actions and gradual peace sustained efforts lets these “agents under duress” contribute toward a justpeace for all.
Apocalyptic eschatology interacts with gradual eschatology in Hunter-Bowman’s interpretation of these Colombian communal peacebuilding experiences. She contends that theological agency, evident in the practice knowledge of these northwestern coastal Colombian communities, must guide peacebuilding processes beyond mainstream colonial theories and liberal practices. People’s wisdom and their marginalized voices can help scholars, government offices, and nongovernmental organizations to make their peacebuilding efforts more fruitful.
The book emphasizes how the academy needs to learn from communities’ wisdom to broaden its horizon of understanding violence and its transformation. Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives open the space in this volume to see how grassroots communities create a sort of practical knowledge that must be recognized by scholars and peacebuilders as a source of worthy resources.
Under duress, the faith of these communities that have suffered violence in the Colombian context turns them into agents, so they become wise partners for other civil society participants and government actors committed to achieving peace. As the author’s research shows, these formerly invisible grassroots communities have emerged in Colombia as new visible political subjects powerful enough to transform violent reality into justpeace.
Some Questions about the Supernatural Interpretation of Irruptive Events
Using the messianic political theology framework, Hunter-Bowman highlights the interdependence between human and divine actions. In the now time, the communities enact immediate conditions for peace. However, cases like the Mampuján community narrative about its liberation from death on March 10, 2000, by the action of a protecting light in the sky and the presence of some angels in the mountains could present us with a latent risk in communities’ supernatural interpretations of irruptive liberative facts. That vision eventually could affect the very communities’ capabilities that make them “agents under duress” as well as the relationship with other less fortunate communities.
God’s will operates through human action, not over it, so it is possible to formulate some questions about the incidence of divine intervention in the life of the communities. How can we prevent some messianic events interpreted as “miracles” from reducing the communities’ motivation to engage in political processes in gradual time? How to avoid allowing seeing “the hand of God at work” in these historical actualizations of the divine power to generate a passive attitude that freezes communities in a waiting time for other divine interruptions that can operate the necessary changes to reach justpeace? What are the necessary conditions of discernment to ensure that a community can respond adequately to the saving intervention of God?
In the case of the Mampuján community, to have escaped the imminent massacre planned by a paramilitary group gave it a new identity as a messianic community and a blessing to the nations. The village inhabitants survived that night and the next day had to leave their territory under threat of death. Beyond the important national and international role that this community has played since 2000 as a visible peacebuilding agent, especially through the collective memorial tapestries work made by women, what about its relation with the community of Las Brisas, where eleven innocent farmers were killed by the same paramilitary group the next day? How to explain to themselves that God has saved the people from Mampuján (municipality of María La Baja) but has remained indifferent to the massacre perpetrated in Las Brisas (municipality of San Cayetano)?
Some Questions about the Interaction between Grassroots Communities and Other Peacebuilders
Besides the interaction between divine and human action, Hunter-Bowman also highlights in her book the proactive role of these communities before the absence of the state and the presence of armed actors in their territory. The author shows how, instead of being subaltern state-dependent entities or just armed conflict victims, these communities have made important contributions to peacebuilding practice and theory through their thought-practice wisdom.
Cooperation between socially engaged scholars and marginalized people optimizes their participation in political struggles oriented toward a justpeace. Participation is a required condition for the communities’ cooperative work with other agents because they are not only sources of information but also worthy interlocutors and powerful peacebuilding agents. This is the case of associations like the Corporation for Community Social Development (CORSOC) based in Tierralta (Córdoba) or the Inter-institutional Group for the Defense of Land and Territory of Córdoba (GDTTC).
Although it seems that collaborative work could only benefit the agents that can learn from the communities’ experience, the role played by the communities as main entities among other actors involved in peacebuilding gives rise to another group of questions. What do these communities receive in the interchange with the academy and other peacebuilders? How to avoid their instrumentalization by scholars, members of NGOs, and members of government agencies? Maybe the recognition they have achieved from the government and civil society is not enough.
These last questions inquire about transparency in power relationships that historically have been unequal and discriminatory with vulnerable rural communities, exploiting their wisdom without any compensation. This issue is particularly important insofar as these “agents under duress” deserve ethical treatment for their dignity and the relevance of their contributions to reach a justpeace for all.
Thanks to the hospitality of the NGO Sembrandopaz, in November 2023, I witnessed how proud the people of these Colombian coastal communities feel to recognize themselves and their peacebuilding efforts in Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents under Duress in Colombia. This inspiring book is now a main reference in the reconfiguration of the relationships between the communities, government agencies, and NGOs. Hunter-Bowman’s work is especially helpful for these communities to deepen their own identity as peacebuilding agents. However, in Colombia, there is still a great deal of research that extracts knowledge from communities without a genuine concern for their well-being.
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11.19.25 |
Reply
Response to Edgar López
It is such a privilege to have Dr. Edgar López’s participation in this symposium. He has supported this project at various stages of its development. We met when the Javeriana University of Bogotá, Colombia, hosted me for a fellowship in support of the dissertation on which this book is based. He then facilitated a November 2023 visiting professorship to the Javeriana that included Witnessing Peace book lectures, fascinating conversations, and marvelous hospitality. As he describes, during that time he participated in one of the popular education-style dialogues with communities of collaborators about Witnessing Peace.
López notices that the engaged research contributes to its aims in Colombia. The introduction to the Spanish-language synopsis used in the workshops reads, “This summary is a tool to discuss ideas from the book with you, the communities that inspired it, contributed to the theory-building, and are featured throughout. This is your book too.” One aim of engaged scholarship is to support violence-affected communities’ efforts to address their political concerns and goals of deep transformation. It is meaningful to hear from López that the book contributes to the “reconfiguration of the relationships between the communities, government agencies, and NGOs.” Currents in US-based academies of theology and religion sense that change is necessary and that certain things can be done to facilitate it.1 In a moment of environmental crisis, white supremacy, and fascist politics (among other deep and intersecting concerns), there is a surge of interest in, maybe even commitment to, scholarship that is praxis and activist oriented, transnational, critical feminist or queer, and produces decolonial transformation. López has been participating in community-engaged scholarship for years, and I would love to hear where López sees the field going in Colombia, especially given his closing words that “in Colombia, there is still a great deal of research that extracts knowledge from communities without a genuine concern for their well-being.” I am beginning my response with where López ends his essay because I want to lead with my hope that we can think together about where engaged research should go from here.
In his opening comments on Witnessing Peace, López draws attention to the temporalities (apocalyptic eschatology and gradual eschatology) that interact to help us think about theological agency that moves “peacebuilding processes beyond mainstream colonial theories and liberal practices.” He appreciates the theological reflection that begins with close listening and careful attention to communities struggling to overcome violence. Nevertheless, he worries that one community’s narrative overdetermines an aspect of the normative theory. This is an important concern.
López worries about what he calls a supernatural or “sobrenatural interpretation of irruptive events” in the book’s formulation of the apocalyptic eschatology of messianic or now time (the topic of chapter 3). He states that making communities’ constructive responses to difficult circumstances reliant on divine supernatural intervention could negatively affect their capacities for action and their relationships with their neighbors. His concern is rooted in a descriptive narrative featured in the chapter on the gradual time of processes, chapter 4. He recalls “the Mampuján community narrative about its liberation from death on March 10, 2000, by the action of a protecting light in the sky and the presence of some angels in the mountains.” Women of the community created tapestries depicting this narrative that, in their telling, gave them a new identity as a messianic community and a blessing to the nations. His first worry is that a normative theory that relies on a supernatural intervening God will reduce community motivation to engage politically, be it because communities are passively waiting for God to intervene in crisis or because a focus on miraculous events “reduces communities’ motivation to engage in political processes” for structural change “in gradual time.” The second worry concerning relationships with the neighbors stems from the tragic fact that the day after soldiers of the paramilitary group aborted the massacre they were carrying out in Mampuján, the same paramilitary group killed eleven farmers in the neighboring community of Las Brisas. López writes, “How to explain [to] themselves that God has saved the people from Mampuján (municipality of María La Baja) but has remained indifferent to the massacre perpetrated in Las Brisas (municipality of San Cayetano)?”
Dr. López is right to raise these concerns, and I appreciate them, but the book does not endorse a transcendent God that strips humans of agency. López knows well that this is a book of engaged scholarship developed through a form of participant action research. Narrative descriptions are interpretations and arguments for the concepts identified in the chapter headings and the surrounding text. The descriptive narrative in chapter 4 is argument for the titular topic of gradual time, the time of processes and structural transformation, not for messianic time. It is not appropriate to apply the interpretation and argument for one concept to another. Perhaps this raises the question—the narrative is in the book; doesn’t that mean the author endorses the theology? To create an ethnographic scene of critical importance to a community in ways that do justice to community members’ retelling is not to endorse a given interpretation. I do not “own” my interlocutors’ theology—that would be an extractive impulse and posture—but rather try to think with my interlocutors. Doing so led me to feature the narrative in question not in the chapter on messianic time but rather in the chapter on gradual processes in gradual time (gradual eschatology). Mampuján is featured as a community that has been “sent” on the journey and participates with others in pluralistic coalitions for the work of deep transformation. This provides a response to the second part of the first concern: their experience and sense of God did not strip them of agency for processes of structural transformation but instead invests them with agency for structural transformation.
