In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

* * *

David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Can you tell me about how you first got involved in peacebuilding?

ML: Living amidst the conflict in Mindanao, if you’re concerned about changing the situation at all, peacebuilding almost automatically becomes a part of your mission. I started early in my university days with student activism work, using music and other forms of cultural outreach. During that time, the People Power Revolution was going on, and I wanted to explore the ways that I, as a student, could take part in it. I became involved in a church-based organization called Citizens’ Council for Justice and Peace, where the focus was on human rights education. Right after college, I joined the organization in order to do justice education with urban poor communities in Davao City. Then, because my degree is in agriculture, I tried to work with a government program assisting farmers in southern Mindanao. But I found that my passion drew me more toward non-governmental organizations, and so I joined Catholic Relief Services after that. My religious commitment and my professional life dovetailed and became integrated at CRS.

NS: How much does CRS, which is mainly an aid organization, see peacebuilding as a part of its purpose?

ML: When I began at Catholic Relief Services in 1991, our focus was on development. I worked on agriculture and enterprise development programs. In 1996 CRS decided to establish a peace and reconciliation program to help support the peace agreement signed between the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front. I was very happy about this change in the organization, so I transferred from development to peacebuilding in 1997.

NS: How does CRS approach its peacebuilding work in Mindanao?

ML: We understand our purpose mainly in terms of bridge-building. We’re fostering relationships that, if conflict arises, will offer an alternative mechanism to fighting. This begins with governance at the local level, but we also keep in mind the larger peace process in the region. On the one hand, we help local governments implement the national government’s peace program, which they’re mandated to do anyway. On the other, we assist grassroots organizations in setting up and strengthening conflict-resolution mechanisms. As we understand it, the conflict in Mindanao is not just one between the government and rebel groups—there are also issues at a more local level, such as clan feuds over land and other resources. We try to address these small-scale disputes while, at the same time, helping to resolve problems facing the country as a whole.

NS: What are some examples of particular programs you have been involved in implementing?

ML: The current focus of our programs is making sure that village-level development plans account for the concerns of the most vulnerable groups in the community, which often include Muslims, indigenous people, women, and youth. For example, the indigenous groups don’t have a revolutionary front, so they are not as well-organized as the Muslims or the Christians. We’re helping to create a network of different indigenous organizations that will be strong enough to make their voices heard. We’re also working to promote peace education in schools and madrasahs, as well as in the mass media, in order to help make the peace process more a part of mainstream culture.

NS: And how do you measure success—or progress, at least?

ML: When we begin a particular initiative, one measure of success is whether it can actually sustain itself and grow. The indigenous peoples’ network that I was talking about started with small-level, core-group meetings. A number of indigenous leaders had brought up the concern that it was very hard for them to be heard in peace negotiations with the government and, for some of them, with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. We began setting up meetings and doing some consultations, and now it has become a network of its own. Our strategy is to use small activities as catalysts for larger ones. When tensions flared up between Muslims, Christians, and indigenous peoples about the Memorandum of Agreement in 2008, we were actually able to contain some of the violence, and that was only because of years and years spent nurturing relationships at the grassroots level.

NS: So, a little well-placed effort can go a long way?

ML: Yes. Part of what we do is nurturing “peace champions” in certain sectors. It was very hard at first to engage the military in the peace process in Mindanao, for instance. But we had an international peace training program, and in 2005 we invited a military official to attend. Soon, that official became an advocate for the peace process within the military structure. Because we are a small organization, we realize that we can’t instantly transform the whole system in Mindanao, or even the Philippines. But if our approach is to strategically target individuals in particular communities, we can help influence the system as a whole.

NS: Can it become problematic, especially in the eyes of rebel groups, that you’re helping to carry out the national government’s peace program? How can the government come to the table and call for peace without being perceived by some as wanting a peace that is unjust?

ML: We cannot build a sustainable peace if the critical stakeholders aren’t part of the process, and the government is a critical stakeholder. Of course, we have to maintain credibility among the various other stakeholders, which can be difficult. We’re not naïve about the unequal power relations among them. There are times when we need to act as advocates for particular vulnerable groups, as we have for the indigenous; if a vulnerable group is going to engage in negotiation or dialogue, they need to have the necessary preparation to do it.

