Resistance to Empire and Militarization; Reclaiming the Sacred; Fernando

Edited by

Jude Lal Fernando [+–]

Trinity College Dublin

Jude Lal Fernando is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of M.Phil Programme in Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics, School of Religion, Trinity College Dublin. He is the Director of Trinity Centre for Post-Conflict Justice and brings praxis-based experience to the academic context in the fields of interreligious studies and international peace studies. His main research interests are religion, peace, and conflict, with a specific focus on the role of interreligious dialogue in peace-building, and ethno-nationalisms and geopolitics, focusing on Sri Lanka in particular, and Asia more generally. He has authored two books and his research has been published as journal articles and book chapters, presented at international conferences in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Some of these have been translated into German, French, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Resistance to Empire and Militarization gathers critically reflective articles by 25 leading and emerging scholars/practitioners from religious and non-religious backgrounds, representing three generations of survivors of imperial invasions and genocidal massacres across the globe. The authors interrogate and expose the oppressive religious and secular ideologies and mechanisms of the modern empire and its allies that cause desecration of lives and the earth through various means, ranging from psychological operations to the brute force of advanced technological warfare.

Offering perspectives from the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific and the Caribbean Islands, the authors address topics such as mass killings, starvation, rape, militarized prostitution, torture, forced disappearances, land grab, displacement and the destruction of nature, while articulating people’s inherent collective aspiration for liberation that is expressed in multiple languages of faith as well as in secular humanist strands. They help evoke and sharpen the alternate consciousness among peoples in furthering resistance, and in envisioning and building a non-imperialist future for us, for our children, and for our planet.

These are testimonies of truth and liberation, written with a prophetic urgency.

Preliminaries

Foreword [+–] xi-xii

Collin Cowan FREE

The Council for World Mission

Rev Dr. Collin Cowan is General Secretary of The Council for World Mission.

This collection of 21 papers were written by leading and emerging critical scholar/practitioners who represent three generations of survivors of imperial invasions and genocidal massacres across the globe. They are from the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific and the Caribbean Islands who are renowned for the depth and urgency of their analyses and their principled ethical and political positions against empire and militarization. The contributors expose the oppressive ideologies and mechanisms of the modern empire and its allies and exemplify in particular how militarization has affected various peoples, lands, seas, and skies across the globe. They expose the desecration of lives and the earth by the modern empire and its local allies through various means, ranging from psychological warfare to brute force of advanced technological warfare, leaving an intergenerational impact. The authors foreground a breadth of modes of resistance and the places where they have been implemented, sharing with the reader their hard-earned knowledge and stories of truth and liberation, amplifying the voices of those who reclaim and proclaim the sacredness of life, lands, seas, and skies with a prophetic urgency. The authors have embraced people’s cries against mass killings, starvation, rape, militarized prostitution, torture, forced disappearances, land grab, and the destruction of nature caused by modern warfare, as well as people’s inherent collective aspiration for liberation of their lives and lands. They help evoke and sharpen the alternate consciousness amongst peoples in furthering resistance, and in envisioning and building a non-imperialist future for us, for our children, and for the planet earth. To that end, this book has combined political analyses of the modern empire and militarization with a deep awareness about the death and destruction it causes in order to elaborate upon the transformative practices and knowledge that have emerged out of the author’s concrete engagement with people’s liberative praxis. In that sense, these papers draw on methodologies of engagement, evocation, and envisioning. Coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the authors’ academic disciplines and homes are both theological/religious as well as representing important strands of practice and critique that adopt secular and humanist approaches to collective liberation. This book is the archive of a process of deep discussion and revision, linking the different disciplines, themes and regions so that the knowledge produced has global resonance. It adopts an interdisciplinary, intercultural, interreligious and internationalist approach. Each paper in its own way proclaim faith in the Ultimate Reality or/and in Eco-Humanity expressed in uniquely distinctive ways. Faith is understood here as the liberating language of the spirit; at once divine and human. This collection of papers is published with the aim of sharimg the above liberative knowledge with a wide audience and strengthen horizontal solidarity across the globe to contribute spiritually, morally, intellectually, and politically to the creation of a life-giving new world in opposition to empire and militarization.

Preface [+–] xiii-xv

Sudipta Singh FREE

The Council for World Mission

Sudipta Singh is Mission Secretary – Research and Capacity Development at The Council for World Mission.

Introduction [+–] 1-21

Jude Lal Fernando £17.50

Trinity College Dublin

Part I: East Asia, South Asia, West Asia and Beyond

1. Wars Beyond the Armed Forces: Colonialism and Militarization of Ethno-national Conflicts in Contemporary South Asia [+–] 25-44

Radha D’Souza £17.50

University of Westminster

Radha D’ Souza is reader in Law at the University of Westminster. She is a critical scholar, activist, barrister and writer who has worked with a range of social movements around the world. Her recent book What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations(Pluto, 2018) maps, for the first time, the transformations in the regime of international rights to the transformations in post-World War imperialism.