Additionally on methods, I strive to use strategies of reflexivity that require self-critical choices to represent my interlocutors’ visions in a way that is accountable to their struggle. In this instance, one dimension is a Pentecostal-inflected emphasis on the possibility of Spirit-enabled disruption amidst high levels of incertitude in a landscape shaped by Catholicism (chapter 1). They respond to both. This account in Witnessing Peace intersects with peacebuilding scholar-practitioners’ observations of Colombian Pentecostal communities in situations of internal displacement who have experienced the Spirit in ways that extend and depart from traditional Christian theology in ways that empower women amidst machismo and illuminate paths for peace.2 It also calls to mind Todd Whitmore’s emic account of the Holy Spirit as “animator” of the vocations of the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate of Gulu, Uganda.3 López has invested decades of his life accompanying communities of different Christian expressions, including evangelical, and different genders. I know he strives to be cautious and sensitive in these engagements, so I am curious how he thinks about reflexivity amidst such communities from his positionality as a male Catholic theologian and look forward to thinking together about this some more.
Dr. López’s questions made me very curious about the notion of God in the book holistically. I went back to the text to see what it says. As I see it, the understanding of God encompasses transcendent and immanent qualities, particularly through the lens of more horizontal manifestations of the Holy Spirit. The book acknowledges God as beyond human comprehension and determination. This aligns with traditional theological understandings of God existing outside of space and time. The book also emphasizes God’s immanence, mainly through the active presence of the Holy Spirit working within the world and empowering individuals and communities. This power “from the underside of history” supports a decentralized distribution of divine power that contrasts with vertical notions of God’s power (101) and disrupts hierarchical power structures (120). Again, this aligns with the Pentecostal theological tradition in context, emphasizing the tangible and experiential aspects of life with the Spirit. “Spirited judgment” or “pneumatic mind” describe the apocalyptic discernment given by the divine Spirit (106). These forms of divine involvement in the lives of Colombians in situations of oppression and crisis are integral to the account of the messianic. The book also discusses God’s immanence through the concept of “being known by” an unpossessed sovereign power (106). This relational understanding of God’s presence goes beyond mere cognitive knowledge and points to a deep, experiential connection with the Divine that empowers action and transformation. These concepts from the book’s account of messianic apocalyptic theology (chapter 3) do not speak to me of a formulation of the supernatural of the sort that rightly worries Dr. López.
As I finish recapitulating the concept of the divine in the messianic apocalyptic formation, I wonder if I’m addressing López’s concern or missing the mark. Maybe the question is less about the concept of God and more about the question—what do we say in the face of horrific violence, loss, and injustice? That’s outside the scope of the book on constructive agency, yet it is a question that is ever on our minds and deserves an answer. As the exchange with Dr. Marie-Claire Klassen in this symposium suggests, lament and the agency of lament is an important complement to agency under duress. It helps to brace against theologies that espouse a “chosen” people (suggesting that others are not). I will be glad to hear if a conversation about lament helps to address concerns in ways that a response about method and concepts of God do not. And I wonder how reflecting on lament amidst crisis and death might shape the “imperative to change” felt in recent conversations on engaged scholarship.4
In the realm of Latino/a studies, see the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres including through the Foundation Frantz Fanon, as well as methods of mujerista theology. See Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Justice as Reconciliatory Praxis: A Decolonial Mujerista Move,” International Journal of Public Theology 4 (2010): 37–50; and Mari Castañeda and Joseph Krupczynski, “The Power and Possibilities of a Latinx Community-Academic Praxis in Civic Engagement,” in Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader, ed. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa (New York: NYU Press, 2021), 491–503.↩
Susan Hayward and Michael Joseph, “The Work of the Holy Spirit among Colombia’s Internally Displaced Communities,” Journal of World Christianity 7, no. 2 (2017): 187–210.↩
Todd D. Whitmore, Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2019).↩
Jeremy Sorgen, Rebecca C. Bartel, and Emma Frances Bloomfield, “Engaged Scholarship in Times of Crisis,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 18, no. 4 (2024): 435.↩
11.24.25 |
Response
Accounting for Agency by Attending to Time
Janna Hunter-Bowman begins Witnessing Peace with a story about a faith community protecting a young man who has been targeted for assassination. While “paramilitary soldiers search for Isaac at his home and around town,” church members “surround [him] in supplication, arms raised in petition. Isaac sways in the midst of the praying body, held by a community interceding and, by their account, intervening with God on his behalf” (2). After keeping him safe through the night, they help him escape into the mountains the following day. Meanwhile, other relatives and community members contact everyone they can to report the incident and ask for help. None is forthcoming. Indeed, because there was no assassination, “authorized knowledge and official rubrics” determine that “nothing happened” (3).
Hunter-Bowman’s book is a fight against erasure. It tells stories that official accounts ignore and includes voices that bureaucratic procedures silence. Most significantly, it develops a framework for agency that renders visible action that does not count in other metrics and logics. My comments focus on this account of agency, summarizing the critical and constructive moves that shape it, and offering some thoughts on the contribution and challenge of it. Hunter-Bowman’s contribution is significant: she literally adds a dimension to accounts of agency by prompting us to think about time or, rather, times. In the same way that earlier scholars drew back the curtain on constrained power as an essential and overlooked consideration in discussions of agency, so Hunter-Bowman does with interpretations of time. Moreover, because these interpretations of time are shaped by theological conviction, Hunter-Bowman also contributes an account of agency that reflects a truly integrated political theology. This significant contribution brings with it some challenges that I hope we can engage together in this forum and beyond. In this response, I raise a methodological challenge regarding the role of theology in the interpretation of agency, something that is central to Hunter-Bowman’s account and a perennial challenge for those of us working at the intersection of theology, ethics, and peace studies.
The contours of and criteria for agency have been debated for generations in ethics, and they should continue to be. These are important debates, and Hunter-Bowman helps us to see what’s at stake in them. In the context of Colombian movements, we see how frameworks for agency (assumptions about agency) inform accounts of violence, reports of pain, and metrics for peacebuilding. Perceptions of agency translate into assessment, such that a woman at the US Embassy declares: “Colombians are passive about their plight. . . . They lack tenacity, a willingness to stand up for their convictions and fight” (xi). The “dissonance” that Hunter-Bowman experiences between accounts like this and her own observations underscores that accounting for agency is not only about theoretical accuracy; it is about the way that our perceptions and assumptions cloud our vision. Placing these complications about construals of agency into the context of peacebuilding work in Colombia makes clear the costs of counting and miscounting. The question of “what counts” shapes the telling of history, the funding of programs, the crafting and dismantling of agreements, the reporting of crime, and the perception of resistance and religiosity.
Hunter-Bowman critiques two political accounts of agency and puts forward a theological one instead. In the liberal framework, she argues, “agents are constituted by the possession of rights” (77), and “victimhood and agency are mutually exclusive” (67). Given her context and concerns, Hunter-Bowman is more appreciative of a poststructuralist approach to agency represented by Saba Mahmood. She values Mahmood’s approach for “discerning agency among the oppressed” and disrupting the liberal link between agency and resistance. But she argues that Mahmood’s approach does not capture the participation of evangelical actors in “pluralistic movements of social and political struggle” (78). The rights approach and the piety approach both distort the activity Hunter-Bowman is trying to witness and communicate because they are missing a dimension. One needs an account of time, and particularly a theological account of time, to really see and understand what is unfolding among these particular evangelical actors in Colombia (80).
When Hunter-Bowman asked Isaac’s pastor how the church responded as it did that night, the pastor responds, “What can I say? Those times are not like these. Those moments of desperation and anguish. . . . We had no one else to turn to but God. And we saw the hand of God at work” (3). This pivotal quote directs Hunter-Bowman’s attention to time, particularly notions of messianic and gradual time, which make the actions she has observed visible in a new way. Messianic (or now) time is disruptive or interruptive, revealing the Ultimate in the midst of things (101) and disclosing a hopeful future. In these moments—viewed through a theological interpretation of messianic time—people “become agents through the power of the Spirit,” writes Hunter-Bowman (100). The language of becoming looms large in her constructive move. But crucial to her project is a nonlinear understanding of becoming. This is a becoming that is always unfolding, catalyzed in disruptive messianic moments “that disconnect the present from the threatening past and disclose the hopeful horizon of expectation as future” (101). And these moments occur “in the midst of things, again and again” (101).