NS: By the same token, does being a specifically Catholic organization make it difficult to work with other religious communities?

ML: In years past, we had real difficulties collaborating with Muslim communities because of our name. We had to reach out and build relationships with them to show we didn’t intend to convert anybody and that we only wanted to be a partner in the peace process. Over the years, we have been able to win their trust. We began with only a few Muslim partners, and then they became our spokespersons. Now, if we enter a Muslim community, it’s not just us; we do it together with a Muslim organization. We never enter any community without a local partner. This puts on display the kind of collaboration that we want to encourage. As we work with one group of people, we try to help teach them how to work with others.

NS: Is there strong support for what you’re doing within local Catholic communities?

ML: Because of the longstanding conflict in Mindanao, we have to foster this same kind of openness among Catholics as well. We’re continuing to do interreligious dialogue, but now we’re actually focusing more exclusively on bringing fellow Catholics into the peacebuilding process—exclusively, that is, so they’ll become more inclusive.

NS: Have there been secular organizations involved—organizations that aren’t affiliated with particular religious groups? Or do you think that peacebuilding can only succeed through efforts grounded in religious communities?

ML: The conflict in Mindanao is not a religious conflict as such, but it certainly has a religious component, and religious identity is very important for all the participants. But secular organizations might play more of a role in peacebuilding in other contexts. Take, for example, the communist insurgency elsewhere in the Philippines, which I’m also involved in helping to resolve; that conflict is founded in a grievance against the state, and the issues are very secular. But even in that case, religious leaders are taking part as well.

NS: When you say that this is not a religious conflict, what does that mean, exactly? How do you know it’s not, especially if the divisions are drawn along lines of religious identity?

ML: It’s not just religious identity, but ethnic identity also. When we think about the conflict in Mindanao, it’s important to look back to the history of colonization and how it affected the political, economic, and social challenges we’re now dealing with. It led to the marginalization of Muslims and indigenous people, not only at the political and economic level, but also in terms of demography. Religious or ethnic identity becomes a marker, but other factors are really responsible for the conflict.

NS: How has your time at Notre Dame affected how you think about and carry out your work?

ML: Well, I’ve only been back for three months—

NS: So you’re still getting over the jet lag?

ML: Yes, getting over the jet lag and trying to transition back into the CRS peace and reconciliation program. I was away for two years, but it also feels like I haven’t been gone very long. People in Mindanao are facing the same issues now as when I left in 2008. We did just elect a new president, actually, and there are high hopes for him. But part of what I have brought back is the desire to share with my colleagues and our partners the benefits of reflection. For the past decade or more, it has always been work, work, work, and practice, practice, practice. There isn’t enough value placed on stepping back, reflecting, and trying to gather lessons from what we’ve been through. I’d like to do this more intentionally and systematically than it has been done in the past.

NS: Did you feel that what you were studying at Notre Dame actually spoke to the situation on the ground where you are?

ML: Being exposed to various theories of peacebuilding certainly expanded my range of vision. As a practitioner I have always relied on a bottom-up theory of change. But, in the end, there are other ways of doing it too. Getting to know, for example, democratic-peace theory, which is a more high-level, elite approach, has helped me understand how those of us working on the ground can address elites. The experience, however, strengthened my own conviction that I am where I belong. On a personal level, the time at Notre Dame also helped reinforce my sense of identity as a woman and as a Christian.

NS: What does that awareness of identity help you bring to your work?

ML: Being conscious of one’s identity can make one stronger and more effective. I’m convinced that I, as a peacebuilder, need to touch the hearts and minds of people I work with, and part of doing that is being able to connect with who I am. When you do this kind of work, you’re in it for the long haul. You can’t just stop one day and change jobs. There is a lot at stake, and the whole person needs to become involved in order to endure disappointments and keep working for success. Self-awareness also helps me understand the power relations I’m dealing with. As a woman, my gender always becomes a constraint because of how my culture tends to view the role of women. Reflecting on that helps me to understand the constraints others feel.