The destinies of South Asian people are necessarily entwined such that a democratic and stable India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and Maldives is contingent on the emergence and consolidation of regional peace movements against war and militarization within each South Asian state. The necessity of regional peace movements in South Asia is something more than conventional “internationalism” or universal humanism or conscientious objections to war. The intertwined destinies of the people of South Asia are linked to a specific historical legacy of British colonialism. South Asia had a pivotal position in the architecture of imperialism past and present due to its geopolitical location, the trajectory of the formation of each state in the region, and the hiatus between “nations” and “states” in South Asia. Theoretically, this chapter will argue that: (a) the state-centric framework for understanding internal militarization is inadequate as problems of internal militarization in each state are deeply entwined with external imperialist geopolitics; (b) the form and substance of colonialism must be distinguished and engaged with, as colonialism is much more than a temporal characteristic of the nineteenth century empires; and lastly (c) critical scholars and activists must pay greater attention to the international legal order which is a structuring mechanism for reconstituting imperial/colonial relations. The chapter will consider the continuities and changes in militarism in South Asia by juxtaposing key features of South Asia under the imperial system led by the British empire and the UN system led by the American empire since the end of World War II.

2. Contemporary Globalization and Militarization: From Speculation Blitz to the ‘War on Terror’ Rampage [+–] 45-63

Haluk Gerger £17.50

Independent Scholar, Turkey

Haluk Gerger is former professor at the University of Ankara and an author of many articles and books in German, Turkish, and English on the theme of the Global War on Terror and imperialism. As a Middle-eastern analyst known for his support for Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, he was imprisoned in Turkey for his political activism.

This chapter aims to reconstruct the interconnectedness between the recent wave of globalization, understood as capital’s international mobility and penetration, with militarism, understood as institutionalized physical and non-physical violence. The roots of globalization lie in the restorative onslaught of the Reagan administration against various crisis-generating challenges. The birth of globalization incorporated a good measure of state violence. Reagan’s assault was symbolized domestically in America’s rust belt and internationally by the onset of the Second Cold War. The speculative capital divorced from production for human need, running amok together with privatization plague, created poverty-inducing structures and processes. Resulting inequalities within and between nations made the very conditions of life violent for billions. The politico-legal superstructure of globalization, the so-called “New World Order” was devised to discipline the mortals while the US was set to recreate the world after its own image through chaos. Sovereignty-denial was the purpose. The American “right to intervene” was to become a customary source of international law through frequent use and common consent. All this naturally necessitated militaristic incursions into all facets of life in the form of “War on Terror.” Resistance to enslavement carried mainly dormant militaristic values and dynamics from the victims’ socio-cultural environment into the confrontation. The mutually supplementary process provided legitimate militarism. Finally, at its nadir, the collapse of the liberal project manifest itself in militaristic populism. The attack on the social being which makes us human beings is at its peak. Resistance means nothing but a recovery of our social being.

3. Peoples Against a New Cold War: Nuclear Imperialism or Dialogue for Reconciliation [+–] 64-80

Kinhide Mushakoji £17.50

Sophia University, Japan

Kinhide Mushakoji is professor emeritus of Sophia University, Japan and a leading analyst of international affairs in East Asia. He is a founding member of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), and the Journal of Human Security, and a senior specialist at the East-West Centre in Hawaii and Consultant to the Committee on Society, Development and Peace in Geneva.

Constructing a theatre for space wars to law intensity conflicts, both the Atlantic and the Pacific/Indian Oceans, two submarine-arm based-race grounds, with NATO vs. Russia in the former, and US plus Japan vs China in the second, have been heavily militarized. This New Cold War is based on increasing military/police security of great Powers and MNCs, by forced deprivation of human security of local, especially indigenous communities in the South, and multi-local migrants, refugees and diasporas in the North. The hegemony of the Trilateral=G7 supporting exogenous propagation of Westphalian States legitimizes monopoly of violence and Civil Society Westminster Representative democracy which developed during the inter-Cold War period promises to deliver human rights through the United Nations. This propagation of the Atlantic Liberalism combined with an ecological sustainability campaign was successful to the extent that it produced a hegemonic imposition of Modern Statehood, democracy, and a universalist approach to protect minorities. But the New Cold War put an end to the Atlantic Liberalism that enabled the growth of Neo-Fascist Populisms beginning with Trump’s America-First anti-Westminster America. The UN proposal of SDGs is unrealizable in the present global disorder. However, four endogenous peoples’ movements which must be united can still save the world. They are building an anti-hegemonic opposition that can stop the new Cold War. These movements are: The Anti-nuclear weapon ICAN and the Anti-Nuclear Energy Movements, The Latin American Human Rights movement promoting the Right to Peace, the non-violent movement for truth and Reconciliation of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and the One-Belt One-Road movement combined with the Free and Open Pacific and Indian Ocean of China and India. It will propose a dialogue between the Atlantic Liberalism, the Pacific-American Cosmovisions and the Afro-Eurasian Axial Civilizations towards a New Social Contract between the West and the Rest.

4. Contesting Pasts, Presents, Futures: East Asia’s ‘Japan Problem’ and ‘Korea Problem’ [+–] 81-96

Gavan McCormack £17.50

Australian National University

Gavan McCormack is professor emeritus at the Australian National University. He is the co-founder of the electronic journal, Japan Focus (now the Asia-Pacific Journal – Japan Focus). Much of his work appears in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, as well as English. His most recent work is The State of the Japanese State: Contested Identity, Direction, and Role, Folkestone, Kent: Renaissance Books, 2018.

