Afterword Imagining People’s Peace

Chad Haines and Yasmin Saikia

Othering lies at the heart of most of the conflicts around the world today, justifying discrimination and violence against those deemed as threatening or whose cultural values are perceived as less advanced and less civilized than one’s own. Through hegemonic histories and narratives, differences are portrayed as problematic, highlighting discrete differences to justify violence. As the chapters in this volume document, rather than something to celebrate, Othering identifies differences with suspicion, as traits and behaviours that need policing, or worse, outright erasure. This is the ultimate outcome of Othering. It is not differences per se, for we are all different, but the transforming of differences into something negative that is perceived to be threatening to “our” way of life, “our” society where the “our” is exclusionary, singular, and normative. However, the Other can also be a site for reflective rethinking for developing an ethics of living with difference and accepting that circumstances and conditions separate us. Acknowledging that the Self–Other relationship is a continuum, a challenge that must be continuously worked on and improved can enable the process of peaceful living.

The contributors to this volume set out to explore a number of different expressions of Othering, uncovering the processes of imagining the Other as a social negative. As the chapters demonstrate, many of the claims of Othering are quite spurious, yet they are popularly consumed and circulated, amplified through mainstream and social media. At times, people are motivated to latch on to false claims and untruths about others, creating conditions of violence and oppression. This is particularly evident in the chapters in part 2—Haines, Aviña, Burge, Attai, and Khan—focusing on different case studies of Othering in North America. But these false differences are not anomalies, rather they are naturalized through a variety of institutional arrangements that map and encode bounded differences. Othering, as the chapters in the book argued, is not merely a rethinking of group identity, of demarcating us and them as discrete entities. They are boundaries for violence, to keep the outsider from infiltrating and changing our societies, as Cassidy and Perocco demonstrate in their chapters in part 1. Even nature is Otherized allowing for regimes of resource exploitation and environmental degradation, as Neyrat, Baishya, and Tsosie argue in part 3.

Othering is more than a politics of identity that demarcates clear differences between Self and Other. Processes of Othering include imagining fixed boundaries that separate Self and Other, socially, culturally, and historically; it is about suspending or ignoring commonalities, interconnections, and interdependencies; and it is about creating a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority between Self and Other, where the Other’s cultural values and practices, social organizations, philosophical ideas, and even their blood are deemed impure and corrupting. In part 1, Grose and Saikia show how Othering is about denying interconnections and interdependence, privileging boundary thinking, and, as a result, laying the foundations of unpeace.

Boundary thinking, however, is not merely the production of racists, sexists, and bigots. Boundaries are in fact naturalized through a variety of discourses. That is, boundary thinking is as much at the root of negative Othering as much as liberal ideas of tolerance and acceptance. Boundaries in our geopolitical world of nation-states are an assumed reality, demarcating nations, communities, and civilizations rather than socio-cultural interconnections, flows, and borrowings. Even in academia boundaries are naturalized in our disciplines where national histories are the dominant mode of organizing research and teaching—one studies Chinese history, French history, American history, and so on. Even a course on European history is often organized around the making of German or French or Italian identity, long before any of those ever existed, and certainly long before any conceptualization of Europe existed. Such bounded thinking also occurs in philosophy where Western philosophical thought is never categorized as “Western” unlike Islamic, Chinese, or Indic philosophies that are always qualified and constricted, mapped as inherently different. Western philosophy then takes on an aura of universality, as philosophy, while Islamic philosophy is only that of Muslims, Chinese philosophy is only that of Chinese. How Greek philosophy shaped Islamic thought which in turn gave birth to Renaissance thinking is rarely acknowledged, and, if so, each component remains as a bounded unit that borrows, but where the flow is not the history, but rather the making of discrete philosophical discourses is the outcome, atavistically projected back in time. We have institutionalized boundary thinking and thus unpeace in our approaches to peace, which is the connecting arc of the case studies in this book. We have situated our dialogue alongside feminist, postcolonial and humanist scholarship that have pushed the boundaries of knowledge as they move across borders both as a method and as epistemological reconceptualizations of the hierarchies of power.

