Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding offers an irreplaceable gift to the scholarship and practice of building peace, and to people motivated by faith who seek the transformation of harm and violence. The gift is this: To understand that lasting change starts with honest, critical reflection. This type of engaged scholarship requires the courage to unravel the paradoxical challenge of how to appreciate the deep commitment of the faith-inspired practitioner navigating difficult settings of violence while unveiling the ubiquitous overlay of historic and contemporary patterns of religious colonial patterns that perpetuate dehumanization. With extensive interviews and extraordinary mastery of interdisciplinary literature, Atalia Omer has surfaced the deep conversation our fields of peacebuilding and religious studies have long needed.

Atalia Omer is a Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She is also the Dermot T.J. Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peace Building at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard University's Religion and Public Life program. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017. Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (2019). She is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford, 2015).