Much of the difficulty about perceiving trends in East Asia today stems from the fact that the common paradigms and patterns of perception are those set around 70-years ago, in the wake of the cataclysmic WW II and subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1951). Following that, the US was set as an undisputed master of the world, and the treaty system it constructed was designed to consolidate and preserve dominance. China was divided and excluded, Korea divided and at war, Japan still occupied and divided (Okinawa severed from it), and the apparatus of occupation, bases, hegemonic control was assumed crucial to maintaining regional and global “security.” This chapter will argue that no historical settlement or framework of alliances lasts forever. The world has to move on. Since 2018 the mood in East Asia has shifted. Something unimaginable a year ago becomes a real possibility: a Korea at peace, de-nuclearized and subject to multilateral security guarantees. If the Cold War knots around the Korean peninsula can at last be untied, foreign troop occupations, in Japan as well as Korea, could be ended, opening the door upon a post-San Francisco Treaty, post-Cold War, and even a post-US hegemony, regional order. In considering the recent state and the prospects, this chapter pays special attention to the struggles in Korea and Okinawa.

5. The Geo-politics of Imperialism and the Unitary State of Sri Lanka: Militarization and Structural Genocide of the Eelam Tamil Nation [+–] 97-113

Athithan Jayapalan,Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam £17.50

University of Oslo (PhD candidate)

Athithan Jayapalan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oslo, Norway. Due to the war in Sri Lanka he was displaced from the Tamil homeland and was raised in Norway. He holds a M.A. from Bergen University, Norway and has published articles on the geopolitical dynamics of the Tamil national struggle.

Lawyer, Sri Lanka

Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam is barrister-at-law from Lincoln’s Inn and an attorney- at-law in Sri Lanka. After the assassination of his father by the paramilitary groups operating with the Sri Lankan security forces, he joined political activism. He served as a parliamentarian representing the Tamil National Alliance and campaigned internationally for a negotiated political settlement for the decades-long ethno- nationalist conflict in the country.

This chapter will present a historical background of the nation of Eelam Tamils and their attachment from time immemorial to their traditional homeland in the north and east of the island known today as Sri Lanka. The peril of British colonialism oversaw the establishment in 1833 of the presently existent unitary state. From then onwards Eelam Tamils have been subjected to structural genocide levied against them by a matrix of comprador elites of the Sri Lankan state and their imperialists backers, be it global or regional hegemons. The multifaceted processes and series of actions taken against them, through the framework of the state, has aimed at dismantling the national characteristic of the Eelam Tamils and their intricate connection with their homeland. Political protests from Tamils commenced in the backdrop of state aided colonization in the Tamil homeland in the 1930s, revolving around the principles of recognition of Tamil national existence, their traditional homeland, and the right to self-determination in the form of a federal solution. Increased state terrorism and the opting for a military solution to deal with the Tamil national question, conditioned the armed and revolutionary phase of the Tamil national struggle, out of which rose the Eelam Tamils vanguard organization, the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). The course of the civil war crystalized the array of global and regional hegemons who opted to safeguard the comprador unitary state and neutralize the Tamil struggle, chief amongst which was the US/UK axis of powers. The condensing alliances of hegemons and their backing of the military solution to the LTTE and their struggle, concluded in the genocidal massacres at Mullivaikkal in May 2009. Since the annihilation of the Tamil struggle and de-facto state, structural genocide backed by world and regional hegemons and their corporate allies have been orchestrated in a hitherto unprecedented manner, whilst also aiming for the exploitation of the natural and human resources of Tamil Eelam. This chapter will present the conditions of structural genocide and military occupation whilst illuminating the forms of resistance formed by Eelam Tamils in their political struggle for justice, life, dignity, and sovereignty.

6. Militarization and Everyday Struggle: A Case of Families of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances in Kashmir [+–] 114-126

Farrukh Faheem £17.50

Institute of Kashmir Studies, University of Kashmir

Farrukh Faheem is assistant professor at the Institute of Kashmir Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He has written journal articles and book chapters on understanding the militarization and cyclic protest mobilizations in Kashmir. He has taught at the University of Delhi and has been closely associated with several inter- community dialogues on dispute resolution and reconciliation organized by the Delhi- based think-tank, Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation (CDR).

The Indian state’s response to the late 1980s civil and armed uprising against the Indian rule over Kashmir witnessed excessive militarization that earned the region the distinction of being the highest militarized zone in the world. The intimacy of militarization in the everyday particularly increased the vulnerability of male members due to detentions and subsequent disappearances. Most of the disappearances have taken place during the cordon and search operations where male members are picked up, driven away in army trucks to unknown locations and later their custody is denied. In most of the cases, male member are the victims of the involuntary enforced disappearance leaving behind women members who are forced into the public sphere for their livelihood. The traditional male roles in a largely male dominated society are thus forced upon the women. The monthly sit-in protest in a public park by the families of the disappeared is a commemoration of the suffering and the means of challenging the Indian state’s regime of denial. This chapter captures the everyday lives of the families and their struggle against enforced disappearances. The primary focus will remain on the lives of the women members of the movement to understand their everyday negotiations with the Indian state and the larger patriarchal structures. Community meals were arranged to set the women free from household errands and ensure their involvement in the protests. When a majority of men retreated due to crack downs by (Indian armed forces) or went for training (to other side of Kashmir) the women carried on the movement. They marched to courts and camps of Indian armed forces to protest against detentions and negotiate the release of men.

7. “Enemies of the Nation, Heretics of the Church”: Conscientious Rejection of National Authority [+–] 127-140

Nami Kim £17.50

Spelman College, Atlanta, USA

Nami Kim is associate professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies in Spelman College, Atlanta, U.S.A. She has co-edited (with Wonhee Anne Joh), Critical Theology against U.S. Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. She was the co-chair of the Women and Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion.