This notion of becoming hinges on another understanding of time, not the disruptive, messianic now, but “gradual time.” Gradual time captures the ongoingness of agency. These individuals “are not living in the staccato messianic moments peppering history but become agents who are actively and continuously participating in the emergence of justpeace in their part of the world” (133). Justpeace is not a state, but an ongoing dynamic process, “always contextually contingent and never fully achieved” (231). Justpeace is always in a state of becoming. It is the gradual peace of gradual time, “the slow, arduous work of deep relational, institutional, systemic, and discursive transformation” (230). Hunter-Bowman uses the metaphor of a pilgrim to communicate the relationship between now and gradual time: “the presence of the Messiah (messianic time) sends the pilgrim on the road (gradual time)” (130). As all pilgrims know, the inspiration or catalyst remains on the journey, sometimes reappearing, disrupting the journey again. The walking—or the becoming—is maintained, catalyzed, inspired by the ongoing presence of disruptive messianic time. As Hunter-Bowman writes, “the temporal interplay is crucial” (230).
The temporal interplay is not only crucial to understanding fully the behavior of her interlocutors; it is a significant contribution to theories of agency, particularly theories of moral agency under constraint. Like agency under duress, the language Hunter-Bowman uses, moral agency under constraint focuses on the ways that actors exercise power when they have a limited range of freedom and choice. This approach to studying agency was initiated by womanist ethicist Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon. In her essay “Moral Wisdom in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition,” Cannon argues that the dominant tradition of Western philosophical ethics assumes an agent with “freedom and a wide range of choices.”1 Like Hunter-Bowman, Cannon was trying to make visible a form of agency that the dominant tradition had obscured from view. Her research focused on the writer and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, highlighted models of moral agency, and offered a new methodology for learning from expressions of moral agency enacted under constraint. The classic example from Cannon’s early work was her description of unctuousness as a virtue. Drawing the descriptor, unctuous, from Alice Walker, Cannon writes: “Hurston repeatedly found herself in situations where her head was in the lion’s mouth and she was being forced to treat the lion very gently.”2 She continues, “Being unctuous helped Zora Neale Hurston . . . to find meaning in the most despotic circumstances and to create possibilities where none existed before.”3 In order to make Hurston legible as a moral agent, Cannon had to pull the curtain back on the layers of constraint to which she was responding. This description of agency required an account of tridimensional oppression.
Here we can see the overlap between Cannon and the theorists Hunter-Bowman cites as capturing agency on the margins. In order to understand fully the action, we need to understand the context of it. We need to know what the actor is responding to. Hunter-Bowman’s contribution now comes clearly into view. Her interlocutors are not only responding to the layers of constraint documented in chapter 2; they are also responding to the “temporal interplay” of messianic and gradual time. A framework for agency that attends to time helps us to see not only what actors do, but also why and how, what inspires them and sustains them in the arduous and seemingly impossible work of justpeace. The temporal interplay enriches the account, giving it an internal as well as external dimension, and helping us to see a form of agency that linear views of time and binary accounts of violence and peace, secularity and religiosity have obscured from view.
Studies of agency involve interpretation of action. This is especially true (or perhaps just transparently so) of projects focused on moral agency under constraint. We are making claims about what counts as moral agency and what counts as constraint. And we are offering an interpretation of activity in light of those criteria. Hunter-Bowman does this as well. She integrates her years of experience in Colombia and her findings from fieldwork with peacebuilding literature, critical theory, eschatological theologies, and scripture to offer an interpretation of human activity. She crafts a particular political-theological lens and focuses it on particular subjects (non-state actors) so that her readers can see them becoming agents, forming coalitions, “enact[ing] peace amid violence and engag[ing] in gradual processes that transformatively displace and reproduce the world toward a justpeace” (239). She is transparent and intentional about unveiling the constraints in structure and in logics that impede and erase these expressions of agency under duress. The description is simultaneously interpretation and argument.
This is good and necessary work and also hosts a challenge I am eager to reflect on together. In the introduction, Hunter-Bowman writes: “theological agency is what should drive theory and reflection on peacebuilding and related ethics” (11). This method shapes chapter 3 most clearly, as she draws on the theologies of time to narrate the internal dynamics of becoming agents. I am less clear that the influence flows from theology toward theory and reflection on peacebuilding and related ethics. It seems a much more dynamic interaction to me, and I am inclined to think it should be. In my view, we come to understand something like messianic time also through the experience of an interruptive moment. It is the experience and our reflection on it that bring meaning to a theological claim, as well as the claim helping us to make sense of the moment. Interpretation involves a dynamic interaction between multiple sources and among conversation partners, something that I perceive and appreciate in Hunter-Bowman’s work. But if there is a particular vector of influence from theology toward the other sources, I welcome some shared wrestling with that. I perceive this to be a challenge particular to this important book and the research and theological reflection that shape it, as well as a challenge perennial to political theological projects attempting to provide internal and external accounts of agency. Hunter-Bowman so powerfully conveys the high stakes of perceiving agency that the function of multidimensional and multidisciplinary interpretation surfaces as a challenge we must continue to address.
I am exceedingly grateful to Hunter-Bowman for this wonderful book and especially for its contribution to discussions of agency under duress. Her thorough descriptions of constraint and her concrete descriptions of agency enrich that literature significantly. But most of all, Witnessing Peace offers a compelling argument for attending to time and an example for how to do it well.
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11.24.25 |
Reply
Response to Ellen Ott Marshall
I am honored that Dr. Ellen Ott Marshall has read Witnessing Peace with such care and offered an honest, thoughtful response. She is one of the first professors bringing together conflict transformation and theology, and I have long appreciated not just the integration of the fields but her generosity in engaging those of us who come after her.
Ott Marshall uplifts the book as a fight against erasure. It struggles against the erasure of marginalized communities and their experiences, particularly in relation to peacebuilding and conflict transformation, through reflecting on constructive responses under duress, or amid constraints on autonomy (7–8, 20), through experiences of times.
Ott Marshall draws to our attention a key source for accounting for people exercising power under duress: Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon’s work on the constrained moral agency of Black women. Cannon draws on the “Moral Wisdom in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition” to develop the model of moral agency. Witnessing Peace follows Cannon in Black Womanist Ethics in working against the dominant tradition of ethics that makes assumptions about moral agents with (negative) “freedom and a wide range of choices” who (seemingly) make decisions within an ahistorical, universal moral context.1 Like Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics, it stresses that the present situation of the communities in focus is linked with the “historical background” of colonialism, slavery, death, continued economic exploitation, and racism.2 Cannon was a forerunner in tracing the intersecting and interlocking oppressions that Black women face, which is vitally important to understanding constructive agents under duress as well. Furthermore, like Cannon, I emphasize that context informed by relations of power shapes moral life, which cannot be predetermined by “fixed rules or absolute principles of the white-oriented, male-structured society.”3 Points of divergence are also significant. In contrast to Cannon’s positionality as a Black woman, I try to think with Colombian community collaborators in engaged research. (See 87 for further engagement.) (I commend Dr. Marshall’s blog, “Moral Agency under Constraint,” rooted in Cannon’s work!)
A second source for accounting for people engaging under constraint is the concept of “duress” from Catholic theology, which refers to constraints on autonomy or limited choices (7–8, 20). I did my graduate work at a Catholic school, the University of Notre Dame, and used this second source to develop the notion of constructive agency under duress. The Catholic moral tradition’s notion of duress refers to specific constraints on autonomy that might result in cooperation with evil acts due to the limited range of choices in the situation from which a person cannot extricate herself. Working with an approach that thinks about agents’ responses to specific constraints that shape their world and, with my interlocutors, against the notion that duress leads to cooperation with evil led to an analogical extension of the term. That is why “constructive” is linked to “under duress” in the book. The linkage emphasizes agents’ participation in extending life amid threats to existence, structural transformation, and radical democracy.
A third valuable source for analysis is Michel Foucault’s notion of apparatus, which provides a resource to articulate overlapping bundles of duress that do not extinguish power (36, 58). A Latin American center-periphery lens (149) paired with an intersectional lens highlights how individual participants in organized communities in the same geographic location are differently affected by the plural interlocking systems and fields of oppression. These sources bring into view the internal difference and complexity of a multiply, contradictorily oppressed community-based agent (chapter 4).
Bringing constructive agency under duress alongside Cannon is important, Ott Marshall shows. She writes that to fully grasp an action, we must understand its context and what prompts the actor’s response, including constraints and the interplay of nonlinear times. Indeed, this contestation of times illuminates the motivations, perseverance, and possibilities of their efforts toward justpeace. The contestation of times is key in the fight against erasure, which leads us to discuss time and method.
