Theological Vision and Praxis for Liberation: Facing Destructive Conflict

Anyone concerned about contributing to social justice and human rights causes in their own social contexts is also concerned about facing the wider state of the world today. Anyone who still values religious visions of liberation and continues to care about the impoverished and marginalized humanity can see that violent conflicts are ravaging the lives of billions of people, along with the environment around them.¹ Although such confrontations continue to erupt largely in contexts of the two-thirds world, human interdependence and the intersecting dimensions of violence come to affect, in one way or another, every human community around the globe. Violence is present everywhere, within one's own body and emotions, within one's home and family, and within the larger regional, national, and global settings. Those few countries that deploy military power for world dominance, such as the United States, while sponsoring a highly profitable weapons industry, prefer to export armed confrontations somewhere else, which allows them to deceptively provide their local population with a sense of apparent, false peace. But genuine human security cannot take root anywhere when the actual conditions for making human life viable fail to meet the basic needs and human rights of the majority of the world's population. The current processes of destructive conflict taking place around the world in multilevel and multidimensional fashion are directly deteriorating wo/men's human dignity and human rights across cultures, religions, and societies.

From the carnage of war, stories of killed, tortured, dismembered, degraded, injured, evacuated, displaced, and sexually abused women multiply in a seemingly endless narrative of horror. Used as a weapon of war, sexual violence against women, which includes but is not limited to rape, has not only persisted to this day but has also been met with silence, apathy, and impunity worldwide.² Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza recounts the image of her mother struggling to escape armed conflict with her two small children in 1944, "surviving from day to day, begging for food, shelter, and clothing for her children."³ Although she was describing her own experience of becoming a refugee of war as a little girl in Germany,⁴ women and children in many places today, such as Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Colombia, Timor Leste, Mindanao (Philippines), Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan, to name just a few, suffer the same hardship. Indeed, the story she tells, reflects a common experience that women and children often share across regions, cultures, and religions. The carnage of war and the path of destructive violence have not stopped in the face of skin color, ethnic affiliation, religious association, or sexual orientation, but have disseminated the suffering humanity around the world as they evenly devastate individuals and communities. Out of a shared cry for justice and often under precarious circumstances, from community-based projects to international initiatives, women are doing something significant to end the cycles of violent conflict.⁵

Committed to change the root causes, as well as the devastating dynamics and impact of destructive violence, women around the globe are coming together beyond traditionally divisive boundaries with the aim of advancing shared agendas for fostering a just world. As human rights activists and peacemakers in action, women from all ethnicities, religious traditions, and lifestyles increasingly share the conviction that "violence is not inevitable," and that "structural injustices can be addressed."⁶ For these women, overcoming dynamics of violence and "creating just social structures go hand-in-hand."⁷ They meet, they analyze, deliberate, and plan, and they devise activities in view of advancing the shared goal of meeting the basic human needs of those who have been denied them, which asserts human rights and justice for women as a priority.

Strengthened by recognition of the diverse ways in which women's common humanity is being both shared and shattered, women are empowering one another in their initiatives to rebuild society through work for human rights, social justice, and systemic transformation. As Dee Aker remarked during the international conference "Crafting Human Security in an Insecure World," "when it comes to violence against women...