Rather than limit our study to the negative aspects of Othering, we posit that people’s peace is possible within the realm of human behaviour. By and large, most people would agree that people are generally civil toward one another, express neighbourly concerns, and have an ethics of living in communities. The majority of people are socially tuned to think of the world as a connected place. This became distinctly evident in the collaboration to create a COVID vaccine and develop human immunity against the virus. Yet we are also prone to think vertically. Vertical thinking is prevalent within the academy, although it is also the site of critical theory and calls for upholding the equality of all knowledge. In everyday life, vertical thinking is even more obvious. Our own neighbours are extremely helpful in times of need. But they also speak of the problem about “those” immigrants, directly to Yasmin, herself an immigrant from India. As we write this afterword, dozens of “patriots” are protesting daily outside a hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, leased to temporarily house asylum seekers, many of them from Venezuela, others from Afghanistan. They are deemed “illegals,” and demands are made to send them back “where they came from.” Such protests are a common expression of national belonging not only in the United States but around the world. In the United Kingdom and Italy, as Cassidy and Perocco’s chapters argue, the border-making between communities demands a harder stance toward refugees and emigres imposing intense surveillance of the outsiders and creating conditions of unwantedness for people seeking a place to belong because of their displacement from home. The contradiction between the need to be together, peacefully, and yet assume to be superior and better than “them” undermines our basic human capability to ensure people’s peace.

Living peacefully cannot be done without an awareness of the humanity of the Other. If we continue to view the Other as below us, radically different than ourselves, and deem them an enemy and a threat to our “way of life,” we will only deepen the problem of unpeace. This is the core concern of our book. But humans are not the only ones with whom horizontal relationships are important for peaceful living. The natural environment is equally vital. Today, the main threat to peace is generated by the destruction of the natural environment by human exploitation.

We Other the natural environment in multiple ways. First is our attitude toward nature, animal and plant life as inherently inferior species. Humans claim the right to possess them for use, Othering them in the bargain. Not far from our home is a golf course. A few years back the beautiful tall Arizona long-needle pine trees were felled to redesign a links golf course without trees. The desert landscape was changed to look like a coastal one because this is what the consumers wanted it to be. When there is an awareness to “save” the environment, it is seen as an object, once again, for human use. Protecting nature, the advocates reason is good for healthy human lives. The idea of actually living in harmony with nature, in a horizontal relationship, is a rare value.

To live in peace—humans and non-humans—is to live with our differences, and value the ways our diverse lives are interconnected. The question that we must ask is how willing we are to explore the potential and undo the façades of differences that blind us to this living reality. The answer lies in our human agency: We can humanize ourselves and the Other. Peace is a human good for us to find and make, a collective journey for all of us to seek out. We invite each of you to reimagine our relationships with one another and with nature, valuing our differences and our capacity for being human. This capacity is not too far away, it lies within grasp, the task is a mindful awareness of this possibility to mimic affinity to close the gap of Othering.

“The Power of the People Is Greater than the People in Power,” the chant at Tahrir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring protest in 2011, encapsulates a deep-seated belief that people can change the system and liberate themselves from the vertical oppressive system. The spark for this liberatory moment was lit far away in Tunisia by Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, a street fruit vendor, who set himself on fire to protest the harassment he suffered daily at the hands of local authorities. This event became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring that drew millions of people from all walks of life and divergent political, religious, and ideological orientations to demand change in the oppressive political institutions and leaders. Some, like Egypt, had initial success but it was short-lived after the military crushed the people’s movement. Others, like Syria, spiralled into violence, and warfare involving multiple groups, including ISIS, forcing millions to flee. Today, there are over five million Syrian refugees abroad, while several million are internally displaced.

Over the following years, people’s protests demanding justice and peace appeared in new places around the world. In the United States, a movement was born based on Black Lives Matter—protesting against the murder of young Blacks, particularly Black men, by governmental and extrajudicial forces across the country. In 2018 in France, the Yellow Vest Movement rallied people in solidarity to counter systems of social injustice. A year later in Hong Kong, ordinary citizens took to the streets to struggle for democracy, and, in 2019, in Assam and Delhi in India, young and old, men and women, surged to the streets to protest against the government’s arbitrary decision to change citizenship rules. Muslim women held a continuous sit-in for months in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, against the Citizenship Act until the COVID pandemic broke out and they were forced to disband. The Farmers’ Protest in India that emerged in mid-2020 was thwarted by the government and the massive outbreak of the second wave of COVID in India pushed the farmers to return home to safety and protection.