NS: Are there many women involved in this kind of work in Mindanao?

ML: Many women are involved, but unfortunately not as visibly as men in the formal leadership structures. Women do a lot of work in terms of preparation and facilitation, but it is mostly invisible. The actual peace negotiations are done publicly and formally, and women don’t necessarily have access to them. Part of my own advocacy is to help give women more of a voice in the public processes. My research in the master’s program focused on the role of women in peacebuilding—both visible and invisible.

NS: Are there ways in which being a woman enables you to operate in a way in which, perhaps, a man in your position couldn’t?

ML: I think it does give me a distinct way of looking at things compared to others. I always work for complementation, which comes partly from my standpoint as a woman. Integration comes naturally to me. I’m always asking myself how I can connect people and groups, activities and initiatives. That, I think, has been my contribution as a peacebuilder and as a woman.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

* * *

NS: After your tenure last year as president of the American Academy of Religion, what do you think are the deepest challenges facing the study of religion today?

MJ: That’s an interesting question, because, in some ways, religion has never been of greater interest to a greater number of people than it is at present. Whenever something blows up, religion seems to be in the news. But, on the other hand, scholars are less and less sure about what religion actually is, and it has become an increasingly problematic subject to study. The self-confidence that an earlier generation had in the ideas of the “secular” and the “religious” has come into question. Because of globalization, we’re intensely aware of all of the diversity of perspectives in the world, and we’re increasingly aware that our perceptions are not necessarily the only ones, the right ones, or the dominant ones. The way we have come to conceive of religion in the post-Enlightenment West—as something reified and essentially different from the secular—is falling apart. Maybe the religious and secular never really existed in quite the ways that we thought about them. Religious studies remains, in large part, what it has always been—the study of religious literature, ritual, organizations, and the like—but at the heart of it, there is the very difficult conceptual question of how to think about religion in a globalized world.

NS: You’ve worked in a number of different departmental settings, including Asian studies, divinity schools, religion departments, and now global studies. Do you think that religion needs its own department? Or can it be addressed, fruitfully, in other contexts?

MJ: The answer is both. It’s like mathematics. You can’t imagine mathematics not having its own department, but you also can’t imagine physics, or accounting, or even political science and sociology without it. In the same way, I think religion has a part to play in other ways of understanding the contemporary world—whether political, anthropological, social, or economic—but there is also the danger that it can become too easily slivered off into pieces. Departments of religion allow people to look at the whole. Not everybody in those departments studies everything, of course, but they’re aware of what one another are doing in a way that they wouldn’t be if they were separated in different departments.

There have been attempts to make religious studies into a discipline or a science, and I’m not sure that has entirely worked. But the same is true about political science and sociology. Academic life is a coffeehouse with a whole bunch of tables, and there are different people sitting around the tables discussing different things, and each table is a field or a discipline. You can pick up and go from one table to another and talk about the same thing but find that you’re in a different conversation. Religious studies deserves its own table.

NS: What, then, can those conversations offer outside of the academic coffeehouse? I remember when Madeleine Albright came to the AAR and said that religion experts should participate more in matters of international policy, for instance.

MJ: I agree. When people like me, who study religion and violence, are called upon to advise an intelligence agency, or the State Department, or people in the military, I think that’s great. But it’s not like I’m telling them something different from what I’m telling anybody else. All I know is what is in my books. I don’t have a treasure chest of secret information that intelligence agency people would want. Probably the most valuable thing I can offer a government agency is an outsider’s perspective about the way in which other people view the world.

NS: Is there a particularly urgent message that you try to convey to them?

MJ: What I’ve found is that I’m most useful for alerting them to the one thing that they don’t have, and don’t want to deal with: a view of America’s role in the world, and the way in which our actions affect the actions of others. People don’t act in a vacuum. They respond to their perceptions of us, and the role that they see us playing in the world. If we’re perceived as the Great Satan—whether we think we are or not—it’s very important to know that, because it helps us understand why people respond to us as if we were. Within their sphere of perception, they’re simply responding to an image that they have of us.

