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Tang, Book Review   187 

Book Review 

 

Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding 
By Atalia Omer 

 

Reviewed by Flora x. Tang 

 
 

  
 

New York. Oxford University Press. 2023. $29.37. 

 

In this book, Omer speaks to and with on-the-

ground practices of intrareligious and interreligious 

peacebuilding in the Global South. Drawing on 

participant-observation and interview-based fieldwork 

with interreligious peacebuilding organizations such as 

Catholic Relief Services in Kenya and the Philippines, 

Atalia Omer offers a critical yet generous review of 

neoliberal peacebuilding industries’ usage of religion as 

a bureaucratic tool in peacebuilding. Omer highlights 

how religion and religious traditions have been 

“harnessed” by peacebuilding non-governmental 

organizations (NGOs) and programs to become a 

“technocratic tool” to promote liberal governance and 

societal harmony. This process reduces the prophetic 

voice and rich, decolonial, or feminist theologies or 

religious interpretations present in major world 

religions, and instead emphasizes “hermeneutically 

closed accounts of religion and culture” (58) that can be 

used as simplified justifications for peace and 

neighbourly love. 
One central thesis of this book is that these on-the-

ground, NGO-ified religious peacebuilding practices 

are worlds away from decolonial theories of religion, 

which emphasize colonial history, power, empire, and 

gender/sexual dimensions of such power imbalances in 

the history of religion and coloniality. Omer attempts to 

highlight this abyssal gap between theory and praxis by 

offering a decolonial critique of neoliberal 

peacebuilding industries’ usage of religion, while also 

allowing for on-the-ground lived experiences of 

religious practitioners to speak back to the privileges 

and purist tendencies of decolonial theory. Omer 

notices the individual-centric nature of much 

interreligious peacebuilding: peacebuilding programs 

focus on “capacitating” individuals to adjust to their 

predicaments, as well as “planting a seed” of peace by 

promoting contact and relationships across 

communities to prevent intergroup violence (60). 

While these practices can have positive effects, they 

prioritize a “problem-solving” approach that facilitates 

people’s resilience in present-day conditions rather 

than a more analytical or intersectional approach to 

challenging why the present-day conditions were there 

in the first place. As a result, religious traditions’ deep 

historical and intersectional complexities are reduced to 

“sticky note” or “twitter” versions of religious 

aphorisms, harnessed solely for the purpose of 

cultivating individual resilience or harmonious 

relationships, rather than allowing for religious 

hermeneutics themselves to be complexified, 

decolonized, and transformed by or transformative of 

alternative futures of decoloniality. Omer dubs this 

throughout the book as an example of “doing religion,” 

which comes at the expense of “knowing religion.” The 

dichotomy between “doing religion” and “knowing 

religion” emerges as another central thesis of the book: 

“knowing religion” and knowing religious traditions in 

and through their colonial, historical, gendered, 

structural, and material complexities—as well as 

allowing for new hermeneutical reinterpretations from 

queer/feminist or decolonial perspectives—are 

sidelined in the current neoliberal peacebuilding 

industry, whereas “doing religion” (or putting religious 

traditions into easily understandable and essentialized, 

bite-sized information pieces that promote peace) 

emerges as the primary mode of religious engagement 

by these organizations and practitioners. 

This attempt to “systemize, measure, and NGO-ize 

constructive religious forces” (111) affects women 

religious practitioners in unique ways. In particular, 

Omer notices that gender norms are re-inscribed in 

these efforts. The structural and gendered violences 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  
 

Tang, Book Review   188 

that are caused by religiously-informed gender norms 

in society are not questioned or destabilized in this 

practice of religious peacebuilding. Women (imagined 

by NGOs as mothers) are seen as primarily responsible 

for forming youths’ religious and peace education, for 

forming their children’s religious morality in the 

direction of socially acceptable peace rather than 

extremist violence. Muslim and Christian women 

interviewed in the book also see a link between their 

pious religiosity and their capacity to survive personally, 

economically, and socially (135) in a “neoliberal and 

unequal economy” (141). Omer dubs this tendency 

among women and men to spiritualize resiliency and 

material survival as “pious resiliency” or “survivalist 

piety” (134): influenced by neoliberal religious 

peacebuilding industries, religious piety is increasingly 

experienced by people on the ground as that which 

leads to further capacity for survival and economic 

wellbeing for women and their families. This 

inadvertently spreads a form of “prosperity gospel” 

among Global South religious practitioners, thereby 

depoliticizing the potentially socially transformative 

messages (including decolonial, anti-capitalist, and 

feminist messages) of various religious traditions. 