This chapter provides a critical intervention in the normative understanding of “national security” as military security by examining the narratives of conscientious objectors in the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea), a sub-empire and a staunch U.S. ally, where military service is mandatory for men. Within the larger geopolitical context of US “War on Terror”, the narratives of conscientious objectors redefine national security not only in relation to their resistance to war, militarism, and state sanctioned violence, but also with regard to their stance against (hetero)sexism, neoliberal economic system, and various forms of violence against women and other vulnerable people. This redefining is significant because it demands that “national security” should be concerned with everyday struggles of ordinary people, especially women and other minorities. The narratives also pose challenges to the Protestant Right’s view of “national security” as the protection of the nation from both internal and external “enemies” that include communists/leftists/pro-North (Korea), conscientious objectors, sexual/gender minorities, and Muslim (im)migrants. The Protestant Right has been one of the most vehement opponents of the efforts to provide alternative to military service by labelling conscientious objectors as “threats to national security,” “selfish,” or “heretics.” Furthermore, the narratives of conscientious objectors directly or indirectly challenge hegemonic masculinity. The conscientious objectors’ refusal of enacting hegemonic masculinity signals cisgender men’s different ways of performing masculinities that are counter-hegemonic in a highly militarized, classed, and misogynistic Korean society.

8. Okinawa People’s Philosophy of Direct Action against Capitalism and Imperialism from Post-World War II to the Present [+–] 141-157

Kozue Uehara £17.50

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Kozue Uehara is a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She is originally from Okinawa Island where she participated in the popular movement against militarization. Her research focuses on the anti-developmentalist struggle in Kin Bay in central Okinawa in the 1970s. She is a member of the editorial committee of Ekkyo Hiroba, a cultural and political magazine based in Okinawa.

This chapter examines popular movements in post-World-War-II Okinawa, such as the 1950s Iejima land struggle; 1970s Kin Bay and Kisenbaru struggles (Kin Bay activists protested the construction of oil stockpiling tanks and the reclamation of ocean in eastern coast of Okinawa while the Kisenbaru activists organized against US military live-fire exercise); and oppositions to US military, Japanese Self-Defense Force, airport construction, and corporate land enclosure in the Ryukyu Archipelago from the 1970s to the 1990s. Some of these movements not only constituted an opposition against power but also attempted to create their own autonomous space, self-activities, and alternatives to the dominant structure of power. For example, the Kin Bay activists innovated collective bargaining negotiations with municipal and prefectural governments, undertook legal battles, created new cultural practices, and pursued community-based farming and fishing subsistence economy. They also built solidarity with anti-nuclear and anti-development activists in the islands of Ryukyu Archipelago and Mariana Islands. Many of the important testimonies and voices in these movements which focused on everyday subsistence and produced communal spaces that connected various regions came from women. Post-war Okinawan people’s movements were propelled by the memory of the Battle of Okinawa and were fueled by the presence of the US military bases, which made them into outposts of US Cold War imperialism that resulted in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Thus, in order to understand the full historical scope of Okinawan movements, we must situate them as part of a global indigenous people’s history against imperialist war and capitalist development, to which the ongoing struggles in Henoko and Takae are heirs.

9. Understanding Non-feminist Groups through the Necessity to Resist Feminist Hegemony: The Palestinian Women’s Movement versus Hamas [+–] 158-177

Sara Ababneh £17.50

University of Jordan

Sara Ababneh is assistant professor at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies and earned her D.Phil. in Politics and International Relations from St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2010. She wrote her dissertation on female Islamists in Hamas in occupied Palestine and the Islamic Action Front in Jordan. Her research interests include class, gender, and struggles for liberation and change.

This chapter asks whether – and if so, how– Islamic groups such as Hamas that clearly define themselves outside a feminist framework can be studied in terms of women empowerment. The material is based on fieldwork conducted with Hamas-affiliated female Islamists, as well as women’s rights activists in general, in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2007. Centrally, this work debates whether it is possible to think of women empowerment in non-feminist terms. The significance of this study lies in two critical contributions to the question of women empowerment in Muslim societies: firstly, the case of Islamism exposes the hegemony of feminism – religious and secular – as a theoretical framework when we study conservative religious groups. The discourse of the Palestinian women movement functions as the “invisible” framework that we often use to evaluate non-feminist groups. Secondly, this work shows the importance of giving more attention to Islamist practice. While Muslim feminists’ reinterpretations of Islamic texts have made important contributions in terms of women empowerment, an exclusive focus on discursive analysis can result in overlooking significant developments in Muslim women’s activism. Conversely, a discourse-centric analysis can lead to romanticizing organizations and movements which, despite espousing, even foregrounding, gender-egalitarianism in their discourse, are quite hierarchal and patriarchal in their practice.

10. God vs Goliath: Theological Challenges to Empire in South Asia [+–] 178-197

Francis Gonsalves £17.50

Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

Francis Gonsalves is the dean of Theology of Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India. He was the former principal of Vidyajyoti Theological College, New Delhi for 18 years. He is the executive director of the Commission for Theology and Doctrine of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, and the author of many articles and books on contextual theologies.

Empire and military might are creating havoc in South Asia, especially in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. India – the largest and most populous of these – has been both, active aggressor and naïve victim, in the dangerous dynamics steadily unfolding in this region. While the dominant discourse peddled by the Hindutva ruling powers is that “Bharat Mata” (Mother India) has been destroyed by Muslim kings and Christian colonizers, the actual fact is that, in the guise of patriotism, nationalism, self-protection and defense, the democratic and secular fabric of India is being threatened and a theocratic Hindu Rashtra along caste lines is being constructed. Taking the God vs. Goliath narrative as paradigmatic of the workings of the Spirit (according to the biblical tradition), this essay will first briefly highlight the ground realities and the key issues involved in current south Asian conflicts. It will then briefly seek to pinpoint causes and consequences with an interdisciplinary approach. Finally, it will attempt to reinterpret scripture and tradition with a “relational-contextual approach”, which critiques depoliticized depictions of Jesus, and replaces them with Christ-images of subaltern theologies that have the capacity to resist empire and militarization. It will also show how these are consonant with Pope Francis’s pastoral and missiological guidelines.

