Introduction

Other as the Foundation of Peace

Recognizing that peacelessness is a shared condition, for true peace to take root in our world, the following chapters point us toward the commonsense approaches of valuing differences, understanding the socio-historical contexts of people’s lived conditions, and appreciating the depth of our interconnection with one another. Collectively, we suggest that valuing difference is not merely a matter of “multiculturalism” but must aim for a deeper reorienting of our understanding of difference.

The key ingredient in the shift to peacefulness is moving away from hierarchical, vertical thinking and the institutions that produce it to horizontal imaginings of “us” along with “them.”5 In horizontal thinking, differences are not threatening but rather are valued as something worth knowing. There is a verse from the Qur’an that sums up how in the Other is the possibility of peace: “We have made you tribes and sub-tribes that you may recognize (and do good to) one another.”6 This understanding of the Other as the locus of knowledge and, ultimately, peace through good acts can be a very powerful approach to developing horizontal thinking.

A critical inquiry into the processes of Othering illuminates the change in thinking that is necessary for recognizing the humanity of the Other for peace. At its foundation, the Othering process, as documented in the following chapters, is dehumanizing. This is true when we Other one another, as well as when we imagine nature as an object less valuable than the human species. Recognizing dehumanizing processes provides tools to interrogate structures that thrive on Othering and undo peace.

The problem of Othering is not specific to a single place or people, but rather a global phenomenon. The imagery of shared humanity is not wishful thinking but is an enormously powerful idea for redirecting energy from destructive to peaceful activities and outcomes. Erich Fromm understood horizontal thinking as a “being mode” of existence. Among other psychological states, Fromm saw peace in the Other through being in solidarity, being joyful, and being creative as opposed to acts of peacelessness rooted in our desire to acquire, where we objectify our world and thus see things as distinct from one another, as discrete entities to possess, use, throw away, or even kill. The structures of our consumer society and the rise of “selfie-ism” drive us toward having things, relationships, and emotions that feed into a violent relationship between ourselves in the world around us.7

As an orientation toward fellow humans, as a way of imagining our relationships and interdependence with one another, and as a mode of valuing our rich and diverse human heritage, peace is not easily definable. It is a value and ethics of living that is at once universal yet particular, with diverse expressions in different communities according to their culture and circumstances. A singular, fixed definition of peace itself would be counter to the very notion of peace ascribed to in this collection. For some, peace is simply about living side by side; for others, it can be reconciliation, healing, pluralism, or amity, and so on. Yet, for others, it might be a struggle for justice. The capacious understanding of peace foregrounds the possibility of bringing together disparate Others, overcoming differences, and practising relationality. Narratives of superiority and inferiority that produce vertical relationships among communities—dividing, compartmentalizing, and piling them one on top of another—must give way for horizontal interactions allowing the multiplicities of communities to thrive without overcoming or suppressing another. This may sound utopic, but in our times the extreme polarity between “us” and “them” calls for new imaginations for bridging the chasm.

Our approach is humanistic, based solidly in the humanities and human social sciences. As such, we draw on the philosopher René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, which in essence is a theory of conflict and a prism for understanding the causes of interpersonal clashes and encourages the search for solutions to address them.8 The negative emotions and attitudes toward the Other based on envy, rivalry, prejudice, and hate allow for justifying and supporting a war against another group in the name of protecting good from evil, as Girard argues. Through mimetic imitation, one can also develop an affinity with Others as fellow humans. Thus, mimetic theory cautions against lurking violence because of negative desires against the other scapegoated for destruction, and, simultaneously, this awareness opens pathways for thinking about how we can work with differences for accepting the Other as human. Awareness of this negative and positive possibility, as we argue in the book, is critical for peaceful living with internal and external Others as well as friends.

Girard’s theory of mimesis turns to Christianity as the only way to protect man from the consequences of mimesis.9 Unlike Girard who emphasizes only Christianity as saving mankind from imitating the violent ways of others, we emphasize that different religions and value systems should be appreciated for overcoming the hubris of the Self. By focusing on interpersonal human relations as the primary location for peace, our approach moves beyond the surgical and instrumental methods of “positive” or “negative” peace developed by Johan Galtung.

Johan Galtung has developed a powerful thesis of a twelve-step approach to peace, which draws from both Western and Buddhist philosophies and practices.10 He emphasizes that positive peace can prosper only where there is the absence of organized group violence alongside the commitment to equality, the absence of exploitation, and a positive relationship between groups and countries, which is the purview of state actors controlling the exchange of values, such as commodities, services, knowledge, people, etc. In other words, he argues that peace thinking will only emerge if there is at the same time “a value on the absence of violence and perception of (at least potential) presence of violence.”11 Galtung’s overemphasis on structure and typologies of violence privileges the utilitarian value of “elite talk” among national and international peace actors for making peace and encouraging peace thinking. Peace thus becomes a technostrategic project.

Galtung’s positivist model has remained very powerful in informing scholars working in the field of peace studies. They use Galtung’s typology of violence and “steps method” for evaluating social systems and creating stochastic patterns for assessing peaceful and unpeaceful societies. Feminist scholars of peace critique this method of peace as overlooking gender and social constructions of violence.12 Kenneth Boulding, another giant in peace research, argues that the approach to “positive” and “negative” peace produces a creative tension between them.13 In peace studies classes at Arizona State University our students usually express confusion how there can be negative peace, for them it is not peace at all.

