1 Introduction

This chapter argues that to understand violent conflict more completely, including conflict that is religiously articulated, and to facilitate healing and reconciliation, analysts and practitioners need to seriously consider materiality and things as entry points, as they play a significant role in the immediate onset, escalation, or de-escalation of violent conflicts. Using cases of religiously articulated violence, it interrogates how prioritizing materiality and things illuminates an understanding of violence on the one hand and healing and reconciliation on the other. Focusing on materiality challenges the predilection to overlook the physical and material harm and concentrate only on broader theoretical and conceptual frameworks that are divorced from the victims’ lived experiences. Concerning violence in which religion is a factor, the chapter argues that, contrary to the claim that violence is inherent in the beliefs and doctrines of the religious traditions involved, which allegedly prompt their subscribers to cause violence, actors in religiously articulated violence act not on the evoking of abstract ideas or beliefs, but often on the violation of materials and things. Accordingly, materiality and things ought to be seriously considered as entry points to analysing and addressing violent conflict in facilitating healing and reconciliation. However, this is not to suggest that materiality and things instigate violence: indeed, they do not in themselves evoke violence. Instead, it is to argue that it is the violation of things that stakeholders consider dear or sacred that sparks conflict and violence, leading to hurt, woundedness, and trauma. The high priority placed on reparations and the restoration of livelihoods, truth-telling, justice, and apologies in processes of healing and reconciliation indicates that it is the violation of bodies that hurts most. While discourses on reconciliation like forgiveness, coexistence, truth-telling, and healing may be perceived as abstract, moral, and existential questions, the chapter argues that they can only make sense if they are firmly grounded in materiality, that is, in the materiality of people’s lived experiences. This approach is distinct from existing scholarly approaches to healing and reconciliation, which often focus on moral, intellectual, and existential questions that present abstract and universalist understandings of conflict and violence. A healing and reconciliation process that is primarily built around abstract ideas, beliefs, doctrines, and metanarratives, and not in people’s lived experiences, is perceived as cheap, vapid, and lacking contextualization, thus being unsustainable. However, to focus on the centrality of materiality and things is not to imply that ideas are insignificant in mobilizing for conflict and violence, including those with a religious dimension. Both aspects, ideas and materiality, constitute important dimensions of violent conflicts, as well as of processes of forgiveness and reconciliation.

In violent conflict situations where religion is a variable, religious ideas are mobilized in response to violations that are seen and experienced, and not the other way around (Pape 2006). With respect to violence that is articulated religiously, this train of thought on the one hand dislodges the attempt to locate the provenance of violent conflict merely within the beliefs and doctrines of religious traditions and challenges. On the other hand, there is an unsustainable dichotomy in which belief-dominant and ritualistic religious traditions are pitted against each other, with the former alleged to be good and peaceful and the latter bad and violent.

2 Materiality Matters

The chapter understands materiality and things in the context of the material turn, an analytical framework which proposes that we take as an entry point for our study of religion-specific, concrete visualities, for example, a) objects like relics, amulets, dress, painted or sculpted images, written words, and architectural spaces; b) feelings and sensory experiences like seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, as our emotions are related to what happens to objects we feel related to; and c) bodily performances in specific gestures, rituals, ceremonies, and festivals (Houtman and Meyer 2012; Strijdom 2014). It thus argues that objects, feelings, and the body are the primary location and targets of violent conflict. For instance, buildings and infrastructure are destroyed and people blown up by explosions. By definition, violence targets materialities like buildings and bodies. Healing processes should address these as well. How humans relate to violence should include the destruction of places that are dear to them and, more importantly, grief over loved ones who have suffered violence. The focus on justice and reparations, truth-telling and apology/repentance, and forgiveness as dynamics of reconciliation which are connected to the violation of objects, feelings, and the body proves the centrality of materiality and things.