Ott Marshall observes that, whereas in most of the book there is a dynamic interaction between academic theology/ethics, critical theory, and peacebuilding praxis, chapter 3 draws on academic theologies of time “to narrate the internal dynamics of becoming agents.” She is uncomfortable with what she perceives as “a particular vector of influence from theology toward the other sources” in messianic time (chapter 3). A possible methodological commitment to prioritizing academic theology worries her.
On the level of the text, academics do play an important role in the interpretation of messianic time, yet the perception of theology’s priority is an illusion created by the contexts to which I am accountable. While I offer descriptive narratives as interpretation and argument, in the introduction I state that “[t]his book is decidedly not an ethnography in the academic sense, but it is a testimony to how experience on the ground and our collaborative efforts have shaped my thinking in a profound way” (9). It is engaged scholarship that “seeks to address a problem or contribute toward a goal defined by communities that also intersects with a scholarly interest and concern . . . and is assessed and evaluated according to traditional academic standards and by the living communities to whom I become accountable through collaboration” (12). One of the venues in which I seek accountability to the academy is in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. There I described engagement as exchange in which all contribute, and none are untouched. An example of this is how the Colombian communities that, according to John Howard Yoder’s work, should have vindicated his messianic theology pointed out its limitations and the fit of his messianic theology with his sexualized violence.4 This illustrates how this form of engaged scholarship differs from theological ethnography. The book explicitly commits to a nonlinear method in which (academic) theology is in the mix but is not given priority in the way Ott Marshall fears. That said, deploying academic resources in this kind of a project is methodologically tricky for precisely the reasons Marshall indicates. I work on it in my current project.
Meanwhile, Dr. López worries that the account of messianic time reflects a methodological commitment not to academic theology (Ott Marshall’s worry) but the theological narrative of one of the communities. He is the Colombian respondent on this Syndicate panel who participated in one of the book dialogues with communities from northwest Colombia that inspired, participated in theory-building, and are featured in the book. Dr. López is worried that communities overdetermine the normative theory of the messianic. Interestingly, the communities have told me what Dr. López reports in his response to this forum: the book project has helped to reconfigure relationships between communities, academics, government agencies, and NGOs—which was my intention. I look forward to continuing to wrestle together with interlocutors outside of the academy on these important questions.
Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 2.↩
Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 6.↩
Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 4.↩
Janna L. Hunter-Bowman, “Constructive Agents under Duress: Alternatives to the Structural, Political, and Agential Inadequacies of Past Theologies of Nonviolent Peacebuilding Efforts,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 38, no. 2 (2018): 149–68.↩
11.26.25 |
Response
Negotiating Democratic Processes
I was born in the United States of immigrant parents. I grew up returning with my family to Colombia—to Manizales, my father’s hometown—at least once a decade, except during the 1990s, after my aunt’s murder. Those were violent years even for middle-class Colombians. I was told that her death was a random act of violence, perhaps a result of theft. I don’t remember if I was given much more of an explanation than that at the time. I doubt it. I was a kid. I’m sure my parents tried to shield me from the details. I do remember, however, learning that the identification of her body proved difficult due to the brutality of the attack. Her absence, and the unspeakable violence, haunts our family reunions.
“[V]iolence against women has become a pandemic,” writes Nancy Pineda-Madrid in her recent book, Theologizing in an Insurgent Key: Violence, Women, Salvation.1 Pineda-Madrid focuses our attention on the gendered nature of violence in the Americas, a “violence motivated by a drive to assert and maintain structural gender and racial inequalities” (2). These killings are scenes of crucifixion. “The theological plight of the femicide victims is as a crucified people” (90). In her overview of femicidal violence, she includes the women of Colombia. “Of the 960 women murdered in Colombia in 2018, 73 of these killings were a femicide, the killing of a woman because she is a woman” (33). Such targeted attacks demand theological engagement, Pineda-Madrid argues, because Christian institutions have had a hand in shaping the dominant moral landscapes that crisscross through Latin American societies. The widespread violence “requires a serious theological and ecclesial soul searching” (75) given that the gender norms reified through liturgical performance and theological discourse “tacitly provide justification for the enduring subordination of women” (94). Violence against women is a social problem that requires theological and ecclesial reformation. Peacework begins at church, in the reformulation and reorganization of Christian thinking and practice.
I read Janna Hunter-Bowman’s book, Witnessing Peace, against the backdrop of gendered violence in the Americas—because of my own family’s story of loss and because I was reading her book in the wake of the killing of a Colombian friend here in North Carolina. Her murder has sparked a call from immigrant communities, especially from the large Colombian and Colombian American population in our state, to recognize women as an endangered population given the pervasiveness of misogyny and the ubiquity of guns.2 The power of men over women is an important feature of Hunter-Bowman’s account of peacebuilding efforts within communities that have endured long-standing, internecine armed conflicts—a vicious, drug-trade-fueled war among various guerrilla and paramilitary groups, as well as governmental forces. She traces the legacy of Spanish colonialism into the present configuration of social relations—the “colonialidad del poder” (Hunter-Bowman cites Aníbal Quijano’s landmark essay)—which imposed a structure of power that has stratified populations according to hierarchies of class, race, and gender. “[T]he colonial aspect of power relations in Colombia still enables violence” (42). As she explains,
Regional scholars trace contemporary gender relations to the patriarchal relations of power established by the settler hacienda, in which sexualized violence against women was the norm. Sexualized violence is of a piece with the “social order” on the coast imposed by the paramilitary, nearly eliminating the distinction between “wartime rape” and “everyday rape.” (43)
This is a significant aspect of the context for Hunter-Bowman’s account of communities that have organized peace—for themselves and their neighbors—even while persevering under the duress of violence. She includes the story of “Luz” (a pseudonym), who organized political power, especially related to land reform. Members of the paramilitaries threatened Luz in order to pressure her to withdraw from politics. When she refused to step away from her political work, the paramilitary group sent men to rape her. The sexual violence happened repeatedly, as Hunter-Bowman recounts her conversations with Luz, since she refused to obey their demands. She did not speak of these horrific violations in public, but found trusted women to share her story as part of her own survival and ongoing commitment to fight against the paramilitary’s domination of her community. With care and insight, Hunter-Bowman considers the personal and political negotiations of people who struggle for liberation even while undergoing duress—people like Luz who discover the parameters of their subjectivity, of their agency, as they discern the boundaries necessary for their own well-being, their own grasp of themselves despite the violences that threaten to shatter their lives. To notice the complex political agency of communities under duress involves a realism about the inseparability of social concerns from the lives of individuals, the subtle and ubiquitous relations of mutual life that make a person a person.
In the sections of her book where Hunter-Bowman recounts what she has learned from people who have shared their lives with her (see pages 169–75 for her story about Luz), she begins to cultivate in the reader the kind of posture toward peacebuilding work that she wants to develop in conversation with political theology and human rights theories. Central to her argument is a rebuttal of rights-based frameworks for humanitarian work that ignore the agency of people who create the conditions for their survival even while suffering under threats of abuse and death. Rights-based theories of peacebuilding focus on nation-states and governmental agencies as the primary actors in curbing violence. Such liberal theories of justice cultivate an epistemic posture in which all parties are taught to see like the state, to borrow from James C. Scott. In other words, solutions that matter—that have weight, that are serious responses to civil strife—originate from political technocrats, from experts in statecraft, from global think tanks and consultants who parachute into communities with plans for the resolution of hostilities. Those kinds of peacebuilding postures “preclude self-relief” within vulnerable-yet-resilient communities and “tend to reinforce the institution as subject of redress and diminish the context-responsive activity of communities on the ground” (67, 76). Thus Hunter-Bowman’s contribution to the field of peacebuilding: to recognize ordinary peacemakers as “agents instead of victims” (12).
She develops a theological account of the “sanctuary of peace” movement—a network of around fifty Christian-based communities, at the geographic fringes of the Colombian state’s reach, that developed processes of peacemaking in conflict zones. “[T]heir experience and experiments of peace decenter governmental and mainstream technocratic processes” (133). Caught in the crossfire of the government’s army, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary forces vying for control of land and populations, Hunter-Bowman explains how these endangered communities became conduits for God’s work of peace. They developed processes for peacemaking that transformed social life in their region. National officials turned to them for political wisdom as the government began to imagine the possibility of a negotiated peace process with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the dominant guerrilla organization in the country. The peace negotiations started in 2012, which resulted in an agreement in 2016, the end of a fifty-two-year armed conflict. The communities that Hunter-Bowman had worked alongside and studied were considered the vanguard of this historic peace agreement. They demonstrated, in their collective witness, the possibilities of making room for peace and safety despite a half-century of patterns of violence that powerbrokers had entrenched into the political landscape. As she puts it, “war-affected communities have practical ways of protecting themselves and transforming conflict dynamics on the ground in Colombia” (4). This is the creative imagination that Hunter-Bowman traces throughout the pages of her book—a political theology born from people organizing themselves and their communities toward a hope in the power of Christ’s peace to transform the world. She quotes her colleague Ricardo Esquivia Ballestas, the founder and director of Justapaz, a Colombian peacemaking organization: “we are vijias de Esperanza—watchpersons for hope” (10).