11. The Empathetic Power of Suffering: The Memories of Killing, and Feminist Interfaith Spiritual Activism [+–] 198-212

Keun-Joo Christine Pae £17.50

Denison University, Ohio

K. Christine Pae is associate professor and Chair of Religion in Denison University, Ohio, U.S.A. She is a Christian feminist ethicist and her academic interests include feminist peacemaking, interfaith spiritual activism, transnationalised militarizm with a focus on intersection between gender and race, transnational feminist ethics, and Asian/Asian-American perspectives on post-colonial racial relations.

War is about killing and/or necropolitical. However, we often do not know when the killing began and will be over because genocide has been normalized in human history. Tracing the US 7th Cavalry Regiment's history of genocide in North America, Korea, and Vietnam, this chapter analyzes how America’s mass killings are alive and unfolded together in the present moment, transnationally and intergenerationally haunting those who live in the consequences of America’s wars. Along with the memories of genocide, the chapter presents militarized prostitution, especially around US military bases in South Korea over six decades, as the affective site of the war, the concrete system that has consistently reminded people of America’s genocide. The chapter further argues that militarized prostitution is another form of genocide rather than gender-based sexual violence and critically engages genocide and militarized prostitution as the two distinctive characters of the US military empire. Subsequently, based on imagined dialogue between Dorothee Soelle and Sister Chan Khong, the chapter contemplates “feminist spiritual activism”. More specifically, this two women’s non-violent peace activism, built upon Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism, will show how empathy with the sufferers becomes a powerful tool in healing “us”; from the haunted memories of war. Spiritual activism further searches for the possibility to create solidarity among diverse groups of people who live with different memories and consequences of war (e.g. genocide and militarized prostitution). A concrete example of the empathetic power overcoming militarized violence will be presented from faith-based Korean women’s social activism on the site of militarized prostitution.

12. The Qur’an, the Bible, and the Indigenous Peoples of Canaan: An Anti-Colonial Muslim Reading [+–] 213-232

Shadaab Rahemtulla £17.50

University of Edinburgh

Shadaab Rahemtulla is lecturer in Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations in School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His primary interest lies in how religion can be read/shaped/lived to challenge contexts of social marginalisation, such as patriarchy, poverty, racism, and empire. He is the author of Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Over the past several decades, Muslim scholars have undertaken new readings of the Qur’an based on social justice and liberation. These readings have concentrated on questions of gender – such as representations of women, femininity, and sexuality in the sacred text – and religious pluralism, that is, the Qur’an’s discourse on the religious Other and the possibilities of that Other’s salvation. This chapter contributes to this body of progressive scholarship by bringing an anti-colonial lens to the hermeneutical table, centered on an underlying commitment to indigenous rights and solidarity against all forms of empire, in particular settler colonialism. Using critical textual analysis, the chapter will explore the Qur’an’s account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, engaging the following questions: How precisely is this event represented in Muslim scripture, and how does this representation line up with biblical narratives, as found in the Book of Joshua? In turn, how has the Muslim commentarial tradition (tafsir) built on the Qur’anic narrative and, in this exegetical endeavor, what sources has the tradition drawn upon? Finally, and perhaps most significantly, what are the ethical and political implications of the Qur’anic account of Canaan for anti-colonial Muslims committed to the liberation of indigenous peoples and their lands?

13. Counter-imperialistic Features in Biblical Israel [+–] 233-247

Youngseop Lim £17.50

Trinity College Dublin (PhD candidate)

Youngseop Lim is a biblical scholar and a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Religion, Trinity College Dublin and his primary research revolves around faith, empire, division, and the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula.

Considering the characteristics of biblical Israel, Palestine may currently be closer to biblical Israel than to present-day Israel. Christians have believed that present-day Israel’s use of armed force against the Palestinians and in occupying the land can be justified on biblical grounds. However, since the twentieth century, biblical criticism has begun to set forth a counterargument to the above biblical basis. The early Israel community consisted of the vulnerable so-called “Hebrew”, who had diverse racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, theories of military conquest during the settlement in Canaan were found to be uncertain through subsequent excavations and studies. Rather, archaeological research shows that Israel settled in the land of Canaan peacefully. Above all, we should note that biblical Israel, from its formation, had features distinct from the empires surrounding them. As in 1 Sam. 8 and 12, the biblical writer criticized the strong military-based monarchy, and the hierarchical society, as being contradictory to the ideal of the Exodus. This chapter pushes the reader to assess the features of biblical Israel and the features of empire in relation to the modern state of Israel. Who represents the biblical Israel? Is it the modern state of Israel or is it the Palestinians who are engaged in a struggle for liberation? Who embodies the empire today?

Part II: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, and Beyond

14. Colonialism Still Matters: Militarization and Imperial Grand Strategy in the Era of US vs China [+–] 251-269

Andy Higginbottom £17.50

Kingston University

Andy Higginbottom is associate professor in Kingston University and a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy in the UK. He is an international solidarity campaigner in support of social movements in Colombia, South Africa, and Tamil Eelam. He teaches modules on international political economy, slavery and emancipation, and crimes of the powerful.