To argue for the centrality of objects, bodily expressions, feelings, and emotions is not to suggest that ideas are insignificant in mobilizing for or against violent conflict. There is an inextricable relationship between materiality and ideas. The chapter thus concurs with the ‘material turn’ in critical security studies, where analytical attention is devoted to object-oriented approaches to events and phenomena in international politics and everyday life (see Salter and Mutlu 2013). Inherent in this line of research is the overarching understanding of discourse and materiality as co-constitutive of the social order, a rejection of both wholesale social constructivism and materiality. The peace-promoting motives and ideas found in various religious traditions should be invoked to pursue peace and reconciliation. By “refusing the distance between the object and the discourse about it”, critical object-oriented analysts have challenged the conventional understanding of ‘matter’ as a set of inert, neutral artefacts that humans use in the enactment of security (Bousquet 2008). Indeed, by recognizing materiality as “lively, affectively laden, and active in the constitution of subjects, (…) practices and processes”, every social and discursive structure is effectively afforded a material character within this strand of literature (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). The material turn resonates with the ‘lived religion’ approach in religious studies and a shift in humanities and the social sciences which gives greater importance to the quotidian: to the “spaces, rhythms, objects, and practices” around us (Sheringham 2006, 2; Vaughan-Williams 2016). In critical security studies, the everyday turn has shown that security is not only about exceptional politics, such that a distinction can be drawn between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, which for this chapter parallels beliefs, ideas, and meta-narratives as high, and materiality and the quotidian as low. The material turn thus disrupts this logic, which is elitist and proceeds to accentuate the concrete human subject at grips with experience, as an entry point to understanding social realities (Sheringham 2006, 2). Acknowledging the co-presence of materiality and ideas/beliefs serves to avoid committing the fallacy of reductionism, for instance, of reducing religion to belief.

3 Whither Materiality in the Study of Religion?

To study religion only through the lens of ideas and beliefs results in locating the motivation of religiously articulated conflict and violence inherently in religion. Modernists deploy rationality, at least neglect or at most charge objects, feelings, and bodily performances with negativity, for instance, that they are absolutist, irrational, and divisive (Cavanaugh 2009). Hence the necessity of Johan Strijdom’s argument that a systemic critique of power relations that are at work in the uses of objects in religions, the comparison of religions, and the comparative study of religions (Strijdom 2014). This argument resonates with Tomoko Masuzawa’s assertion that the comparative study of religions is replete with power and political interests (Masuzawa 2005, 73). Birgit Meyer traces this trend to the colonial period and the project of “Christian outreach” in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time during which a huge quantity of data about other religions was being gathered that formed the basis for a systematic comparison and evolutionary approaches. The hierarchies of religious development moved from ‘fetishism’ and ‘animism’ to ‘monotheism,’ which was posited as intellectually and morally ahead of and superior to religions (Meyer 2012). Chief among the wrongheaded negativity is that the actions of those whose religions are understood as material are not strategic but are generated by fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, indoctrination, and psychological instability. Religious traditions which uphold materiality are charged with irrationality and absolutism, rigidity, and lack of flexibility, and hence dismissed as irrational instigators of violence which must be sloughed off before real work on peacebuilding and reconciliation can begin. Secularist approaches to peacebuilding and reconciliation consider religion, especially religious traditions that are materialistic, as a factor to be cleared out of the way before positivist work and the realpolitik of peacebuilding can begin. To bring materiality and things to the centre of the discourse on conflict and violence as well as to healing and reconciliation is not to confirm the modernist assertion that the materiality and rituals of non-Christian religions are the cause of conflict and violence. Rather, it is to show that the negativity levelled against materiality and things in connection with violence that is religiously articulated is not a given but is constructed and has a power-laden historical genealogy. Accentuating the centrality of materiality and things brings them back from the periphery to the centre of analysing and addressing conflict and violence, as well as healing and reconciliation.

In treating violence with religion as a variable, the first port of call for analysis has been religious beliefs, doctrines, theologies, and macro-narratives, while materiality has been undermined (van Liere 2020). However, materiality, rather than being peripheral, is central to the motivation for engaging in conflict and violence. While there might be narratives behind violent conflicts, it is their enactment, as well as materiality and things, that prompts conflict. Focusing on materiality and things in the pursuit of reconciliation and healing foregrounds victims’ lived experiences of broken limbs, houses razed to the ground, women raped, livelihoods destroyed, and people killed and disappeared, and brings the process to their everyday lives (see Žarkov 2007). In the next section, I use concrete examples to argue that, despite the effort of conflict-analysis scholars and practitioners who are influenced by modernity to marginalize things and materiality, conflicts and violence, including those which are religiously articulated, are replete with objects, feelings, and bodily performances.

