PARTICIPANTS

ATALIA OMER
Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame

Atalia Omer's research interests and goals encompass teaching, researching and publishing works on the theoretical study of the interrelation between religion and nationalism; religion, nationalism and peacebuilding; the role of national/religious/ethnic diasporas in the dynamics of conflict transformation and peace; multiculturalism as a framework for conflict transformation and as a theory of justice; the role of subaltern narratives in reimagining questions of peace and justice; intra-group dialogue and the hermeneutics of citizenship in ethnoreligious national contexts and the symbolic appropriation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in other zones of conflict.

The question concerning the role of religion in global civil society calls to the fore two sets of interrelated conversations. The first interrogates the premises underlying the characterization of global civil society as secular and asks whether religious organizations such as the Catholic Peacebuilding Network that grounds its platform in an explicit religious orientation be considered a non-governmental organization like Doctors without Borders and subsequently be analyzed through this prism in its localized efforts for peacebuilding. The second set of conversations focuses on challenging the premises underpinning the perception of a global civil society as necessarily `peaceful' and `progressive'. Sociologist Laura Macdonald (2002) contends that this perception tends to be overenthusiastic and presumptuous with regards to the progressive nature of a global civil society as well as insufficiently reflective in terms of gender dynamics and structures that underlie a global public sphere in the same way they do in the more localized context of civil society (see Iris Marion Young 1996). Instead Macdonald follows Nancy Fraser's “model of a heterogeneous, dispersed network of many publics (`subaltern counterpublics'). Macdonald's understanding of the conception of a global civil society as one that simply provides an extension to an already problematic concept of a civil society, a concept that conceals the power dynamics involved in construing a public sphere (a space that is defined by power dynamics and decisions concerning inclusion and exclusion), points to the caution in which one ought to proceed in articulating the role of religion in global civil society. How are we to analyze religious trans-national organizations that seem to challenge `progressive' agenda? As a point of departure for responding to this quandary, the academic training for leaders of international NGOs needs to complexify the presumed `secularity' of a global civil society?a presumption that constitutes an extension for an unreconstructed interpretation of `civil society' as constituting a neutral secular space. Useful in this regard are contemporary conversations in the study of religion concerning post-secularity (Connolly 2000) (Taylor 2007). In addition to confronting the parameters of the categories of the 'secular' and the 'religious', this scholarship challenges hegemonic interpretations of modernity and development. A thorough engagement with these conversations may enrich the work and outlook of leaders of international NGOs, including religious NGOs.

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