Imperialist “global policing” is a reality. The US pivot to Asia and its military penetration of Africa through Africom adding to its well-established programme of intervention in Latin America, has been redirected in recent years to isolating and ultimately eliminating “the pink tide”. Britain has launched the first of two mega aircraft carriers, primarily for the international projection of aerial strike power, that are likely to be used in areas where there is no equivalent land base, such as the South China Sea or the South Atlantic. Good-detailed analysis of the resurgence of US militarism post-9/11 indicates the mushrooming of private security from the Iraq occupation, impunity for rendition and torture, forward operating bases, enhanced surveillance capacities, and drone warfare. A synthesis is needed for these different elements. However, a recent typology of militarism identified nation state militarism and neoliberal militarism but had not categorized neo-colonial or imperialistic militarism. This chapter will build on Hippler’s (2017) history of aerial bombing to argue that the current strategies of the US, UK, and France demonstrate a resurgent imperialism, with formerly colonized people addressed in a fundamentally different way as legitimate targets in total war strategies.

15. New Imperialisms and Struggles for Peace [+–] 270-287

Napoleón Saltos Galarza £17.50

Central University of Ecuador

Napoleón Saltos Galarza is the director of the School of Sociology of the Central University of Ecuador whose main expertise is in the study of changing dynamics of modern empires. He is one of the leaders of the Coordinating Committee of Social Movements in Latin America.

This chapter addresses the transmutations of late capitalism from two perspectives, structural changes and changes in inter-imperialist contradictions, and domination of people. In the first aspect, we are not in the transition phase, but in a previous time, marked by the decline of world capitalism, but with the absence of an alternative utopian horizon, and we can locate anti-systemic seeds from the resistance of the people and experiences partial. We are facing extreme forms of liberal modernity which concludes the process of estrangement of the individual subject, now himself in post-humanism, whose dystopian horizon artificial intelligence and cynical rationality. In the second aspect, the paradox is the presence of “ultra-imperialism” with extreme concentration of wealth and new forms of poverty, exclusion, and disposability of towns and continents, but with the intensification of inter-imperialist contradictions. We are facing imperialism in the plural. The expectation of the “end of history” and the triumph of the West was not fulfilled after the Fall of the Wall, but we entered into a phase of wars and conflicts on a different scale. This is not a repeat of the “Cold War” between two poles, but a complex process; the contradiction between the North-South axis, led by US imperialism in relation to the traditional powers US-EU-Japan and the East-West axis, led by China-Russia alliance in connection with the BRICs, and the presence of contradictions within each pole, between dynamic globalists-financial, and nationalist-postindustrial. The end of the Westphalian order and weakening of nation states is combined with the emptiness of a world state, which is being taken over by US imperialism as a global custodian, based on a warmongering strategy and strengthening of the arms race. In relation to the peoples of the South, the main modification is the new imperialisms’ devices “accumulation by dispossession” and the delegation of civil wars framed in geopolitical disputes with emptying dynamics of nation states. Thus, the boundaries of wars and conflict hot spots are located at the intersection of three dynamics: control of the five strategic monopolies, particularly linked to traditional and technological income, the civilizational and religious-ethnic confrontations, and geopolitical disputes. The final question is about the ways to establish peace through the collective will of the people for a better world, through negotiations or renditions, resistors and disconnections, ethical and political struggles.

16. Necropolitical Capitalism, the State of Exception and Accumulation by Dispossession [+–] 288-305

Luis Arizmendi £17.50

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Luis Arizmendi is lecturer in Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Alva Edison University, Mexico. He was a lecturer at the National Polytechnic Institute for 30 years and is the director of the international magazine Mundo Siglo XXI and an author of many articles and books on the global crisis of capitalism, both in English and Spanish.

Ayotzinapa evokes Auschwitz to talk about modern-day Mexico. This powerful formulation, expressed by Elena Poniatowska, states a parallel but not in the sense of an allegory. It should not be taken lightly. Ayotzinapa is not simply Ayotzinapa; it is the window to an era. It reveals, in all its horror, in the murder of 43 college students, the new configuration that is trampling Mexico: necropolitical capitalism. It discloses the politics of death as the basis for accelerated and decadent forms of accumulation by dispossession. Ayotzinapa has awakened a peculiar protest; the first national struggle against necropolitical capitalism. The chapter critically periodizes Mexico’s history in recent decades, and demonstrates that this is the outcome of an evolution that has passed through the stages of cynical capitalism and narcopolitical capitalism.

17. Hawaiʻi: A Pivot of Empire or Piko of Aloha ʻĀina? [+–] 306-322

Kyle Kajihiro £17.50

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (PhD candidate)

Kyle Kajihiro is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He was born and raised a fourth generation Japanese in Hawaiʻi. His current work involves research, education and action for the demilitarization of Hawaiʻi and solidarity with the native Hawaiian movement for sovereignty and human rights. He is a board member for Hawaiʻi Peace and Justice.

Hawaiʻi and numerous other islands in the Pacific have been weaponized by the US to form an archipelago of sites crucial for projecting its military power over the earth. And yet, these sites remain unmentioned in most discussions on the costs and consequences of America’s wars. Attending to this “lost geography” of US empire in the Pacific, and Hawaiʻi’s crucial role in it, this chapter argues that dismantling the US imperial infrastructure of island military bases is necessary for improving the prospects for peace, for advancing self-determination and for social and environmental justice of the people of these military-occupied islands. As Hauʻōfa has argued, Oceania is not a vast emptiness peppered with remote and insignificant specks; rather it is a region with epic histories and visionary futures, deep cultural wisdoms about more sustainable ways of living within the limits of finite resources and the potential to help us reimagine international politics through a global ethics of care.