NS: Is this a lesson that you’ve learned from the terrorists and religious militants you’ve talked with over the years?

MJ: Sure. To be a good social scientist, I have to try and understand another person’s frame of reference. My job in those interviews is not just to get information from these people but to try to get into their minds, into their views of the world, into their worldviews. As a sociologist, and also as a religious studies scholar, I’m what Ninian Smart used to call a “worldview analyst.” In the course of a conversation, I try to understand the other person’s frame of reference. I try to find out how they want to present themselves to me. That helps me understand them.

A good example of this is Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the key people in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. I had a series of remarkable interviews with him in prison after he was convicted. He’s an affable, friendly, very talkative fellow. The way he explained the role of religion in his life and in society gave me a profound window into his view of the world. He regarded Islam as having rescued him at a couple of points in his own past—from an aimlessness when he was a kid in Egypt to another aimlessness when he was in Germany and was being wooed by the easy pleasures of Western life and Western women. He was struggling for a sense of identity and coherence in a world that is fractured and immoral. He made an attempt to justify himself—including several horrible murders of Muslim clerics in Brooklyn—by casting himself as a soldier for virtue in a war in which immorality and secular irreligiousness are the great enemy. At one point he leaned over to me and whispered intensely, “Mr. Mark, you just don’t get it. There’s a war going on, Mr. Mark. There’s a battle between good and evil and right and wrong. You just don’t see it!” And so I asked him if that was why people blow buildings up, to try to make that point. And he looked at me and smiled and said, “Well now you see, don’t you? Now you see.” His violence was meant as a demonstration to the world, to make visible for everybody else that we are living in a war and that we need to wake up.

NS: Is such religious violence fundamentally different from violence understood in secular terms? Is it necessary to draw a distinction there?

MJ: I hesitate to use the words “religious violence,” because it sounds as if I’m promoting the idea that religion causes violence. I don’t believe that for a moment. I sometimes have to defend myself and remind people that I don’t say that. I think that violence happens for a complex variety of social and political and economic reasons.

On one level, violence is violence; it is a social phenomenon. What religious images and language can bring to a violent situation, though, is a structure of justification and meaning. It can be an ethical justification, or it can also be a more dramatic, visual one, touching on the symbolism of the cosmic war, the great battle between good and evil, right and wrong, religion and irreligion. I call it “cosmic war” rather than “holy war,” because I mean to imply, not just a fight fought for religious reasons, but the image of a broader conflict between good and evil. Or, in many Eastern traditions, it’s a battle over chaos and order, as in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

NS: Religion has become the language of resistance against modern states much more in recent decades than at the height of the Cold War, when secular economic or social theories tended to be structuring the ideologies of resistance movements. What might be the consequences of such a shift from secular to religious ideologies?

MJ: In some cases, as in Egypt, it’s the same people; they just take off their Marxist hats, put on their Muslim hats, and they’re good to go. One needs a great ideological template of moral struggle with which to justify a challenge to power, authority, and order. Marxism supplied that, and so does a certain kind of politicized religious language. They’re both ideologies of order. But the way in which you perceive the nature of a struggle makes a huge difference. If you think of it in religious terms, the timelines can be vast. They can be eternal.

I’ll give you an example. When I was interviewing Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the political head of the Hamas movement, I brought up the futility of using suicide bombing against the Israelis. I pointed out that Israel has one of the strongest armies in the world, and certainly the strongest in the Middle East. These suicide attacks can certainly annoy them, but it’s not going to topple the political institutions of Israel or create a Palestinian state. He just looked at me and smiled, as if he were speaking to a small child, and said, “Well, maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in my children’s lifetime. Maybe not in my children’s children’s lifetime. But in my children’s children’s children’s lifetime, it might succeed. We cannot lose. This is God’s war.” If you think it’s God’s war, then you’re able to put up with temporary failure. If this is God’s war, that changes the whole equation of the struggle. And, of course, cosmic war justifications exist in all religious traditions—you see this difficulty not just on the Muslim side of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian situation but also on the Jewish side, often with people associated with the settler movement. If you’re a certain kind of messianic, Zionist Jew, your actions, like those of the Muslims on the other side, are for much greater reasons than mere conquest. A temporary setback doesn’t matter because it is an eternal war.