Coming from a humanistic perspective, we argue that the sociological and “scientific” methods for evaluating peace overlook and leave a big void in understanding human thoughts and perceptions that influence both violence and peace. People are not automatons who follow patterns and trends without reflection. The theories of agency, dialogue, and interpersonal contact, including overcoming anger and hatred of the Other through a reasoned and faith-based approach developed by John Paul Lederach and Desmond Tutu are powerful ways of thinking for improving human relations for peace.14 Thus we argue that at the centre of peace and peace studies is creating the conditions for positive human relationships. The management of the relationship between people cannot be a top-down approach, but human development for understanding Self and the Other must be horizontal in its basic orientation. Thus, instead of seeing peace as an object, as something “to have,” we focus instead on peace as a way of “being,” thus reaffirming that sustainable and deep peace requires valuing the Other because all human relationship is communal and interdependent.

Moving beyond the self-centred assumption that “we” are “good” and “they” are “evil” and the rugged individualism symbolized in the West by a figure like Robinson Crusoe, which pairs with the Hobbesian image of an anarchical world of violent and destructive Others out there, the contributors to this book argue that co-operation and integration among people is essential for creating shared histories and appreciating lived realities. As the philosopher Kim Sterelny argues, for 97 percent of human history, we lived in equality with one another.15 While the social structures and cultural patterns that fostered equality are long lost, those values and a renewed commitment to living in appreciation of one another should be part of our lived world.

The human reality is a desire for peace with and through the Other, despite structures that define us as discrete entities. While war, violent conflicts, oppression, marginality, and inequality are prevalent and capture headlines, the vast majority of the world’s population forge peaceful lives, even in the face of grave oppression. We see in the work of architect Teddy Cruz and political theorist Fonna Forman the values of difference informing new imaginings of borders in conflict. Their work begins with the premise that “border walls, and border policies, are often self-inflicted wounds on the border-builders themselves since they frequently interrupt the environmental, economic, and social flows that foster the health and sustainability of the larger region.”16 It is neither naïve nor utopic to reimagine the walls and borders of conflict and heightened differentiation when we recognize that our well-being is undermined by those walls.

Peace with the Other is not a romantic image of the homogenization of society or a “melting pot” metaphor. Peace is also not a multicultural national identity, a symphony of cultures that together form a beautiful whole. Multiculturalism is itself predicated on acts of differentiating those who belong within the symphony and those whose presence is an unwelcome din. It is also predicated on a bounded unit, a nation, a country, a territorialized society with policed borders, and a kind of gated community in which an experiment of cultural appreciation is practised. But the gates are locked to allow the experiment to unfold.

With rapid climate changes, devastating natural disasters, and the ensuing displacement of people, peace studies must acknowledge the place of the non-human Other as well. The lived natural environment and the critical role of balance for sustaining human and non-human lives are essential for sustainable peace. When we place the natural environment within the frame of peace, we see similar patterns of vertical thinking that must be reimagined, taking a more “cosmo-centric” perspective, as Frédéric Neyrat argues in this collection.

Building positive relationships for peace is not a new idea. Religious, philosophical, historical, and even scientific discourses show the connections among the varieties of species and acknowledge that they constitute one whole. It is this way of thinking about the connections of our world that can free us from negative discourse. As Yasmin Saikia and Fabio Perocco point out in their respective chapters, we do have the human capacity, both as individuals and as collectives and assemblies, for positive relationships with the Other and for bringing those relationships to bear on the Self–Other continuum.

Siep Stuurman’s path-breaking book The Invention of Humanity informs our suggestion that common and shared humanity is not a singular concept but a plural way of recognizing and acknowledging the multiple ways people have expressed their humanity and the humanity of the Other.17 Accepting the Other, even foreigners and rivals, as equal fellow human beings, not destructive strangers, is a powerful idea that disrupts the current and extreme polarization of people and cultures. Stuurman’s viewpoint is that the concept of humanity is not a European one, but a universal idea shared by multiple cultures and people, and it is evident in multiple time periods and societies, even the ones that Europeans considered barbaric and uncivilized. However, it is not a widely accepted approach. Rather, the idea of the Other as a disrupting, if not corrupting, force is the generally held view and it is also evident in scholarly conceptions of society. Much contemporary thought is rooted in the classical approach of Emile Durkheim’s theory that postulates community as a bonding force, encoding social integration and solidarity. It is this understanding of community that scholars such as Samuel Huntington employ to map clear distinctions between us and them and perceive the Other as a threat that must be kept out of “our” community, with an inherent “clash” between Self and Other, as he argues consistently in all his scholarly work.18 In particular, Huntington argues that there is an unbridgeable divide between the civilized Western and the uncivilized Islamic worlds. In various chapters in the book, we show how Huntington’s divisive idea of community as a bounded unit works as a mechanism of self-identification rather than as a socio-historical reality. We engage the literature on how ideas of a fixed, often primordial identity are in fact imagined and operationalized to create fractures between the Self and Others. To develop this conceptual understanding, we draw upon Charles W. Mills’s foundational philosophical idea that hierarchical social ordering is a way to maintain an imagined hierarchy of privilege for some and reducing Others to sub-humanness.19 In The Conquestof America: The Question of the Other, the Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov argues that the relation to the Other is both process and function created and determined by the Self. In the Spanish conquest of America the European Self failed to “discover” the Other because they could not accept the equality of the Other who was different.20 This approach is evident throughout the history of Western colonization of the so-called Third World where it tried to impose Western values and culture and transform the non-Western communities because in Western colonial view the Other was less civilized and constituted a lower category of humans. Again, in a more recent book, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, Tzvetan Todorov and Andrew Brown argue for the dignity of the Othered, particularly the Muslims in Europe, who are repeatedly demonized without engaging in a dialogue.21 The perspective of unbridgeable differences with the Other and a mentality that differences must be feared is rooted in a historical process that has come to claim a hegemonic, universal position—but, we argue, it is just a claim. To change this inimical outlook and to generate a different possibility, boundary-crossing through co-operation is necessary. Co-operation, Frederick Bird and colleagues argue, is the foundation for developing global ethics.22 As Richard Sennett posits in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, a moral commitment to uplift one’s community through a sense of “togetherness” is necessary so that co-operation among people can enable conversations face-to-face and online.23 Empathetic interaction with others requires us to look beyond ourselves to develop “dialogue skills,” which can be far more powerful in placing “us” in close relation to “them,” and is a way of letting others see us within our context for improved understanding. However, making the normative into a universal political and public ethics is not ideal for advancing peace because the tendency would be homogenization rather than allowing the multiplicities of cultural and religious traditions of humanity to flourish and inform local communities according to their specific conditions, histories and circumstances.