4 What Matters Is Matter: The Material Grounding of Religiously Articulated Violence

Fighters professing religious motives like those belonging to Islamic State have perpetrated many gruesome attacks, including suicide attacks, to the extent that it might seem counterintuitive to contest the proposition that Islamic fundamentalism is inherently violent and a cause of violence. However, it is not Islamic fundamentalism’s alleged inherent violence – a characterization which this article disputes – but the visualities of violence that instigated the violence. Think, for example, of the executions of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning in August and October 2014 respectively. The Islamic State’s media outlet, al-Furqān Media, released four videos that showed a captive kneeling in the sand dressed in an orange jumpsuit with his hands tied behind his back, being executed by a masked executioner known as ‘Jihadi John’. What we observe here is that these gruesome activities are material and visual through and through and may in their turn again spark fear and violence. Although these videos were framed within an Islamist discourse, the message was predominantly submitted through material aspects like clothing as a symbolic reference, body positions, and weapons (van Liere 2020). However, the argument that so-called Islamic terrorism derives from Islamic doctrine and belief has resulted in the crafting of domestic and foreign policies that not infrequently worsen the situation of Muslim migrants, as in France, and that harm religious people needlessly. It has also led to the proposal to reform or transform Islam, calls for a moderate Islam and the binary divisions of good and bad religion (see Pape 2005). This kind of thinking thus addresses terrorism by focusing on the alleged irrationality of the act of terrorism, parallel to the irrationality of belief, from the perspective of the individual, attributed to the sort of religious indoctrination or psychological predispositions that might drive individual attackers. This perspective is wrongheaded. The attackers might hear their religion denigrated often but do not necessarily act because of ideological denigration. Evidence shows that, when conflicts become material and visual through photography and videos, interpretations of what is going on are framed, and actors are more motivated to justify or even commit violence (see van Liere, this volume).

Although the leading causes of suicide attacks have been identified as material and as things external to religion, this material side still constitutes a missing link in understanding violent conflict. This includes the foreign occupation of lands and places, an expression of the suicide attackers’ desire for liberation and ridding their territories or their homeland of foreign occupiers. In a detailed and extensive study of suicide terrorism, Robert Pape (2005) shows that on the one hand suicide terrorists want to get foreign armed troops, police and tanks out of their territories. This was the main objective of Al Qaeda. On the other hand, they often want to secure matter – their land and their holy places – and they want to get matter off their land – armed soldiers, police, tanks. What matters here is matter. Religious terrorists do not attack because they are religious. ‘Religion’ is rarely the sole cause. It has no agency. It is how it is mobilized and connected to materiality or things that may lead to violent conflict or otherwise. The material turn thus challenges perceptions of religion as a pure realm of ideas or beliefs that are translated into material signs. In so doing it avoids reifications that identify ideas or dogmas or individual people as the irreducible core of religion (Meyer et al. 2010). What is of religious significance in religiously articulated conflict and violence is the religious difference (not religion as such) which functions to harden the boundaries between communities and makes it easier for terrorist leaders to portray the conflict in zero-sum terms, demonize the opponent, and gain legitimacy for martyrdom within the local community (Pape 2005). Materiality charges that religion is inseparable from a matrix or network of components that consist of people, divine beings or forces, institutions, things, places, and communities (Meyer et al. 2010), which in this case is or may be expressed in the hardening of boundaries between national communities, demonizing opponents, and winning legitimacy within the local community (Pape 2005). To demonstrate the significance of materiality and things in violent conflict, healing and reconciliation, the chapter will proceed by reviewing some of the best-known case studies in the history of conflict and violence that have religion as a variable, namely those of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Sikh attack on Amritsar in India.

5 Hezbollah

Hezbollah grew out of Harakat al-Mahrumin, the Movement of the Deprived, established by Musa al-Sadr in March 1974. When Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in 1982, a group of clerics and laymen established a militia to resist the Israeli occupation. This group became the core of Hezbollah, which formally announced itself in February 1985 with a manifesto entitled “An Open Letter: The Hezbollah Program”, addressed “to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the world” (El Husseini 2010). Although the material presence of Israel Defence Forces’ troops, tanks, and armoured personnel carriers occupying large parts of the south of Lebanon are the cradle of the movement, the most common explanation for the emergence of Hezbollah is that its foundation was based on radical Islamic principles following the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 (Pape 2005, 129). The community around Hezbollah encouraged individuals to become suicide bombers through its support of martyrdom. Subsequently, suicide bombers were often concerned about how they would be remembered; they left material evidence of their intentions and faith in writing or on videos, expecting these to be made public after they died, in newspapers, or as items in local markets. The materials carried strong statements that were meant to capture the emotions and feelings of the community.