This call to hope, and the work of Justapaz as organizing people toward a hope-infused politics of peace, is the heartbeat of the book. In her preface, Hunter-Bowman remembers when, as a college student in 2000, she heard read during a worship service at her home church in Pennsylvania a letter from Colombian Mennonite Church leaders (Esquivia of Justapaz was one of the authors) asking fellow Mennonites in the United States to exercise their political voice to dissuade their congressional representatives from approving a $1.3 billion military aid package to the Colombian government, which would escalate their armed-conflict approach to guerrilla groups in rural regions of the country, which were also strategic centers for the drug trade. The approval of this foreign aid was part of President Clinton’s exportation of the US war on drugs south of the border. Hunter-Bowman recounts this moment as inspiration for her accompaniment work with Justapaz and the Mennonite Church in Colombia, which later became the subject of her academic research. And she narrates this moment at her home church as a call to learn from people who were entrusting their lives to Christ’s hope for the world. “Their voices arrested me,” she recalls. “I was disillusioned with the US Mennonite Church, a historic peace church that seemed to understand this moniker as a trophy to place on the shelf rather than a living tradition expressed through action. I wanted to learn from the engaged peace church that indicted US Christians for complicity in war and invited them to participate in working toward what I would come to know as a justpeace” (ix). Her book is an account of what she learned when she refused to let her disillusionment have the last word. On the final page of the book, she summarizes the hope she found among Colombian Mennonites and their compatriots as a movement of “creative yeses,” enacted within the “Christian political body . . . born of networks of rebirth, resistance, and even a modest thriving amid onslaught,” whose collective life became “a gift for other territories, for the nation, and for the world” (241).
I take her commitment to discern hope in communities under duress as a counterpoint to Michael Taussig’s lifelong interest in Colombia as a site for the investigation of the modern state that reveals its fundamental nature in extremis, where the exception discloses the rule: the state as a nervous system, productive of the very disorder that it promises to resolve through the imposition of a more comprehensive order, a putative resolution to the chaos of political life that in turn multiplies the system’s points of vulnerability while at the same time generating resistance as members of the body politic chafe against the state’s further intrusions into their lives. The modern state is an anxious state, caught in this vicious loop of order and disorder, of chaos and calm, spiraling into more and more deadly strategies for the exercise of sovereignty over populations and territories—”the constancy of the state of emergency,” as Taussig writes in his (Benjaminian) political theory of US-Colombian relations in The Nervous System.3 Taussig takes these interstate relations as productive of an ever-expansive space of death, which he argues is an aspect of the colonial aura that accompanies the modern state in the Americas. (Hunter-Bowman cites Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing along these lines on page 59.) Hunter-Bowman, however, develops a political theology that explicates a people’s collective hope for life, for survival, for transformation—even for those caught in cycles of escalating violence. “But oppression is not totalizing, and terror tactics do not always have their desired effect. . . . This community’s embodied practice pierced the entangled borders of constraint and space of death” (59–60).
Hunter-Bowman ends her book with a call for “radical participatory democracy” (235–41)—that’s the vision for political theology that she learns from her Colombian colleagues. But I was just as interested in her observations about the rise of evangelical Christianity as a right-wing political movement that organized people against the 2012–16 peace process. Hunter-Bowman includes part of the celebratory address in 2016 of a prominent Colombian evangelical-charismatic megachurch pastor to the Misión Carismática Internacional convention in Los Angeles, California. “[W]e saved Colombia from being handed over to communists! We saved Colombia from the destructive power of the spirits of homosexuality. We saved the traditional family” (233). He was leading the crowd of worshippers in thanking God for the triumph of their political engagement, which contributed to the failure of the initial peace agreement in the national referendum. As a popular evangelical YouTube preacher proclaimed, “We won! Christians are now in position. We are Christianizing politics” (234). They succeeded at the polls, despite the thoughtful and inspired democratic processes that produced the proposal that, in turn, the electorate rejected.
Colombian citizens threw out the peace process and agreement in October of 2016; 50.2 percent of voters cast ballots against the plan. Since the government failed to secure the popular vote, representatives renegotiated parts of the peace agreement and sent it instead to Congress for ratification in November of 2016, which was ultimately successful. “The no vote on the referendum [in October] illustrates this minority’s political tactics” (234), according to Hunter-Bowman’s analysis—a minority bloc assembled with the assistance of savvy megachurch leaders and social media influencers. How do we make sense of the eventual triumph of a peace process, which was the result of “radical participatory democracy,” that had to bypass the will of the voters who participated in a national democratic referendum?
I’m stuck in the quagmire of that political dynamic. In order for a people to benefit from a radically democratic process, which offers possibilities for the collective goods of peace and justice, political leaders had to press beyond the will of the people as expressed in a popular vote. The institutional apparatus that adjudicates the political form of citizens’ participation disregarded the voters, because their position didn’t align with the shared vision of governmental representatives, democratic organizers, and peace activists. I’m left wondering about the messy reality of these sorts of negotiations for a political theology of participatory democracy.
Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Theologizing in an Insurgent Key: Violence, Women, Salvation (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2022), 4.↩
See Aaron Sánchez-Guerra, “‘We Want Us Alive’: Is It Time to Make the Murder of Women in NC a Unique Crime?,” News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), March 21, 2024, https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article286339680.html.↩
Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17.↩
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11.26.25 |
Reply
Response to Isaac Villegas
It is an honor to think with Isaac Villegas about gender, peace, and participatory democracy. Villegas opens his essay by locating himself in relation to Colombia: the city of Manizales in the coffee-growing region of central Colombia is his father’s hometown. Visits from the United States to this place of his father’s birth changed in the 1990s because of his aunt’s murder. Since then, “her absence, and the unspeakable violence, haunts our family reunions.”
He draws on Nancy Pineda-Madrid’s analysis of the gendered nature of violence in the Americas, a “violence motivated by a drive to assert and maintain structural gender and racial inequalities” (2). Pineda-Madrid writes from a Catholic perspective about the Christian institutions that have shaped the dominant moral landscapes that traverse Latin American societies. The gendered legacy of the Catholic Church’s ancien régime of “republican Christendom” impressed me.
The northwest department of Córdoba is one location where complex, religiously marked gender constructions caught my attention. To recapitulate an element of the story traced in the book,1 in the twentieth century, investors and merchants from the neighboring department of Antioquia established commercial ventures and invested significant profits in haciendas in Córdoba. The movement of investors and merchants from Antioquia to Córdoba meant the movement of norms and values as well, including Hispanicity (later called whiteness) and the prevailing Catholic norms and canon law. Values of Catholic piety and the exclusive legitimacy of Catholic marriage became predominant. Women who wed outside the Catholic Church were legally and socially considered concubines, and children who were not baptized in the Catholic Church were considered illegitimate.
I’ve wondered if evangelical women’s practice of piety by wearing loose-fitting blouses and shin-length skirts emerged as a response to what would today colloquially be called slut shaming. Adopting the custom when I visited the communities led me to ask myself questions about what we were doing. Did defiance and the struggle to overcome that “Antioquian” frame of thought encode it further through adopting material and cultural practices of dress? Was this a strategy of rebuff that instantiated a new stereotype, something the communities did not know before? And in this way, did they come to accommodate the patriarchy of entrepreneurial ranchers (only some Antioquian) that formed part of the social order the peacebuilding communities I worked among suffered and sought to transform?
If so, this would explain a split orientation on gender among Pentecostal women. On one hand, there was an alignment in the gendered (sexual) story the Pentecostal women were performing and the gendered norms the paramilitary were enforcing in the towns they controlled and dominated through violent coercion: men’s and women’s haircuts, length of women’s skirts, etc. I traveled through towns in which hosts showed me pamphlets informing the townspeople of the latest crackdown for the purpose of “social cleansing,” which is social control. (Not limited to gender dictates: sometimes everyone was required to make specific Christmas decorations in the town square at an appointed time.) The paramilitary soldiers “disposed” of deviants of the social relations model that was upheld by theological frames of support. By that I mean they assassinated them, making them disposable (desechables). Deviants are disposable. On the other hand, Pentecostal women experience empowerment through the Holy Spirit. Very strong women leaders move through and around social hierarchies through the work of a creative (wonderfully disruptive) Spirit recognized by Pentecostals generally (see the Spirited sovereign power on p. 100 discussed in the response to Dr. López).