While the people’s struggle for a better, more equitable world continues, the public-political space is, once again, crowded by reactionary forces that are determined to ensure that borders are secure. Opposing the people’s quest for justice, equality, and peace, reactionary forces impose draconian crackdowns on democracy and basic civil rights. Right-wing populist movements fill the vacuum fed by outlandish conspiracy theories of the evils of the Other in our midst. They target people who are different; they attack in the streets, and some have driven into crowds of protesting civil rights activists and murdered them. Governments promote new and restrictive immigration laws. Vigilante groups police international borders and beat people they deem “illegal.” Such fascist movements have long histories, fed by extreme nationalist ideas of superiority of the Self while undermining and devaluing others. In the past ten years, these forms of rabid nationalism have become mainstream in many countries as extremist groups have taken control of political and administrative power. The global pandemic of 2020 and 2021, which compelled people to segregate from others, abandon the public space, and disconnect, allowed for fascistic ideas to penetrate deeper into the social fabric of democratic societies in unprecedented ways around the world.

Our work as peace scholars makes us fully aware of these challenges to people’s peace, but we also believe that humanity survives against all odds. The present is a bleak time, but humanity is indestructible. This awareness is not simply bookish knowledge: we have seen and experienced this capacity in multiple places, among a wide variety of people, which kindles our hope that, under the debris of extreme nationalism, oppressive governments, and divisions of people, resilient humanity will emerge and thrive again, we hope. How and why do we take this assertive humanistic position? To answer this question, we would like to share with our readers our personal and academic story that enables this faith or yaqin (which implies “certainty” and is an expression of deep faith in South Asian Islam as Yasmin’s culture teaches her).

When Yasmin took up the Hardt-Nickachos endowed chair position in peace studies at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict in 2010, we were aware that we were entering a new scholarly world. It was very encouraging on one hand to be part of a public university’s effort to contemplate and develop peace ideas, but, on the other hand, global events were unfolding with the Arab Spring, and everywhere people’s search for justice was trampled under the authoritarian boot. The signs of hope were darkened by the dark clouds of uncertainty. However, in our minds, we had a fresh memory of positive human relationships that facilitated a different way of thinking about peace.

The previous year, in 2009, following an intensive six months in Pakistan as two of the first Fulbright Scholars allowed to return to the country following the 2001 US invasion and occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan, we spent a few weeks in Sicily. While there, Chad fell critically ill with an amoebic liver abscess. The care and generosity of the people nurtured Chad back to life. The care was driven by a human commitment to serve those in need; we were the recipients of this care. The care and concern were not limited to the medical staff. Patients and caregivers of patients reached out amid caring for their own and found the time to help translate for Yasmin, attend chapel to pray for Chad’s recovery, bring coffee, and, at times, even forsake the doctors’ visit to attend to their patients. After several weeks, when Chad was medically escorted back to the United States, the stark difference in the nature of medical care between Italy and the United States became evident to us. In the United States, the care was surgical and technologically driven. Reams and reams of paperwork had to be completed before admission, the managerial culture seemed more concerned with “evaluation” than care, and medical insurance saved us from bankruptcy.

Italy’s humanistic care stayed with us as a value, as a lived ethic that was very real and part of people’s everyday lives. It made Yasmin’s shift to Arizona State University to lead a new peace research initiative organic, and the imagination of peace from a humanistic perspective took shape. Pursuing the literature on peace quickly made it evident that the humanistic approach in peace studies is not well developed. To give it a shape and form, under the aegis of the Hardt-Nickachos peace initiative, we were able to organize and participate in a number of conferences, workshops, seminars, and reading groups grappling with a diversity of issues on peace. Faculty colloquia on peace research; international conferences on a variety of themes, including women and peace; Islamic ethical values of civility or adab; religion and human rights; postcolonial thought and resistance movements; migrants and refugees, and others illuminated new approaches for us. The annual peace lectures and film festivals and workshops with artists, producers, novelists, musicians, and public intellectuals facilitated a variety of dialogues and partnerships with a wide group of scholars, practitioners, and the public. We recognized that a recurring concern for everyone was the issue of the role of people in affecting change for peace. Are people so crushed that they cannot reclaim agency, many asked. Even as the question surfaced, immediately it would be discounted. People’s peace cannot die, everyone would firmly assert. So we were encouraged to reimagine peace with a new vision.