Judith Butler offers a realistic warning of the challenges we face in attempting to create “a people” guided by common ethical purposes and/or practices. The modern democratic world “community” is partial and exclusionary, she argues, and “There is no possibility of ‘the people’ without a discursive border drawn somewhere”—which we think is an important issue to bear in mind; however, we cannot remain confined to a bordered way of thinking.24 Borders among people need not be rigid divisions but can be a space that does not foreclose the possibility of encounters and exchanges. The human capacity to invent and find its humanity must be accepted as a fluid, continuous journey.

Freedom from the Othering menace is not simply a political problem: it is an existential and practical demand for human advancement. In his study of early Islamic communities, Franz Rosenthal noted in The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century that freedom was considered a “basic principle for all children of Adam—or, as is occasionally added: as far as Muslims are concerned.”25 Connected to and parallel with freedom, is the concept of Muslims’ relationship to others/strangers. As Rosenthal argues, in early Islamic societies, there is no term or concept of a stranger as an Other. Free people viewed others, who were free like them, as neighbours, some close and others far away, whom they encountered at home or during their travels. The concept of stranger/agnabi “existed and did not exist” in Muslim lands.26 The ethics of hospitality and giving refuge to strangers who are treated as guests (evidently practised in all Muslim communities throughout history, particularly in Arab and Afghan communities, so much so that even Osama Bin Laden found refuge among the Pathans in Afghanistan and Pakistan) evolves from seeing the stranger as a wayfarer/sojourner and even a neighbour. Unleashing this friendly imagination of the stranger/Other as not a fearful Other, but someone nearby and next door, a fellow traveller, is the first step to creating horizontal relationships and to bringing into existence the “reality” of living as a hospitable human community, as a society of humans in a shared, peaceful world. Emmanuel Levinas, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt, and several others have written extensively on this topic. Bauman powerfully argues against the Western philosophical idea of freedom rooted in the privileging of the sovereign individual and our entrenchment behind walls with the emergence of consumer society, suggesting that outsiders are perceived as an ontological “threat and a nuisance,” an opposite perspective Rosenthal suggests is at root in Islamic thought.27

The shared space of a social “public” world cannot come into being by mere contemplation or complaint; transformation requires action, as Judith Butler argues in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.28 The theory of assemblage and acting on it for change fosters ethical connections and the recognition of the precarity of the Other. Political scientist Seyla Benhabib postulates in her insightful book, The Rights of Others, that ensuring rights owed to the Other is a step toward enabling a positive and inclusive assemblage of people.29 We agree on this, but argue in our book that these rights have to work in tandem with human dignity. There are millions of people in our world today who are not recognized as citizens of a defined state but are stateless, displaced, living under occupation, sometimes as illegal immigrants and refugees, and are dispossessed. How can these people enjoy rights and be part of the public sphere when they are not even regarded as fully human? Is it possible to find within the asylum seekers housed in our own neighbourhood the prospect for peace rather than reproducing fear and hatred?

Othering as Peacelessness

At the root of non-peace is an imagination of difference as a threat: that a dangerous Other is out there, a being whose life is not as worthy as one’s own, a creature who must die or be oppressed so one can be free and live in peace. Socio-cultural differences justify violence toward this imagined Other-as-threat and, through a variety of rhetorical and discursive representations, rally a community of people who are (imagined as) similar against the Other. This destructive dynamic between the discourses of Otherness and acts of violence legitimizes oppression, distilling fear, and, in the end, often becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy when those who are oppressed strike back and seek to undermine their oppressors—Timothy Grose’s discussion of the condition of the Uighurs in this book illustrates this problem well.

There are multiple social processes through which the Other as fearful manifests itself. Unsavoury, biased, and discriminatory rhetoric is the foundation of the Othering project. The images employed are rooted in a second process, that of bordering between Self and Other, of imagining ourselves as discrete social entities. These distinct boundaries between “us” and “them” are employed to justify building social boundaries, manifested in such policies as border walls, apartheid states, and other forms of segregation. Modes of separation between the Self and the Other are never between two communities regarded as equals; rather, the difference is inherently hierarchical. We construct walls to protect our identity and the social fabric because we imagine the Other as inherently inferior. Their difference will pollute and corrupt us because they are not as good, not as advanced, modern, or civilized as we are. Each of these three processes becomes a social act of keeping the Other at bay.

In his classic work, Orientalism, Edward Said documented how the construction of the “Oriental,” often an Arab/Muslim Other, was an inherent part of the Western Self. The West imagined the Other as the antithesis of Self to claim a global space of superiority that came to define the Western colonial project and postcolonial imperialism.30 The imagination of the Orient, Said argued, preceded the West’s colonization of the East and the Middle East, serving not as an ex post facto justification but rather as a driving force of colonialism. The Orient was perceived as less civilized, as chaotic, as irrational, rooted in traditionalism and spiritualism as well as socially static and politically despotic. The Orient required the West to colonize it in order to liberate it. The image of the Other as less than the Self was the driving force of conquest and occupation—of non-peace.