The point is that these gender hierarchies shape society, including non-Catholic Christian churches (includes evangelical, Pentecostal, and historic Protestant denominations, including Mennonites—generically called “Christians” or “evangelicals”). It will come as a surprise to no one that thinking with evangelical groups of women engaged in peacebuilding as well as ecumenical women peacebuilding groups surfaced this problem. Non-Catholic interlocutors identifying as women highlight their differences from the experiences of men they struggle and worship alongside in ways that point to structures of patriarchy within their moral and political worlds as well. That is, patriarchy was the system of oppression that my evangelical community interlocutors did not have in common, to borrow a phrase from Marcella Althaus-Reid.2 Villegas observes “the power of men over women is an important feature of Hunter-Bowman’s account of peacebuilding efforts within communities.” The constructive agency under duress of women who endure sexualized violence and confront gendered asymmetries of power in their communities and in broader society should help us come to terms with the way gendered asymmetries of power are often ignored when it is not clear to men in positions of power how addressing them will help to advance peace (as the absence of direct violence).
Villegas is right about the “realism” involved in thinking about the women’s constructive agency under duress because it links complex constraint to contextual personal responses and because it invokes Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism as a feature of the analysis. At least since the 1970s, Mennonites involved in just peace have been realists about the self-interest of the state and the destruction caused by pursuit of US military and economic and political interests around the globe.3 This is a feature of what we might call second-wave peace theology. Typologically speaking, the first wave is characterized by a withdrawn people who simply “resist not.”4 What preceded Villegas’s reference to Niebuhr’s realism suggests a realism about the church, too, or at least the need for realism about the church, so the change in direction surprised me. Villegas concludes the section by urging that violence against women is a social issue requiring theological and ecclesial reform, with peacework starting in the church. I would place Witnessing Peace and Villegas’s remarks on the imperative for theological and ecclesial reformation in a third wave.
Finally, Villegas wonders about the significance of the failed referendum in 2016 for a political theology of participatory democracy. I am cautious about offering analysis that suggests generalizable conclusions about the particular historical moment, probably more now than when I wrote the book section on Christian triumphalism. To start, the “no” vote was shaped by various contingent factors in a noisy system. The wide-ranging debate about the reasons the institutionally unnecessary referendum failed is ongoing. In addition to complaints that the deal was too lenient on the FARC rebels or too financially generous with them,5 analysts find that the confidential nature of the negotiations, along with their exclusivity, played a significant role in enabling the political opposition to sway public opinion against the peace process and to vote “no” in the 2016 referendum.6 Gwen Burnyeat persuasively argues that government-society relations entangled in liberal logics shaped by relations with international donors explains why those in favor of the deal were unable to address the opposition’s misinformation.7 Her account illuminates the disconnect I observed firsthand. For example, government officials parachuted in from Bogotá to coastal regional peacebuilding leaders they previously ignored and insulted to quickly build rural support for the agreement these peacebuilding colleagues had been requesting, struggling for, and promoting for years. In short, while the evangelical coalition’s campaign against the peace agreement contributed to the overall opposition, these studies do not support the celebrity pastor’s claim that certain evangelical churches caused the outcome.
The trajectory of evangelical churches on the political landscape since the referendum is a second reason I am cautious about further extrapolation. As Rebecca Bartel’s essay revisiting the matter notes,8 the National University of Colombia and World Vision conducted a 2019–20 survey finding that 70 percent of Colombians disagree with the notion that religious groups ought to support a specific candidate.9 What’s more, the political weight Christian parties showed in the referendum evaporated in the recent presidential election.10
It might be tempting to root a political theology in the referendum or think through its significance to help explain the second coming of the false messiah in the United States, yet for these reasons I’m cautious. The longer view does point to the value of ongoing dialogue across difference and democratic participation that confronts triumphalist visions of Christianity, as more may be up in the air than appears at a given moment.
This section draws on participant action research scholar of the Sinú University, Víctor Negrete, Montelíbano, pasado y presente (Montería: Fundación del Caribe, 1981); Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 189.↩
Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 169.↩
Keith Graber Miller, Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves: American Mennonites Engage Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 60.↩
An article is forthcoming on three waves of peace theology.↩
“Colombia Referendum: Voters Reject FARC Peace Deal,” BBC News, October 2, 2016, sec. Latin America & Caribbean, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37537252; “Why Colombia’s Peace Deal with the FARC Failed,” New York Times, October 3, 2016, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/03/world/americas/colombia-farc-referendum.html.↩
Joana Amaral, “‘Spoiling’ in the Public Sphere: Political Opposition to Peace Negotiations and the Referendum Campaign in Colombia,” International Negotiation 27, no. 2 (2022): 177–202, https://doi.org/10.1163/15718069-bja10014.↩
Gwen Burnyeat, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia, 1st ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).↩
Rebecca Bartel, “Revisited: Underestimating the Force of the New Evangelicals in the Public Sphere,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere (blog), May 6, 2024, https://tif.ssrc.org/2024/05/06/underestimating-the-force-of-the-new-evangelicals-in-the-public-sphere-lessons-from-colombia-south-america/.↩
Andrés Alba, William Mauricio Beltrán, and Julián Ernesto Cely, Recomposición del campo religioso colombiano en el siglo XXI: Impactos y desafíos para la construcción de paz, la equidad de género y la inclusión social (Bogotá: Iglesia Sueca, World Vision, Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, 2022).↩
“El voto cristiano se estanca aunque se aferra al milagro de la multiplicación del 2%,” Cambio Colombia, accessed December 14, 2024, https://cambiocolombia.com/articulo/poder/el-voto-cristiano-se-estanca-aunque-se-aferra-al-milagro-de-la-multiplicacion-del-3.↩
Marie Claire Klassen
Response
Kairos and Lament in Palestine
In Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in Colombia, Janna Hunter Bowman emphasizes emplacement—that is to say, “the particular geographic landscapes and social relationships” (139) which shape the local communities she works with and how they choose to cultivate a justpeace. So too, the place from which I read impacts how I receive the text. Part way through my field research in Palestine/Israel I receive a copy of Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in Colombia. It becomes my companion during periods of waiting amid fieldwork. I find myself pulling out Witnessing Peace during long lines at Israeli checkpoints and reading between lecture sessions at Christ at the Checkpoint—a conference that considers what it means to be a Christian in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine—and on my regular commute to the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center office in east Jerusalem. During long, drawn out periods of ordinary time when there is nothing to do but wait—for the traffic to ease up, for the Israeli soldiers to let us through, for a speaker to arrive—I am pulled into Hunter-Bowman’s compelling story of agents under duress, in which ordinary people ignored by mainstream peacebuilding transform situations of oppression and conflict.
I am responding to Hunter-Bowman’s book while I am in the middle of my own research, between geographic locations. Perhaps as a result, rather than a carefully constructed linear argument about the book, this response moves between experience, reflection, and questions. Here, at the outset, I will provide some markers so that you can traverse these winding, messy paths with me. I begin with a brief discussion of time in Witnessing Peace. This is followed by two sections: The first focuses on the concept of messianic time/kairos time and the second considers the theological practice of lament and how this might fit with Janna Hunter-Bowman’s conception of time.
Time in Witnessing Peace
My reflections on Witnessing Peace will focus on Hunter-Bowman’s discussion of time. Hunter-Bowman critiques how peacebuilding is predominantly embedded in secular time, “the linearity of liberal politics that centers the state as the subject of history” (5). In this sequential view of time, one event follows another. As Talal Asad, one of Hunter-Bowman’s interlocutors, argues, a heterogeneous understanding of time has been reduced to “exclusive boundaries and homogenous temporality.”1
Complex understandings of time are collapsed into a flat, linear framework—often shaped by the (predominantly western) horizon of progress—and this determines the boundaries of which agents and actions are rendered visible and which are eclipsed from view. Hunter-Bowman’s intervention recovers a complex understanding of time and demonstrates how this multivalent approach can productively engage the dominant, linear approach to time in which the state and many peacemaking projects are embedded. Hunter-Bowman articulates three different timescales: 1) Messianic time: the divine inbreaking in history, 2) gradual time: in which ‘pilgrim people’ do the slow, gradual labour of implementing the insights of messianic time, 3) linear time: the sequential understanding of time in which much of modern, western society typically operates. Importantly, Hunter-Bowman argues that rather than placing these different modes of time in a competitive framework, there are creative elements of interplay and integration. Her work resists a secular/religious binary. Instead, Hunter-Bowman describes a pilgrim people who experience “messianic time,” integrate this experience into “gradual time,” and productively engage with the “linear time” that characterizes the state. In doing so, she argues for a complex approach to time, which engages multiple temporal visions.
