In colonial Africa, Christianity has often supported, sustained,
and legitimated a violent process of governance. More recently,
however, following decades of violence and oppression, churches and
religious organizations have mobilized African publics against
corrupt and abusive regimes and facilitated new forms of
reconciliation and cooperation. It is the purpose of Displacing the
State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa to illustrate the
nature of religion's ambivalent power in Africa while suggesting
new directions in the study of religion, conflict, and peace
studies, with a specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa. As the
editors make clear, most of the literature on conflict and
peacebuilding in Africa has been concerned with dramatic conflicts
such as genocide and war. In these studies, "conflict"usually means
a violent clash between parties with opposing interests, while
"peace" implies reconciliation and cooperation between these
parties, usually with a view to achieving a social order predicated
on the idea of the sovereign national state whose hegemony is
viewed as normative. The contributors argue that this perspective
is inadequate for understanding the nature, depth, and persistence
of conflict in Africa. In contrast, the chapters in this volume
adopt an ethnographic approach, often focusing on mundane
manifestations of both conflict and peace, and in so doing draw
attention to the ambiguities and ambivalences of conflict and peace
in everyday life. The volume therefore focuses our attention on the
extent to which everyday conflict contributes to subsequently
larger and more highly visible clashes. Displacing the State makes
two important contributions to the study of religion, conflict, and
peacebuilding. First, it shows how peace is conceptualized and
negotiated in daily life, often in ways that are counterintuitive
and anything but peaceful. Second, the volume uses African case
studies to confront assumptions about the nature of the
relationships among religion, conflict, and peace.
General
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