In Islam in Liberalism, Joseph Massad furthered Said’s argument, reflecting on how Islam “is an internal constituent of liberalism, not merely an external other, though liberalism often projects it as the latter.”31 That without the (imagined) Islamic Other, the liberal West would not exist, that it was required as its antithesis through which “Europe as a modern identity was conjured up.”32 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Nazi Germany was driven by antisemitic sentiments structured within social policies and practices where “language is mass murder and elimination’s medium.”33 The imagined Other as a threat leads to imagining the body of the Other as worthy of violence.

But racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are not merely discourses through which one projects a particular image of Self; they are predicated on particular worldviews and reproduce those perspectives as natural. Camille Burge’s chapter on anti-Black racism and Chad Haines’s chapter on Islamophobia both tackle this problem head on. In his seminal work, Europe and the People Without History, the anthropologist Eric Wolf traces the histories of material interconnections, trade routes, and cultural borrowings between diverse communities and civilizations. For Wolf, a perspective of cultures and civilizations as “billiard balls” ricocheting off one another provided the West with a history of uniqueness that propagates the popularly held view of civilizational superiority and historical exceptionalism.34 History, however, is a series of interconnections and borrowings, adaptations and appropriations. The perspective of cultural borders as necessary provides the historical foundations of discrete ethnicities, nations, and civilizations. Walls are the physical manifestation of this bounded view of history and culture.

Those who fear the Other argue that raising walls and boundaries is necessary to securitize and protect from the enemy hordes. The political scientist and government policy adviser Samuel Huntington made it clear in his final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, that new immigrants, who happened to be Brown and Black (non-Europeans), were undermining American values through their failure to integrate and to mould themselves to the Anglo-Protestant cultural ethics that made America great.35 Huntington’s argument of the cultural Other is an inherent part of not just the United States’ national ethos but of every nation that imagines itself as a distinct cultural entity with clear borders between us and them. The manifestation of exclusionary nationalism is about maintaining some semblance of national purity. It attempts to create peace inside for the select few who are members of the nation, often at the cost of others, not just their exclusion. This pattern of violence to create peace is repeated over and over around the world, in each nation-state through cultural and physical genocide, elimination, expulsion, and segregation. But this violent Othering is not tenable or sustainable in our globally connected world. Yet it is the dominant mode of political organization and social imagining—a territorially bounded community with some shared values, histories, cultures, religions, and/or languages that has particular rights to a good, peaceful life. Others may have these rights but only in their own bounded communities.

The modern nation-idea as a community with a singular identity predicated on a sense of some shared culture gives rise to “minorities”—the cultural Other within a territorial nation-state. Various countries devise distinct social practices for dealing with minority populations and, in some cases, absorb them through acculturation, which is also a process of cultural erasure. In more extreme cases, structures of apartheid and segregation are devised to separate communities so that the ruling class can thrive and keep the marginalized groups “under control.” In other cases, the elimination of minorities is achieved through deportation or, worse, genocide. Recognizing that no country is comprised of a single cultural group, non-peace prevails in coping with, and finding a place for, minorities. What that looks like for Indigenous populations in settler colonial countries like South Africa, Australia, Canada, the United States of America, and Israel is different from what ethnic minorities experience in countries such as Sweden and Japan, which, again, is different from countries where minorities are mapped as religiously different, such as the Copts in Egypt or Muslims in India. Each country has its own means of marginalizing and oppressing minority populations.

Multiculturalism, as a mode of tolerance, slips into easy cultural essentializing, reducing the Other to a type. This reductivism gives rise to what Mahmood Mamdani calls “Culture Talk,” which assumes “every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics [and all other social behaviours] as a consequence of that essence.”36 The discourses of tolerance, multiculturalism, and cultural acceptance do not in and of themselves undo assumptions of difference as a negative; rather, they create systems of regulating difference, according to Wendy Brown in Regulating Aversion.37 Apartheid and segregation, for example, are forms of accepting cultural differences and then policing those differences to protect the purity of Self and secure well-being.

Exclusionary nationalism is currently compounded by the rise of “selfie-ism,” an imagining of a discrete Self, a sort of collectively practised narcissism that prompts moral and ethical “withdrawal from other people.”38 We find ourselves in a double bind, seeing in the Other only whatever might gratify us, and commodifying our differences by turning them into objects; this entices fear and builds walls to keep the unwanted Other out, as Sennett asserts in The Fall of Public Man. When the Other is reduced to an object, a discourse, their true nature is “invisible,” just as the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man experiences.

Focusing on the Othering of nature, novelist Arundhati Roy and ecologist Satish Kumar identify this mindset as “speciesism,” reflecting the hierarchical mapping of Self and Other, where our sense of interdependence is lost.39 As Amit Baishya argues in his chapter in this book on Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the loss of relationship with the non-human Other is a process in which rampant urbanism and conspicuous consumption play a vital role.40 The Self becomes a severed entity, an island unto itself, disconnected from an interconnected natural world and an exclusive unsustainable community. The fixation on the human Self normalizes a value of Self and regards those like me as good, indeed superior, and the non-human as inferior, objects in the service of the consuming human.