Messianic Time, Kairos Time
May, 2024
I enter the auditorium of Bethlehem Bible College, a small, Palestinian evangelical university in the occupied West Bank and find one of the few remaining seats. We are all—internationals and Palestinians—eagerly waiting to hear from Yousef Khoury, a Palestinian theologian whose family is from Gaza. I close Janna Hunter-Bowman’s book as Yousef Khoury approaches the stage. I have just been reading the introduction of Witnessing Peace, in which Hunter-Bowman describes her concept of messianic time, drawing insights from the Greek term kairos in the New Testament. “We can turn crisis into kairos!” Yousef Khoury exhorts us, as he reflects on the unfolding genocide in Gaza. I scrawl his words in my notebook and draw an asterisk beside it—reminding myself to return to his lecture and Hunter-Bowman’s book later.
Khoury utilizes the term kairos towards at the end of his lecture titled, “Untheologizing Genocide: Stories of Love and Hate That Kill.” His lecture traces, “how Zionism and the Zionist Christian lobby turned biblical stories into a blueprint for genocide and God into its mastermind.” Khoury further explores how from Turtle Island to Palestine, Scripture is misused to dehumanize the other and justify the elimination of the other. I think of Khoury’s insight weeks later as I listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before the U.S. congress: “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.” This depiction of the U.S. and Israel as human and those they fight as barbarians—subhuman—is met with applause. Later in his speech Netanyahu draws on the Hebrew Scriptures, specifically Numbers 23:24, stating, “These are the soldiers of Israel…As the Bible says, ‘they shall rise like lions.’ They have risen like lions—the lions of Judah, the lions of Israel!” Khoury rejects any use of theology to promote the ongoing destruction of life in Gaza and turns to the prophetic tradition, which disrupts ideologies and reveals God’s solidarity with the oppressed. Kairos, as Khoury utilizes the term, is the prophetic revelation of the God of the oppressed in a moment of crisis and the choice to respond by living the principle of Micah 6:8, “Do justice, love mercy and love humbly with your God.”2 In other words, kairos—the prophetic—disrupts violent ideologies, creating space for new paths of action and alternative visions of the future to emerge.
In the Palestinian context the term kairos recalls the Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth (2009) document, which was modelled after South Africa’s The Kairos Document: A Challenge to Action (1985). Notably, here, kairos time is intimately connected with truth. Kairos makes visible truths that have been suppressed and manipulated; such truths interrupt systematic violence. Similar to Hunter-Bowman’s point that the messianic “interrupts,” making visible those who are invisible, the Kairos Palestine document states that Palestinians have “a cry of hope in the absence of all hope, a cry full of prayer and faith in a God ever vigilant, in God’s divine providence for all the inhabitants of this land.” The document goes on to proclaim a God of love who refuses to abandon those who face injustice. Even when changing the violence of the status quo seems utterly impossible, God’s love for the marginalized provides a foundation for hope. What allows for this prophetic vision to take hold in this community? The document’s title itself provides an answer: Kairos is interpreted as a moment of proclaiming the truth of God’s universal love despite suffering and immense injustice. This vision fosters “resistance with love as its logic.”3 This resistance that makes concrete the “equal dignity” of all persons, rejecting discrimination.4
An important component of messianic time is that it makes visible those who have been rendered invisible. For Hunter-Bowman, in messianic time—in these moments when God continues to break into history— “people produced as absent” (103-104) are made visible. Like Hunter-Bowman’s context in Colombia, in Palestine, too, there is a long history of erasure. For example, in Israel the concept of the “present-absentee” has been deployed in the legal system to allow the government to confiscate the property of Palestinian families who were forced to flee in 1948. This conceptualization of “present-absentee” renders Palestinians as politically absent non-agents. This is just one part of a broader system of legal erasure. Amid the immense violence against the Palestine people in Gaza, we have witnessed other forms of erasure too. The ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians has rendered their lives—to use Judith Butler’s terminology— “ungrievable” (or at the very least, not equally grievable). Part of what the messianic, prophetic “inbreaking” disrupts is this erasure through its prioritization of the marginalized.
It is important to emphasize that for Hunter-Bowman the significance of these moments of “rupture,” which characterize messianic time, are lived out in gradual time—in the everyday, often all too ordinary tasks of working for a justpeace. I reflect on this over my three months at Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology center during the day-to-day meetings that take place in the office and as we work on funding applications, organize online webinars, host guests, pray, and eat lunch together—ordinary activities that are necessary for sustaining Sabeel’s prophetic witness. I appreciate Hunter-Bowman’s section on linear (secular) time and engagement with the state, which draws on her own experiences in Colombia. Yet here a different political context shapes what this engagement looks like. Long before October 7, 2023, Israel was engaging in practices of apartheid.[foonote]“Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians,” Amnesty International, 2022, https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Israel-Apartheid-Against-Palestinians-Final- Full-Report-Feb-1-Amnesty-International.pdf[/footenote] Today, according to many academics, international jurists, and human rights groups, Israel is likely committing a genocide against the Palestinian people.5 Rather than engaging the Israeli state, I see some Palestinian organization choosing to interact with other political structures, such as applying for funding from European Union bodies, advocacy around legal mechanism like the International Court of Justice, and, in some instances, working with Israeli NGOs in ways that resist “normalization.” Alongside this, as Hunter-Bowman witnesses in her own work in Colombia, there are calls for decolonization and the recognition of the many failures and shortcomings of international mechanisms.
A Time of Lament
June 2024
I am sitting in the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in East Jerusalem, an organization that promotes Palestinian liberation theology, with a solidarity group from the U.S. The group joins Sabeel’s weekly Bible study, as we wrestle over the text together. Today we are talking about the Gospel story where Jesus heals the man with the shrivelled hand (Mark 3). One person in the group interjects and says, “So how can we act for healing and justice when we leave Palestine?” and he begins to discuss some of his ideas. Another member of responds, “But what if we are the ones with the shrivelled hand in need of healing?” This second person goes on to describe the prophetic tradition of crying out to God in the Hebrew Scriptures. The conversation moves back and forth between the cry of lament and the call to act. As I listen, I wonder if these two moments can be complimentary rather than at odds. What kind of action might emerge from lament?
I find myself thinking of some of the Palestinian Christian women I have been interviewing about Mary, and the ways in which Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows on Calvary has come to the fore. A number of women have told me that they go to the Holy Sepulchre and sit in the place where Christ was crucified, next to the statue of Mary with the sword piercing her heart. Sometimes they pray and at others they sit silently, gazing at mother Mary. Mary knows what it means to watch your child suffer. Mary understands the anguish when children and grandchildren are arrested by an unjust political regime. As my time passes in Jerusalem, I find myself sitting there sometimes too, and pondering the words of one of the Sabeel prayers, “God of Mary, we understand your cries over your son through the cries of Palestinian mothers weeping over their martyred children.” Here too, time becomes complex, as Saint Mary at the foot of the cross actively accompanies Palestinian mothers today and intercedes amid the ongoing massacres in Gaza. My own conceptions of time and space as an academic is disrupted as I participate in prayers that ask for Mary’s intercession and intervention.
This past fall, Reverend Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor from Bethlehem, Palestine, wrote a sermon of lament which was published in Sojourners magazine. In his sermon, Rev. Isaac asks where God is in present in the suffering of Gaza. He writes, “How difficult is God’s silence! Today we cry out with the psalmists, “My God, my God, why did you leave Gaza?” Towards the end of essay, Rev. Isaac concludes, “God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees… This is our consolation.”6 Here, a posture of lament seeks God in impossible circumstances, and receives the consolation of God’s particular love for those suffering oppression.
In Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, theologian Emmanuel Katongole argues that lament can also open up new horizons for action. Katongole suggest that the cry of anguish is also an invitation to others to hear this suffering and stand with the one who suffers.7 I have witnessed this type of action in Palestine. For example, the Sabeel office in East Jerusalem in their weekly Wave of Prayer, which regularly includes prayers of lament for Gaza, and in their ongoing, daily advocacy for Palestinians in Gaza. Christ at the Checkpoint’s conference in Bethlehem also combined prayer with calling the global church to account for her silence and complicity, proclaiming the Gospel call to costly solidarity.
As I read Witnessing Peace in Palestine, I wonder where lament might fit into Hunter-Bowman’s conception of time and theory of action. When lament moves vertically, towards God, it calls the eternal one to account—expressing discontent with God’s unbearable silence and demanding God’s intervention. The practice of lament remembers the inbreaking of God in history, previous kairos moments, and demands God answer the question, “why have you forsaken us (now)?” Yet lament moves horizontally too; it is also the cry for the suffering neighbor. Is lament an act that participates in what Hunter-Bowman describes as messianic time through requesting God interrupt the present injustice? Are the fruits of lament realized in gradual time, in the slow process of healing grounded in justpeace?