18. Existential Threats to the Pacific Islands: Oceania Resists the Long Reach of Empire [+–] 323-338

Vanessa Griffen,Gordon Nanau,Maureen Penjueli £17.50

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Vanessa Griffen is a Fijian political scientist, researcher, writer, gender and development specialist, and women’s rights advocate. She helped form Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Network and is currently a campaigner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Gordon Nanau is currently senior lecturer in the School of Government, Development and International Affairs at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji and is from from Solomon Islands. His work focuses on land tenure and extractive development in the Pacific Island countries.

Pacific Network on Globalization

Maureen Penjueli is coordinator of Pacific Network on Globalization, based in Suva, Fiji. She was formerly a team leader with Greenpeace. Her advocacy and published writings focus on trade justice, seabed mining, investment and decolonization.

A number of countries and people have lived for centuries in the vast Pacific Ocean, who make up the Pacific Islands region. However, it is an area often regarded as empty area devoid of any people or cultures of any significance or power. The Pacific Island countries, experienced external domination and control by different colonial powers, including settlement and takeover of lands and resources. The Pacific Ocean has long been the site of militarized control and competition by external powers. The extreme-most damaging form of empire and appropriation of the Pacific Islands and its people was the use of the islands for nuclear testing by the US, Britain and France. This co-authored chapter firstly argues that the legacy of damage continues in health and environmental effects. There is a continued economic and political domination in the north and south Pacific from Marshall Islands to French Polynesia. Post-independence countries with political control, inherited colonial policies and laws that have fundamentally changed indigenous attitudes and uses of land and sea resources. Secondly, this chapter argues that traditional and amended land ownership systems and land takeovers enabled new forms of land appropriation by post-colonial elites and governments, and undermined customary land laws and relationships that are endemic to Pacific cultures. Thirdly, the chapter looks at the Pacific Ocean and sea resources surrounding Pacific Island countries as an all-important resource that is traditionally viewed with respect, as a source of livelihoods which Pacific Islanders’ must be careful custodians of. The notion of the Blue Economy or Blue Growth, where global powers including Pacific Islands nations are in a race to divide up the last frontier of exploitable resources, indicates a new area of exploitation and environmental damage that Pacific Islanders must oppose. On resistance movements, the Pacific-wide protest against nuclear testing showed the solidarity across islands that was possible in a peoples’ movement. As land and sea resources are newly exploited by powerful multinationals with the agreement of post-colonial elites, the authors explore the ways in which the Pacific Islands states and people can reassert their values, whilst resisting the neo-liberal global world economy that profoundly affects their lives.

19. Knowledge Militarized in Africa: On Crushing Ubuhlanti to Advance Pseudo-democratic and Economic Imagination in the Context of Empire [+–] 339-353

Vuyani Vellem £17.50

University of Pretoria

Vuyani Vellem is lecturer in the Department of Systematic Theology and Ethics, and the Director of the Centre for Public Theology at the University of Pretoria. He is a social commentator on faith-related issues with a specific focus on spirituality, power, and economics and the co-editor of A Prophet from the South: Essays in Honour of Allan Aubrey Boesak, Bible and Theology from the Underside of Empire (2015).

In South Africa, during the state of emergency, South African townships where black people lived were turned into war zones. Apartheid had literally turned South Africa into a military state, using massive power and force against its own citizens; Legion “dwelling” among people. At a deeper level though, the Apartheid state had adopted a military strategy called Low Intensity Conflict to win the hearts and the minds of people. This was done to penetrate the psyche and spiritual dispensation of the oppressed masses. In post-1994 South Africa, universities became military zones during the Fees Must Fall and Afrikaans Must Fall campaigns. For a number of years, Zimbabwe, a South African neighbor, struggled to remove Robert Mugabe from power and only the military intervention in Zimbabwe was recently successful in doing so. The US has had closer cooperation with some African countries, including Botswana and Uganda. This is an example of the penetration of the military in the democratization of countries. With these selected examples, this chapter will examine what Low Intensity Strategy tactics continue to be in use in the vast project of democratization of the African continent. The underlying thesis of this chapter is that militarization of the African continent not only sustains the superiority of Eurocentric system of democratic knowledge, but also does so by all means including the destruction of Ubuhlanti.

20. Resistance, Peoples’ Rights and the Role of the Churches in Latin America [+–] 354-368

Javier Giraldo Moreno £17.50

Jesuit priest

Javier Giraldo Moreno is a Jesuit priest known for his defence of human rights in Colombia and Latin America. He is particularly known for working with poor marginalised communities and for spear-heading social movements involving indigenous, black, and peasants in Colombia. In 2015, he was invited as one of the historical experts to the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC.

Colombia has been maintained as a highly militarized state by the US since the end of the WW II as an effort to contain the influence of the USSR in Latin America. This chapter exposes the ways in which the US integrated Colombia into a strategic military agenda in the region. The anti-communist ideology of the Roman Catholic church served the US imperial agenda in Latin America leading to an unholy alliance between the church and the state that justified oppression of those who resisted. However, the dramatic changes that took place in the Roman Catholic church with the Second Vatican Council had a transformative effect on the Latin American churches to the extent that it gave rise to a new form of martyrdom amongst bishops, priests, nuns, and lay men and women who stood by the exploited and oppressed masses to the point of death.