The discourse of the Other drives two interrelated social phenomena: building walls (physical or social) to maintain separation and enacting one’s superiority—thinking vertically or hierarchically—toward the Other, marginalizing them through such practices as denying them rights. The inferior human Other is denied basic civil rights through disenfranchisement from electoral processes and democratic representation or denying them equal opportunities. Systemic discrimination is driven by structures such as nationalism, capitalist accumulation, and colonialism/imperialism. Unless these structures are addressed, non-peace will prevail.

Structures of Othering

Images about the Other harden our attitude toward them and produce unfounded “realities,” as Edward Said argues in Orientalism. This provokes a discourse that emphasizes a different way of seeing the underlying and often unacknowledged dependency between Self and the Other. Modernity unleashed a number of social processes that have unravelled our human interdependencies—capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state idea as the hegemonic mode of political organization. For peace to be achieved, peace studies as a field must acknowledge and engage the deeper structures of modernity and history that create walls and vertical thinking.

Underneath the human experiences of non-peace in our everyday lives lie historical forces and processes that reshape/d our relationships with one another. Too often, peace efforts work as band-aids. They are much needed in moments of extreme violence and bring an end to the conflict, but rarely do such efforts address the root causes that continue to spew hate, oppression, and outbursts of violence. Such acts of peacemaking are usually state-driven, creating peace treaties and accords without addressing the culpability of states in the violence.

On-the-ground peace activists fill in the gaps by reaching across communities in conflict to foster understanding and tolerance. People-to-people peace initiatives and interfaith and inter-ethnic community-building efforts bridge differences and allow communal work to occur. Such efforts are strategic, particularly in areas with extensive violence, such as the Balkans, Afghanistan, India–Pakistan, Somalia, and other conflict hotspots around the world. However, the forces that drove the cleavages between different communities in the first instance are rarely addressed in such peace initiatives, and the possibility of new conflicts continues to fester below the surface.

The dynamic of vertical thinking reflected in these peacemaking practices is naturalized in the modern-day era of nation-states and institutionalized globally through the long histories of colonialism and imperialism. Many of the conflicts we are experiencing today—for example, between India and Pakistan and between the Hema and Lendu in the Congo—are colonial legacies. We live in a postcolonial world where borders and divisions that were mapped and instituted by foreign occupying forces rewrote the nature of community, belonging, and neighbourliness. The very people whose communities were destroyed by occupying forces are today the migrants who face the third wave of discrimination as they attempt to seek out economic livelihoods and peaceful lives in other countries. First, they were conquered and divided by invaders and colonizers; then they were marginalized and oppressed as minorities by the postcolonial nation-states; and, finally, they find themselves the victims of anti-immigration protests in their new homes.

Modern colonialism and imperialism, extremely violent versions of vertical thinking, are rooted in a “world system” that was forged in tandem with the expansion of European powers, starting in the late fifteenth century. Colonialism was driven by capitalist economic expansion and a “civilizing mission” that “rested upon the twin fundamental assumptions of the superiority” of European culture and of “the perfectibility of humankind,” and implied that “colonial subjects were too backward to govern themselves and that they had to be ‘uplifted.’”41 The project, at least in its early manifestation, was to convert the colonized subjects, the Brown and Black people of the world, to European liberalism. One of liberalism’s foundational beliefs is in the equality of people. Thus, those deemed inferior had to be transformed and civilized to be made equal. Equality in this framework was not inherent in the humanness of people but rather in their cultural expressions and in their mental capabilities. As Thomas Macaulay argued in his famous “Minute on Indian Education” in 1835, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” By doing away with “traditional” socio-cultural practices and creating a class of subjects who were “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” the British would fulfill their duty of advancing Indians to a higher civilization.42 Of course, by creating such a class they would also advance their ability to rule over the masses.

The rhetoric of extreme Otherness that propelled Europeans onto the world stage as “civilizing” colonizers reinforced unequal global economic structures. Colonies were conquered and parcelled out based on agreements between European powers to feed their emerging industrial capitalist economies. What emerged was a “complex hierarchical system controlled by the capitalist mode of production,” mapping core regions with peripheries and semi-peripheries where labour and raw materials were extracted and new markets for products were created.43

European colonialism created structures of dependency, as Albert Memmi argues in The Colonizer and the Colonized.44 Its persistent reflection is evident in the decolonized postcolonial world. The unfree human condition of today, whether in the West or non-West, is the product of a long history of oppression, inherited behaviours, and repressive policies that continue to produce extreme Othering. As colonized people sought independence and built new nation-states, they remained within the global hierarchical structure of cores, peripheries, and semi-peripheries, their economies dependent on exploitative relations with the former colonizers.45 As documented in the following chapters, postcolonial societies have recreated this entrapment in the present. The irony is that those who Other in the present were victims of Othering in the past as they forge postcolonial nation-states in a highly fractured, unequal, and disparate global sphere.

The very idea of the modern nation-state that emerged with the decline of colonial empires legitimizes vertical thinking and institutionalizes differences to benefit the hegemonic community that defines the nation around its values and interests, thus reproducing the structures of governance inherited by the colonial state. The oppression does not only include ethnic and religious minorities but people of different orientations, such as lesbians and gays, and our natural environment. The nation-state idea encodes a singular national identity that places some at the margins or outside the nation while simultaneously propagating a moral orientation of the nation. Here in the Phoenix, Arizona, area, where the editors of this volume are based, there are ongoing anti-immigrant protests taking place that are also a regular part of the political scene across Europe. In India, Muslims are lynched on the suspicion of having beef, or for marrying non-Muslims, and even labelled as “illegal migrants,” “invaders,” or worse, “termites” who are destroying the nation. But such Othering is not restricted to India, as the Uyghurs in China, the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Hema and Lendu in the Congo, the Christians in Iraq, African and Middle Eastern migrants across Europe, and many other groups can attest. In every one of these countries, minority communities are facing violent oppression. The Other—be they ethnic, religious, moral, or natural—are excluded from national imaginings of the Self.