Instead of focusing on conflict management and resolution, transitional justice, truth and reconciliation, and other institutional practices of peace that adopt a tool-box approach, we started our study of peace in people, in acts of everyday ethics. Perhaps, the everyday ethical actions of people that drive and maintain peace are less visible or consciously articulated, but it became evident that people’s capacity to live amicably with others keeps the peace. Coexistence is the bedrock of diverse communities living side by side, and human ethics sourced from secular and religious values maintain peace in the everyday. Paying attention to the rhythms and ebbs and flows of this lived peace gave shape to our concept of “people’s peace.” People’s peace focuses on the humanistic ways of living in peace.

Toward developing the idea of people’s peace, we undertook to write three books. We decided to make it a collective effort rather than develop single-authored monographs so that a combination of voices could be brought together in unison. The first of the three books was Women and Peace in the Islamic World: Gender, Agency and Influence (2015). The second volume is People’s Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (2019). This book, On Othering: Processes and Politics of Unpeace, is the third and final volume emerging from our explorations into the lived ethics of people’s peace. These three books are centred on the lived human issues for peace and bring into sharp focus the most important constituency—human beings—who are both the architects and destroyers of peace.

In the first book, we paid exclusive attention to Muslim women who are generally seen by the “important people”—leaders, peace negotiators, internal donor agencies, and even the Western public—as living without agency, needing to be saved from tyrannical Muslim men and obsolete mores of Islamic society. On the contrary, in putting together the book, we encountered case after case of ordinary Muslim women who are the daily actors of peace, particularly in conflict zones. Their voices are not usually heard, and they are silenced. But they continue to do peace work in the shadows, without the spotlight on them. It was a very encouraging and satisfying journey with these women to see and encounter the world of peace through the prism of their everyday lives and work.

Obviously, not all Muslim women are agents of peaceful transformations; many choose to align themselves with conservative religious movements, extremist political ideologies, or even the interests of global imperialists. But those who work on keeping and reviving peace among people draw upon certain values that are inherent in Islam, though certainly not unique to Islam, such as neighbourliness, hospitality, friendship, sociality, forgiveness, and memories of coexistence. Muslim women’s lived ethics of peace are at once universal yet particularistic. For Muslim women, who are the greatest victims of violence in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the capacity to become the proponents of peace in their lived local worlds is indeed extraordinary. Muslim women, we realized in writing the book, are one of the heroes of people’s peace.

In our second book of this trilogy, People’s Peace: Prospects for a Human Future, we focused on the broad category of people’s peace. We included within our field of vision ordinary men and women who uphold the humane ethics of living together in peace. Beyond the cessation of overt and covert violence, beyond negative and positive peace, there are emotions and attitudes that enable humans to live peacefully in a community, amid external tensions, which we highlighted in the book. Such peace is not an event but a process that survives beyond and despite war and violence. We delved deeper into religious and philosophical interpretations and applications of people’s peace in various sites and chronologies. Ordinary people, we found, do not wait for authorities to issue prescriptions; rather, they attempt to “work things out” at a quotidian level. They succeed at times, but at other times, peace is undone; still, the search continues. “Finding balance” in communities is a continuous and recurring process that is always in motion. This led us to conceive this third volume, On Othering: Processes and Politics of Unpeace.

In developing On Othering, we took a realistic view of the challenges and limitations of people’s peace, recognizing the deep structures of negative and violent Othering that have become acute during this last decade, as explained and illustrated in the different chapters in the book. Othering is the foundation for undoing peace, even when people want peace. The lack of people’s peace is not a failing of the people, but the vertical stratification created by those who control the institutions of power and make decisions that confine people within enclosures of “us” and “them” that result in their division rather than fostering the wholeness of peace. We have shown through different case studies and approaches that dehumanizing the Other has to be interrogated within structures that thrive on this strategy and undo peace. Rethinking the foundation of alliances in everyday interactions, as well as organizational networks is key to asserting the people’s capacity to live in peace. For us, this imagery of people living in peace is not wishful thinking but a realistic and workable strategy for redirecting energy from destructive to productive and generative outcomes. Thus, while we investigate the hyped-up negative politics of Othering, we also demonstrate with specific examples the deep histories of relationality among humans and non-human Others for building a positive narrative of peace. Relationality inspires an ethical concept of people’s peace that includes the Self and the Other.

Taking these three books together with the overarching theme of people’s peace opens up unique multidimensional and inclusive approaches to studying peace, through cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, mutual aid, care, and community-building. People’s peace pushes us to focus on our interconnections and collective ability to create humanistic communities. Near and far, people have the capacity to forge ethical, horizontal, relationships of care, concern, and belonging. It is the capacity to appreciate our common humanity.