21. Empire, the Caribbean Church and the Gospel of Resistance [+–] 369-382

Garnett Roper £17.50

Jamaica Theological Seminary

Garnett Roper is the president of Jamaica Theological Seminary (JTS), who has pastored three congregations over a period of 35 years in Jamaica. He has been a radio preacher on Grace Hour for more than forty years and published works such as Caribbean Theology as Public Theology (2012), Who God Bless No Man Curse(2016) and Thus Says the Lord: Responding to the Resurgence of Empire (2018).

This paper explores the role of the church in the Caribbean with regards to the violation of people’s rights by exploring the exorcism of Legion narrative in the Gospel of Mark. The working hypothesis is that the way Mark treats the subject of demonization is the rough equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorders or the disorientation brought about among the victims of militarization. The role of Jesus as exorcist in the story is therefore paradigmatic of the role of the church in circumstances where people are made victims of militarization, domestication and distribution of military arsenal, and deportation. Mark’s narrative emphasizes the problems that arise after exorcism, the push back by the entrails of empire. It explores the options for intervention in such cases and the counter-narrative constructed in the wake of the push back, opposition, and persecution in the experience of the Caribbean Church.

End Matter

Index [+–] 383-395

Jude Lal Fernando FREE

Trinity College Dublin

This collection of 21 papers were written by leading and emerging critical scholar/practitioners from religious and non-religious backgrounds who represent three generations of survivors of imperial invasions and genocidal massacres across the globe. They are from the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific and the Caribbean Islands who are renowned for the depth and urgency of their critically self-reflective analyses and their principled ethical and political positions against empire and militarization. The contributors interrogate the oppressive religious and secular ideologies and mechanisms of the modern empire and its allies and exemplify in particular how militarization has affected various peoples, lands, seas, and skies across the globe. They expose the desecration of lives and the earth by the modern empire and its local allies through various means, ranging from psychological warfare to brute force of advanced technological warfare, leaving an intergenerational impact. The authors have embraced people’s cries against mass killings, starvation, rape, militarized prostitution, torture, forced disappearances, land grab, displacement and the destruction of nature caused by modern warfare, as well as people’s inherent collective aspiration for liberation of their lives and lands that is expressed in many liberative languages of faith as well as in secular humanist strands. They help evoke and sharpen the alternate consciousness amongst peoples in furthering resistance, and in envisioning and building a non-imperialist future for us, for our children, and for the planet earth. The authors foreground a breadth of modes of resistance and the places where they have been implemented, sharing with the reader their hard-earned knowledge and stories of truth and liberation, with a prophetic urgency.

Reviews

This book is a collection of deep reflections on the struggles of all those “modern prophets” who are fighting against the Empire in their own contexts through multiple ways. They are academics, activists, artists, theologians, and common people from the margins of the society.
We pray that these testimonies of resistance will inspire all of us and strengthen our common struggle against the Empire. We urge that through this work our global network of anti-war and anti-militarization will be strengthened.
Sudipta Singh, Mission Secretary, Research and Capacity Development, Council for World Mission, Singapore

This book contains extraordinary material. It is a brilliant mix of interpretation and realisation by outstanding thinkers, activists and intellectuals from many walks of life and origins as to what a world at peace requires. The language and its scope is fascinating and gives one hope that with such clear minded people spread across our globe progress towards peace for all humanity and success thereof is indeed possible.
Dr. Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations who resigned from his 34 year old career in the UN in protest of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Security Council

This book, which is based on the authors’ concrete actions and commitment for liberation, clearly shows that the fundamental causes of ethnic and regional conflict, poverty, socio-economic and gender inequalities, discrimination, exploitation, and environmental destruction, in the non-Western, Three-Fourths World, are imperialism and militarism. At the same time, the authors invite us on a journey of overcoming imperialism and militarism to save humankind and nature, and to a life of peace, restoring our divinity and humanity.
Prof. Kim, Sung-Jae, President of Kim Dae-Jung Nobel Peace Prize Memorial, Distinguished Professor, Hanshin University, Former South Korean Minister of Culture and Tourism

An exceptional book in three senses: one, in the conception of empire and militarization as an encompassing reality that goes beyond the use of force to show its political, ideological and cultural dimensions. Two, a reflection that covers phenomena and studying the experiences of resistance to empire in the countries of five continents. Three, in the variety of authors that includes prestigious academics as well as resistance activists, who have in common a vision committed to fighting the devastation of human life and the earth that has been perpetrated by imperialism and its basis and reason for being: capitalism.
Magdalena Galindo, Professor in the Faculty of Economics, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Reclaiming the Sacred is a rare product. Three factors give it its edge. One, its contributors. Twenty-five leading scholars/practitioners (covering three generations of imperial invasions and genocidal massacres across the globe) set themselves the question of how to build a non-imperialist future and to give hope to people seeking justice, peace and freedom. Two, their focus is Causes. Why war, poverty or inequality? Questions rarely asked. Solutions often sidestepped or suppressed. Three, their resources. Neither ideology nor Reports (Governments, charities, world organisations or whatever) but listening to people, seen not as ‘victims‘ but ‘Bearers of Hope’ in search of an alternative world worth fighting for.
Clearly a call for prayer, and plenty to pray about, but only if we set about creating conditions in which the prayers can be answered.
Baptist Times

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Resistance to Empire and Militarization

Reclaiming the Sacred

Jude Lal Fernando [+–]

Trinity College Dublin

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