Janna Hunter-Bowman’s Witnessing Peace: Agents under Duress in Colombia has been a beautiful companion as I reflect on three months of fieldwork in Palestine. The book masterfully articulates and delineates the ways in which various conceptions of time intersect with action, revealing alternative avenues for fostering a justpeace. My current work prompts me to combine her insights on time with the cry of lament, and to wonder if just as there are some forms of agency that only become visible with a complex understanding of time, perhaps there are some modes of action that are only made intelligible through the eyes of lament.
References
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Isaac, Munther. “God is Under the Rubble in Gaza,” Sojourners, October 30, 2023, https://sojo.net/articles/god-under-rubble-gaza
“Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians,” Amnesty International, 2022, https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Israel-Apartheid-Against-Palestinians-Final- Full-Report-Feb-1-Amnesty-International.pdf
Katongole, Emmanuel. Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017.
Khoury, Yousef, “Untheologizing Genocide: Stories of Love and Hate That Kill,” Christ at the Checkpoint Conference, Bethlehem Bible College, Occupied West Bank: Bethlehem, May 26, 2024.
“Netanyahu delivers address to joint meeting of Congress,” NBC News, July 24, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4P3r7oBcLY
“Present Absentees in Israel: Exiled in Their Own Homeland,” Interactive Encyclopedia of The Palestine Question. https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/14342/present-absentees-israel.
“Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” OpinioJuris (October 15, 2023), https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/#:~:text=Palestinian%20human%20rights%20organisations%2C%20Jewish,committed%20in%20the%20Gaza%20Strip
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) 2003, 179.↩
This is how Yousef Khoury quoted Micah 6:8 in his lecture.↩
Kairos Palestine, 4.2.3. ↩
Kairos Palestine, 4.2.3.↩
“Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” OpinioJuris (October 15, 2023), https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-ingaza/#:~:text=Palestinian%20human%20rights%20organisations%2C%20Jewish,committed%20in%20the%20Gaza%20Strip.↩
Munther Isaac, “God is Under the Rubble in Gaza,” Sojourners, October 30, 2023, https://sojo.net/articles/god-under-rubble-gaza↩
Emmanuel Katonogle, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 142.↩
11.17.25 | Janna Hunter-Bowman
Reply
Response to Marie-Claire Klassen
I have felt horror, disbelief, and despair sinking into bones as I have been thinking with Dr. Marie-Claire Klassen’s response from Palestine these months (August–October 2024). While the book Witnessing Peace draws us together in this symposium, I read Klassen testifying to the scandalous truth that there are times of horror when astonishing spiritual power and clarity find full expression in witness. (There is no ceasefire, and even peace is not enough.1) Bearing witness to cataclysmic destruction and mounting violent death requires struggle against the kind of despair that can result in the abdication of active attention and eventually abandonment. There is a despair that slips in not because one does not love but because one loves, because the very self is knit into chords of relationships emplaced in living communities, rich and entangled histories, and dynamic and complex struggles for life—now in ruins and “in the rubble.”2 How can we keep alive the prophets’ fierce and tenacious commitment to justice? Thinking with Klassen, I offer thoughts on agency of kairos and agency of lament across contexts.
Klassen picks up and reflects on the theological disruption of kairos in the Palestinian context, emphasizing themes of truth that confront dehumanization and elimination through grounded perspectives that speak to globalized violence (“Turtle Island to Palestine . . .”) and “God’s particular love for those suffering oppression” expressed in Rev. Munther Isaac’s potent affirmation: “God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees. . . . This is our consolation.”3
To recapitulate from Witnessing Peace, kairos is about “being known by” (1 Corinthians 8:3) a divine sovereign power from the underside of history, which entails a relational divine-human ontological base (106). Additionally, this divine-human ontological relationality and movement is at work through place and time. These elements of kairos help us come to grips with the concealed yet extant transnational network of communities and persons suffering under immense injustice (or under duress) where praxis ought to begin. Following Klassen and the Kairos document to understand these as sites of “resistance with love as its logic” and grounded in the perspectives/knowledge of those produced as absent (which informs critical and constructive thought about what that love entails in context), one might attend to the “nested” structures that recognize and coordinate multiple forms of agency across levels, to draw on John Paul Lederach’s nested paradigm and social pyramid.4 That is one way of formulating what arguably becomes a theological imperative as a change-oriented peacebuilding take. It responds to the decolonial question—how can we be in relationship to rewrite the world?5 Yet we know all too well that the same factors that create the situation we are discussing subvert and crush with devastating force South-South solidarity efforts aimed at decolonial transformation.
I have in mind the initiative that took Colombian visionary and peacebuilding leader Ricardo Esquivia and me to Palestine in 2003. At the time, Esquivia was the director of Justapaz (Justpeace): The Christian Center for Justice, Peace, and Nonviolent Action, where I also worked. The aim was to cultivate Global South-South networks of solidarity. There is much to say about that powerful experience of learning together and the hospitality of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, where Klassen spent much time, and other groups that informed our understandings and commitments. Yet the point of this story is that, upon return to Colombia, the Colombian Navy publicly accused Ricardo of being “a subversive,” a member of a guerrilla group that the US State Department listed as a World Terrorist Organization, and therefore placed him in grave danger. This was an effort to “neutralize” his leadership. Those around him threw all of our life energy into multilevel efforts to keep him safe. Our South-South solidarity network intentions evaporated in the overwhelm. As we often said with regret, the urgent too often takes precedence over the important.
Where do we turn in the face of such opposition? Perhaps to God in lament. Klassen suggests that “acting for healing and justice” and “the prophetic tradition of crying out to God in the Hebrew Scriptures . . . can be complementary rather than at odds.” She writes that cries of anguish are also invitations to others to hear this suffering and stand with the one who suffers, opening up new horizons of action. After a few comments on a point of contact to agency of kairos, I will describe what I agree is the complementary agency of lament.
The point of contact comes in the first two (of three) movements in narratives about victims becoming agents under duress in kairos, “now time,” or messianic time (chapter 1). (The three movements are epistemology, submission, and action.) The first is the intimate knowledge of unacceptable situations that are consequences of oppression (102). This knowledge that is usually erased or ignored is the starting point for understanding the meaning of responses under duress. And this reminds me how, as I interpret my interlocutors in Colombia, being in pain together is integral to discernment. The act of being together on the edge of life with the divine aching with them supports judgment of intolerable, unacceptable circumstances. It opens into the second movement, submission. For years I found my interlocutors’ vulnerability, born of their life circumstances, paired with submission to a non-possessed God truly terrifying (110). But the communities taught me that to be insistent about a comprehensible God would inhibit what they might be able to expect in the interaction. When my interlocutors reach out in what they describe as “unconditional surrender” to God, they position themselves as open and poised for the greatest possible response. Epistemology and submission are a matter of providing a new container for thinking and acting in resistance to overwhelming violence and out of which a new community might emerge (103). I am referring to the becoming of a “we,” a political agent that engages in creative action amidst oppression and open violence, or what I call a constructive agent under duress. This is a substantive point of connection with lament that strikes a chord close to Klassen’s keys. That said, the book focuses on understanding and conceptualizing those who do redress instances of violence, who somehow enact change, and contribute to structural transformation.
I fully agree that agency of lament is complementary to this form of agency under duress. At least for those thinking with the Christian tradition, lament is an appropriate and perhaps even necessary response to tragedy and death when relief and even slight change do not come. When there is no constructive agency under duress. Had I focused my reflection on the violence-affected communities that neighbor the networks in which I was engaged, perhaps I would have developed an account that moves more deeply into lament. For example, I think of the community of Las Brisas that Dr. López mentions in his essay for this symposium. Paramilitary soldiers massacred eleven community members the day after the same paramilitary group spared the community of Mampuján in the next municipality (featured in chapter 4). The horror and scandal overflow, confound, and reverberate. What we have is lament. To speak in the book’s terms, the same God aches with the Las Brisas community in pain, a community that is not on the edge of life, like the ones that I am thinking with in the book, but one plunged into death. And, in some cases, amidst the bodies of the dead pinned down by rubble. We cry out in protest and grief.
Agency of lament introduces a third eschatology to the two developed in Witnessing Peace. In Fr. Emmanuel Katongole’s words, it features “memory as a guide to the future.”6 And this is when we might speak of the politics of lament, the titular subject of part 5 in Katongole’s text. Since writing the book, I’ve come to see lament and the politics of dangerous memory as an important complement for peacebuilding, and I am deeply grateful to Klassen for drawing it out and inviting us into this agency and politics.
Atalia Omer, When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).↩
Munther Isaac, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2024).↩
Munther Isaac, “God Is under the Rubble in Gaza,” Sojourners, October 30, 2023, https://sojo.net/articles/god-under-rubble-gaza.↩
John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation: Clear Articulation of the Guiding Principles by a Pioneer in the Field (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003); John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1998), 60–61.↩
Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).↩
Emmanuel Katongole, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 185.↩