Globally, economic shifts and geopolitical manipulations create extreme instability, placing billions of the world’s population in precarious conditions. Digging deep into the histories of colonial encounters is important for charting pathways to peace, as it was a formative site for producing negative images about the subject/Other by the master/European Self that circulated back to the metropolitan centres, influencing and bolstering the still-ongoing Othering process and finding expression in anti-immigrant policies, hatred toward refugees, discussion of safeguarding European culture, and so on.

Under the neoliberal regime of globalization, coming to the forefront since the 1980s, the precarious status of these marginal populations has become more acute. First colonized, then marginalized within their postcolonial nation-states, and today regarded as disposable labourers, people at the margins live in non-peace. Many are forced into displacement, seeking out political and economic opportunities elsewhere. As refugees and migrants, their lives take on a different precarity, becoming the unwanted Other. The presence of the precarious Other disrupts the image of Self and unleashes nationalist movements, such as the Britain First movement in the United Kingdom and the Proud Boys and Minute Men in the United States. While these groups are manifestations of the most extreme anti-immigrant positions across Europe and North America, governments are imposing stricter policies against immigrants and policing immigrant communities as inherently suspect, a trend that Kathryn Cassidy and Alexander Aviña document in their chapters.

While this history of conquest, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression is well known and documented, placing it within the context of peacemaking is a challenge. How does one attempt to foster peace by dredging the past? Many peace activists, in fact, find it counter-productive to engage in history; rather, they focus on the present moment and look forward to a different future. The history of oppression, discrimination, and violence makes it difficult to bridge divides between communities. We cannot change colonialism or nationalism, nor can we overlook these factors because much of the world lives in conditions of latent violence and non-peace due to the vertical thinking of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism.

As the chapters in this volume indicate, socio-cultural differences do not have to lead us down the path of Othering—of reducing Others to essentialized, stereotypical notions, or confining them to “culture talk” or ignoring complex histories. More significantly, the chapters draw our attention to various ways we can start to imagine difference as something to celebrate rather than fear.

The Book

The chapters in the book span a range of humanities disciplines: history, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, human rights law, and gender studies. These diverse approaches help us understand how and why we have a global crisis of peace in local, national, and international arenas. The historical perspectives offer longue durée views on how people create divisions and separations and how they struggle to overcome them. The anthropological and ethnographic methods adopted in several chapters dig deep into human experiences and meanings in the struggle for living side by side with others, while the chapters using the methodology of human rights law and gender studies search for human understanding through reconciliation, justice, and accountability. Finally, the religious studies approach offers pathways to reflect on the significance of values for peace as a lived, ethical relationship that includes both human and non-human Others.

Putting these approaches and methods in dialogue with each other in the book produces an inquiry into, and connection between, two processes—Othering and unpeace and the ethical responsibility necessary to renew the commitment to peace. Our ethics of peace suggests an awareness that the Other and Self are parts of one whole. This awareness may not be so evident in the twenty-first century; precisely for this reason, we need to reflect on how we got to the place of amnesia, forgetting the relationship that we owe to the Other for preserving Self and peace.

Paying attention to the values, cultures, and actions of those who are rarely seen as peace actors—women, minorities, immigrants, refugees; in short, the invisible people—we shift the study of peace from high-rise buildings where international organizations and national governments broker peace and instead situate peace on the ground as a lived activity and a fluid negotiation among people who know its value and suffer the impact of its loss. On Othering extends the conversation and opens new areas for exploring behind the scenes the conditions of Othering that undo and deny sustainable peace.

Each chapter in this book provides an important instance of the Othering process and shows how the phobic relationship can become the site for emerging human awareness of relationality. It is an active engagement generating a language of peace as a felt and actionable possibility in which scholarship and activism come together.

The chapters look behind the screen at the concept of common humanity to see the gaps that exist in the lived world. They drive home the importance of learning about peace from a variety of locations and cultures and show how the different perspectives speak to the same human desire—for human recognition, social harmony, dignity, and peace. We draw upon the works of several scholars and situate our research in conversation with them but also offer new insights on what needs to be done at a practical level for peace with the Other.46

Part 1 of the book focuses on the Other within, exploring the processes of marginalization of minority populations. Sinologist Timothy Grose lays bare the extreme violence being waged against the Muslim Uyghurs of western China. He places the policies within China’s broader concern for mapping minorities as inherently inferior to the dominant Han Chinese and exposes the contradictions of forced acculturation, which includes rape and “re-education.” Grose suggests that the policies create permanent inferior classes who live in continuous states of non-peace. In her chapter on the Miya Muslims of Assam, India, historian Yasmin Saikia traces the historical discourse of Muslim Otherness first by the British colonists and later by the Hindutva extremists (right-wing religious nationalists) who now dominate national and regional politics in Assam. Saikia documents the dehumanizing politics of Othering based on religion but offers a prospect for laying the foundations of peace in the lived Assamese culture. She suggests a local way of being with the Other expressed in the cultural form of xanmiholi (accommodation and fusion) that had developed historically and survived despite colonial divisions of communities. Xanmiholi queries the power of people’s history to counter the politics of the state for a singular Hindu identity and make Assam Muslim-free. Human geographer Kathryn Cassidy’s chapter takes us to the United Kingdom, where minorities are subject to various forms of “everyday bordering” that limit their access to goods and services provided through welfare programs, thus deepening their precarity. Everyday bordering includes a diversity of practices, including policing of identity cards that create a lived anxiety among minority communities. Cassidy emphasizes a variety of everyday practices such as care, love, and support within and between communities that challenge border-making. Looking at Muslim migrants in Italy, sociologist Fabio Perocco reflects on the socio-cultural shifts taking place due to Europe, overall, becoming a site of immigration. This creates diverse responses, including cultural or ethnic-racial selection, policies promoting temporariness, social alienation (Entfremdung), and ethnocentric assimilation. Within this context, the Muslims in Italy seek out ways of “rooting” themselves in the place but find themselves as a racialized underclass.

