Description
Recent scholarship in International Studies and Peace Studies has engaged with critical conversations on secularism and secularity in grassroots solidarity as well as transnational movements, alongside the role of religion and religious plurality. There is a renewed need in light of the UN Secretary General’s call to ‘promote peace and prevent conflicts’ and ‘a renewed social contract anchored in human rights’ to consider religion as a perdurant presence in diverse sociocultural environments, and their contextual role as practice and reform in the Global South. Furthermore, building upon the Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Working Group's call for examining radical futurities and commoning, this panel consolidates scholars who study the possibility for alternative imaginations and critical fabulations of the future, relying upon the immense cultural memory of religious communities in diverse world regions. Engaging with such notions with their ontological and epistemological pluralities, scholars are further faced with a need to document, rethink, and reimagine solidarity as a culturally rooted concept, one that develops and shifts alongside and as religion.
In this panel chaired by Nicola Pratt, scholars attempt to (re)locate religion in the creation and building of (trans)national solidarities, of intra- and inter-faith anti-colonial connectivities (Gani, 2022) that transcend national boundaries and work toward common goals of abolition, liberation, agency, and peace. Mandeep Sidhu explores abolition as a politico-Spiritual Sikhi praxis, engaging with the Sikhi triptych of degh tegh fateh. Sarah Gharib Seif critiques scholarly conceptualizations of agency in consideration of intersections of race, religion, and gender with women who join ISIS. Misbah Hyder reviews the potential for sabr (patience, perseverance) in the Ahmadiyya Muslim community as a mode of global peacebuilding. Q Manivannan considers (public) grief and grieving alongside religious and faith practices in protests as caregiving, reform, and peacebuilding in South Asia. With comments and discussion led by Khushi Singh Rathore, the panel aims to further ongoing discourse on religion, solidarity, and peace, with the potential to translate its learnings to proximate academic disciplines including anthropology, sociology, conflict studies, and international law.