Economic conditions of poverty, which are almost 

always rooted in histories of colonialism, structural 

exploitation, and systemic inequality (as theologies such 

as liberation theology would be able to identify), are 

now depoliticized in this analysis to become individual 

issues that are able to be transcended with enough piety 

and enough resiliency. 

The book also unveils the many ways that these on-

the-ground practices of interreligious peacebuilding 

have “exceeded the critical gaze” (5) and offer material 

insights into questions of survival--something frequently 

elided in academic decolonial theories of religion. The 

book’s genius and humility lie in this very ability to allow 

for individual stories to be narrated in this complexity: 

just as decolonial academic theories offer valuable 

critiques of the neoliberal peacebuilding “industry,” the 

lived religion of Kenyans and Mindanaoans speaks 

back to the academic “industry” of critique itself. Omer 

narrates, via stories of peacebuilding practitioners she 

interviews, the various openings to an unrevolutionary 

“decolonial love” (235) among Christians and Muslims 

who participate in interreligious peacebuilding 

programs. This love—manifested as relationality and 

friendship across difference—is neither feminist nor 

revolutionary, nor does it critique or dismantle the 

colonial power structure. Still, these “openings of 

decolonial love” are nonetheless real and tangibly 

impactful on the spiritual lives, material lives, and 

survival of Kenyans and Mindanaoans at the heart of 

Omer’s ethnographic research. For scholars committed 

to decoloniality, the fact that this book includes these 

stories is a gift, even if (or perhaps precisely because) 

these stories and these lives exceed simple theories of 

decoloniality, just as global subaltern lives have and will 

continue to exceed our academic imaginations of them. 

This book presents several takeaways for 

practitioners of religion and peacebuilding: First, the 

book reminds us that interreligious peacebuilding 

programs may not work (or may do more harm) when 

religious difference itself is not the primary source of 

conflict—in many communities, it is not simply the 

hatred between Christians and Muslims that leads to 

local conflict, but rather centuries of colonial 

domination, historical power imbalances, structural 

exploitation, or territorial conflict that are the true cause 

of conflict. Interreligious peacebuilding programs ought 

not pretend that religious difference is the primary 

source of violence when there may be greater material 

concerns at stake. Instead, they ought to give space for 

these material, economic, and land-based sources of 

conflict to be concretely addressed in their 

programming.  

Second, Omer’s work reminds us that an over-

emphasis on “doing religion” in peacebuilding 

programs may present a “hermeneutically closed” 

account of religious traditions that centers only the 

dominant, simplified, and sticky note-like versions of 

major world religious traditions. Practitioners of 

religious peacebuilding can work against this tendency 

by continuing to center more prophetic voices within 

religious traditions that offer hermeneutically open, 

decolonial, feminist, and empowering re-interpretations 

of religious traditions. This often looks like featuring 

the voices of liberation theologians (or preachers who 

draw from this background) and centering 

queer/feminist religious examples, as well as other 

groups who are at the margins of their respective 

religious traditions. These voices would also help 

combat the overly individualistic tendencies of these 

religious peacebuilding programs by inviting individuals 

of faith to not primarily see their economic suffering as 

their own fault and disentangle economic prosperity 

from religious piety. While simplified versions of 

religious traditions might be the easiest to “do” when 

implementing programs, we must continue to allow for 

the prophetic nature of religious traditions to offer 

people new imaginations of a radically different world, 

so that decolonial hope and love become more than just 

a struggle for survival in a violent world. 
 

 

Flora x. Tang is a PhD candidate in Peace Studies and 

Theology at the University of Notre Dame. She 

researches decolonial feminist theologies and Asian 

diasporic frameworks of land justice and trauma 

healing after displacement.  

Author email:  xtang3@nd.edu  
 

mailto:xtang3@nd.edu