Taken together, the chapters in part 1 critically engage how the national imaginary disrupts and limits our capacity for seeing the Other in our midst as worthy of equal respect. The Other cast as “outsiders” are denied the benefits of the social systems unless they erase their previous identities and assimilate within the national political body to the point of forgetting their past. Or, as in the case of the Uyghurs in China, they are expunged from the Chinese national community although they have no other home than China. The expectation of conversion of the minorities to the dominant culture driven by the political ideology of majoritarianism and rooted in a sense of superiority have become state projects in China and India, as Grose and Saikia show. However, at the local level, particularly as reflected in the chapters by Cassidy and Saikia, human ethics and values are evident; their sources may be cultural or social interactions, but the outcome is care, respect, and equal inclusion of the Other within.

In part 2, the contributors examine how sexuality, gender, race, and religion are Othered. Gender studies scholar Nikoli Attai looks at the personal voices of queer asylum seekers from the Caribbean to Canada and The Netherlands, providing a narrative of living as double Other—racialized and queer, with the additional marker of being an immigrant. Attai importantly raises the question of how asylum seekers find themselves in a system of indebtedness for the help they receive, reproducing hierarchical structures rather than full accommodation. Chad Haines combines religious studies and anthropological methods to discuss American variants of Islamophobia, highlighting one expression of it through a number of interviews he conducted with right-wing extremist Jon Ritzheimer, a member of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. Ritzheimer organized an armed protest against the Phoenix Islamic Center in 2015 because, according to him, Islamic values can never be fully accepted as American values. Haines places this exclusionary perception within the larger realm of Western liberal thought, rooted in the Enlightenment and the long history of racialized exclusion. In the next chapter, Alexander Aviña takes a historical perspective to document the making of the “killing machine” of the juridical-political system along the US–Mexico border and the “right to disappear” those deemed as criminally and illegally Other. Hauntingly, Aviña unveils the finding and identifying of human bones in the desert as a pathway for forging a peaceful future—by recognizing the humanness of the victims and the sheer inhumanity of the system that forced them to disappear in the desert. In her chapter, Camille Burge weaves her personal story of growing up Black in a highly racialized environment in the United States and her research on the experiences and meaning of chronic Othering experienced by Black Americans. Burge documents how shame, anger, and fear come to define the inner experience of being hyper-Othered and marginalized. She argues that to overcome the lived reality of peacelessness of Black Americans, we need to delve deeper than mere recognition of injustices—we need to address them head on and acknowledge the past wrongs as a step for Blacks and whites to live in dignity and equality. Finally, in this section, Maryam Khan’s chapter reflects on her own positionality as a devout Muslim and racialized South Asian queer woman with a disability. Khan questions the relationship between “normative” Muslims and queer Muslims in North America and highlights various Muslim liberationists and feminists who chart a path forward for building positive and peaceful relations within the highly diverse North American Muslim community.

These chapters address the diverse experiences of people at the margins in North America. Each chapter engages directly with the issue of postcoloniality, the carceral state, and racialized structuring that was bequeathed by European colonialism. Using different methodological approaches, the chapters unravel how liberal discourses of freedom, democracy, and inclusion are employed to create peacelessness and how the victims of global violence are doubly victimized as outcasts when they arrive on the shores of North America. In the case of Black Americans, this double victimization is imposed on them when they dare to speak back and attempt to expose the racial injustices of American history.

The chapters in part 3 of the book explore the relationship between humans and non-humans and the Othering of the environment that leads to the destruction of the lived world around us. Taking as his starting point Donna Haraway’s idea of “multispecies flourishing,” literary scholar Amit Baishya, in his chapter, argues that peace is neither the condition of non-violence nor a naïve expression of mutual coexistence and friendship but a “messy and laborious process of making kin within quotidian networks of obligation and responsibility.” Baishya traces the loss of such peace and its possibilities for the future through a reading of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. As with Aviña’s discussion of the disappearance of humans on the US–Mexico border, Baishya draws our attention to the disappearance of vultures and sparrows in Delhi and the spiralling effect that has on everyday life. Frédéric Neyrat takes a philosophical look at the root of such disappearances in the natural world within the human phobic attitude toward the environment. He reflects on the interweaving and interfeeding of Earth-phobia and eco-fascism. Neyrat is both pessimistic and optimistic about our ability to overcome the mass destruction of the environment in our days of COVID-19. The optimism lies with our capacity, as yet not fully recognized, for forging terrestrial alliances—breaking down the borders between Self and a cosmic Other. Yet the fear of the spread of the COVID virus through interaction requires “social distancing” and serves as a reminder of the work that lies ahead for true peace among humans and between humans and non-humans. In the final chapter of this section, legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie uses a human rights lens to reflect on how colonization and globalization disrupted and continue to disrupt the intergenerational sustainability of Indigenous communities in North America. This sustainability is directly tied to their presence on ancestral lands, forging a didactic interdependence between the environment and community, reproduced over generations. The reduction of the environment to an object for exploitation undermines not just nature but ourselves. Tsosie calls for reconciliation and a “centring Indigenous values in the effort to restore the land, the water, and the way of life” if we are to have a peaceful future.