NS: So how does one address another’s cosmic claims? Some want to ignore them and focus on underlying political and economic conditions; others say these people cannot be reasoned with and must be answered with violence.

MJ: There’s a third option: a conversion from within the religious community, one that persuades people that they are not engaged in a cosmic war and should redirect their activities. I think there has to be a combination between the first and the third. Addressing the social and economic issues that help to give rise to tensions in the first place can play a part in disarming the ideology. I have no doubt that if there were to be a solution tomorrow to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, it would deflate a lot of the jihadi rhetoric in the Middle East. Getting the U.S. military out of Iraq and Afghanistan would be an even bigger pin in that bubble, because then you wouldn’t have the same Great Satan doing Great Satanic things. The second choice, which is to fight fire with fire, only magnifies the image of cosmic war.

This is what the “war on terror” did. Even calling it a “war” was a mistake. I’ve gone back to look at the newspapers on 9/11, and none of them used the word “war.” It didn’t appear in the newspapers until the next day, 9/12, in quotation marks: “Acts of war,” said the headlines. That, of course, came from President Bush’s speech. Suddenly, the war against terror became the image that defined our response to the attacks, and that has been driving our foreign policy ever since. My thought was then, and has been ever since: Why on earth are we promoting the ideology of Osama bin Laden? We’re taking that jihadi view of the world and validating it with our own rhetoric and our own actions. If you want to deflate the impression of being an enemy in a cosmic war, there’s a very simple way of doing it: stop acting like the enemy that they think we are. I have no doubt that the whole thing would then begin to collapse. It takes two to do this kind of bellicose tango. Radical religion can dissipate as quickly as it was created, like a summer storm. In that sense, I’m an optimist.

NS: Have you seen this happen in any of the conflicts you’ve studied?

MJ: During the 1980s a spiral of hideous violence arose between young Sikhs and the Indian government. But after a decade, it just unraveled. Yes, the Indian government exerted strong police pressure, as they always had. What really changed in the end, though, was that people in the villages no longer supported the radicals, and the movement fell apart. Just a couple of years later, I went to one of those villages where virtually all of the young people of a certain generation had been wiped out. I asked their families, “What about the cause they were fighting for?” One of the fallen Sikh militant’s brothers, who had become the head of his village, was obviously embarrassed to be talking about it. “What about your dead brother?” I asked. “Oh, we loved him.” he said. “We paid our respects.” Now the surviving brother was busy trying to work with the government to get more benefits for the town, to improve the road—doing all the normal things that people do. And what about the Sikh revolution? It was simply over. It was gone. The image of great warfare had vanished and worldly matters had returned. The same thing could happen with the great jihadi war.

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

NS: For both, a deep moral sensibility seems to have kept their realism from falling into cynicism.

MJ: That’s what I liked about Niebuhr, of course. He tried to take seriously the moral dimension of public life and to understand where it could come from in a world that is, alas, populated by sinful humans. And, despite his understanding of Original Sin, he knew that we can be capable of fellowship and of selfless love. But collectivities are less morally adept, because they’re never capable of selfless love. A corporation might say it’s sorry, but it would never try to show its contrition in a way that would bring about its own demise. Parents sacrifice for their kids, soldiers perform acts of bravery in warfare, but collectivities can’t do that, and that was Niebuhr’s great insight. He insisted on the necessity for us to create buffers against the power of collectivities like nations and corporations: he thought that we needed structures of justice, on the one hand, and countervailing powers, like labor unions, on the other.

NS: What kinds of things did you talk about with him?

MJ: He told stories about his time in Detroit and what he learned as a pastor there. His last book was on the nature of man and his communities. Niebuhr felt that churches actually have a greater moral capacity than other collectivities do. He tried to make that argument. Sometimes I doubt it, with the way churches eat each other and are, in my mind, subject to the same terrible limitations as other kinds of human enterprise. It’s so depressing to see churches on the wrong side of the moral issues in our day. Occasionally you see them on the right side, and that at least gives me some hope.