The authors in the final section grapple with the philosophical question of who are we? with an emphasis on the “we,” not “I,” as part of a congregated whole, but “we” as humanity, together, on Earth and in the cosmos. Are we discrete species divided by imagined demarcations between different groups, or do we have the capacity to transcend speciesism and reconnect with the natural environment that sustains us? Importantly, the final chapters chart a path beyond just documenting the destruction and loss to weaving paths for transcending our destructive ways by valuing and learning from different cultural worlds that embody values of harmony, respect, and equality.

Taken as a whole, the chapters open up dialogue, first, for recognizing the depth of injustice and destructiveness in the Othering projects and, second, for providing hope for charting peaceful futures by transcending the borders of Self and Other and valuing difference.

Notes

1. 1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 1. On war as a route to peace, see, for example, Murad Idris, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Idea in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018); and William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

2. 2 Dalia Galriely-Nuri, “Talking Peace—Going to War: Peace in the Service of Israeli Just War Rhetoric,” Critical Discourse Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 1–18.

3. 3 David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011).

4. 4 David J. Dunn, The First Fifty Years of Peace Research: A Survey and Interpretation (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2005).

5. 5 Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society, trans. Asma Rashid (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1988).

6. 6 Sura 49:13, in the translation of Amatul Rahman Omar: “49. Surah Al-Hujuraat,” Quran 411, https://www.quran411.com/surah-hujurat.

7. 7 See Eric Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).

8. 8 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

9. 9 René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2008).

10. 10 Johan Galtung, “After Violence, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Resolution: Coping with the Visible and Invisible Effects of War and Violence,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, Theory and Practice, ed. Mohammed Abu-Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 3–23.

11. 11 Johan Galtung, Theories of Peace, Synthetic Approach to Peace Thinking (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1967), 19.

12. 12 Catia C. Confortini, “Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies / Feminism Alliance,” Peace and Change 31, no. 3 (July 2006): 333–67.

13. 13 Kenneth Boulding, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung,” Journal of Peace Research 14, no. 1 (1977): 75–86.

14. 14 For more on these faith-based approaches to peace, see John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1997); Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003); and Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday 1999).

15. 15 Kim Sterelny, The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

16. 16 Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, “Interdependence as a Political Tool,” in Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope, ed. Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp (Cairo: American University Press, 2021), 302–25, at 303.

17. 17 Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

18. 18 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

19. 19 Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

20. 20 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

21. 21 Tzvetan Todorov and Andrew Brown, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2010).

22. 22 Frederick Bird, Sumner B. Twiss, Kusumita Pedersen, Clark A. Miller, and Bruce Grelle, The Practices of Global Ethics: Historical Backgrounds, Current Issues, and Future Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

23. 23 Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

24. 24 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5.

25. 25 Franz Rosenthal, The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 53.

26. 26 Franz Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam,” Arabica 46, no. 1 (January 1997): 35–75, at 73.

27. 27 Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 92.

28. 28 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

29. 29 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–128.

30. 30 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

31. 31 Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1.

32. 32 Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 11.

33. 33 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Elimination, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 301.

34. 34 For Wolf’s critique of “billiard ball” history, see his introductory chapter in Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. 6–7.

35. 35 Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

36. 36 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2005), 17.

37. 37 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 19–24.

38. 38 On collective narcissism, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, [1974] 1978), 9–12; and Together, 186.

39. 39 “Spirituality and Ecology: Interview with Satish Kumar” (New York: Films Media Group, 2009), 7:11.

40. 40 Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).

41. 41 Michael Mann, “‘Torchbearers upon the Path of Progress’: Britain’s Ideology of a ‘Moral and Material Progress’ in India. An Introductory Essay,” in Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 4.

42. 42 Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” February 2, 1835, in Bureau of Education, India, Selections from Educational Records, Part 1: 1781–1839, ed. H. Sharp (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing), 109, 116; available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html.

43. 43 Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 296; for details on making peripheral markets in the “colonies,” see chapters 10–12.

44. 44 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

45. 45 Immanuel Wallerstein’s classic study The Modern World System maps out this history, with volumes 1 and 2 tracing economic shifts within Europe and volume 3 focusing on the colonizing project. The contemporary imperialist global economic system is well documented, many studies drawing on Wallerstein’s work and on the work of Andre Gunder Frank, particularly his Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).

46. 46 Other scholars have addressed our concerns but in different ways. We find that Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (New York: Verso, 2020) raises important concerns about the need for a new imaginary of nonviolence to guide human dependency and recognition of one another in positive terms. However, Butler’s analysis falls short in grounding this idea in actual real-world conditions and in examining how violence against the Other becomes the undoing of peace for the self. Otherness: A Multilateral Perspective, ed. Susan Yi Sencindiver, Maria Beville, and Maria Lauritzen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011) provides a new inquiry into the representations and nature of Self–Other relationships in art, literature, and culture, and opens the conversation for a multidimensional exploration of otherness. We have found this interdisciplinary approach helpful in bringing together a variety of methodologies and perspectives from different disciplines in our book. Finally, Jean François Staszak’s intense probing into Other/Otherness (2020) in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography makes evident the deep spatial divides between people that stigmatize certain groups for discrimination and devalue their lives. He emphasizes the asymmetry in power relationships in the construction of the Other but does not make the connection between the othering processes and peacelessness. We argue in this book that the sense of superiority of the self does not depend solely on articulations and highlight that it is backed by the political, social, and cultural power of those constructing the discourse.