Following Israel’s actions during Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, which included the massacre of refugees at the UN compound in Qana, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon united in a nationalist stance against the Israeli occupation. In November 2009, Hezbollah issued a new manifesto entitled “The Political Document of Hezbollah”, in which some of the Islamist rhetoric they had used before was left out. The manifesto also dropped any reference to an Islamic republic in Lebanon, which seems to reflect the group’s ‘Lebanonization’. However, it retained its perception of the US and Israel, especially the claim that they are bent on domination and show hegemonic tendencies (Assi 2009). These two developments clearly dislodge the idea that Hezbollah’ terrorist attacks are necessarily embedded in Islam. The reference to domination and hegemonic tendencies in the manifesto also confirms the centrality of the hurt and woundedness inflicted by occupiers. After the withdrawal of Israeli troops in 2000, there remained controversy over a fifteen-square mile border region called the Shebaa Farms. Lebanon and Syria asserted that the area was Lebanese, while Israel declared it a part of Syrian territory – though occupied by Israel (El Husseini 2010). In 2006, Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others in an ambush with the aim of using them in a prisoner exchange, a move to which Israeli forces responded with massive attacks against Lebanon which led to more than 1100 dead – mostly civilians, with several thousand injured, roughly one million displaced, and economic losses estimated at $12 billion (El Husseini 2010). What emerges from this recurring conflict between Israel and Hezbollah since the early 1980s is that it is not Islamic beliefs and doctrines that trigger the violent conflicts, but material harm like occupation of the land, the killing of people or the kidnapping of soldiers, whether by Hezbollah or Israeli forces, that contributes to violence and its justification.

6 Tamil Tigers

In Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known as the Tamil Tigers, started carrying out suicide attacks after the Sinhalese government started a series of large agricultural projects that asserted new and uncontested rights to Tamil lands. In the 1970s, Tamil lands were occupied by people who had been resettled by the government (Pape 2005, 141). Small Tamil militant groups resisted this development, but the Sri Lankan army descended on them with a heavy hand. Consequently, in 1987, the Tamil Tigers unleashed their first suicide attack when 21-year-old Captain Miller (Valipuram Vasanthan) drove a truck full of explosives into a Sri Lankan army camp and exploded the vehicle and himself near a military barracks, killing and wounding scores of people. In step with one of the arguments of this chapter that religion is not inherently violent, and thus not necessarily bent on violent extremism, it is worth noting that LTTE was a secularist group that was not motivated by religion (Frydenlund 2018). The chapter uses this case to show that suicide bombing does not necessarily originate in religion. Interestingly, non-religion-based suicide attacks or violence often have similar material objectives. However, Tamil Tiger suicide bombers are commemorated as martyrs. Their deeds are recorded in the group’s commemorative albums. Every member, male or female, is required to wear a vial of cyanide on a leather thong around the neck. At the moment of capture, the Tamil Tiger is supposed to bite on the vial. The shards of glass lacerate the gums, which send the deadly poison directly into the bloodstream, causing death almost immediately. Tamil Tigers also carry on them a laminated identity card with the picture, name, and designation as a Tiger. The card reads “I am filled with huge explosive. If my journey is blocked, I will explode it. Let me go” (Pape 2006, 143). After their deaths, their identity is displayed in commemorative events, their stories are published in newspapers and commemorative albums. Public ceremonies are also held for the martyrs, with their pictures on posters (see van Liere 2020 on pictures and materiality) and public processions are held with them with pomp, pageantry, and singing in their honour. The Tigers also have their monuments with memorabilia sometimes surrounded by a small pond or park and fence to provide space for the community to get closure, that is, to realize acceptance of the deaths of the martyrs by laying flowers in their honour. However, due to the impact and mobilizing power of monuments and in the act of erasure of memorialization, the Sri Lanka government destroyed the monuments and the cemeteries where the fallen LTTE fighters were put to rest under neat rows of tombs (Hyndman and Amarasingam 2014; PEARL 2016).

The Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009 with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the Sri Lankan state. The military campaign to eliminate the Tamil Tigers began in 2008 and represented a new ‘no holds barred’ strategy after three failed peace talks. The Tamil Tigers forced thousands of civilians to march with them, and in return, the state bombed hospitals and areas it had declared no-fire zones before allegedly using illegal cluster bombs (Thiranagama 2013). The battles were both highly public, as they were reported in global newspapers, and shrouded in secrecy as casualties piled up in what came to be called a “bloodbath on the beaches of northern Sri Lanka” (Holmes 2009), while international agencies and journalists were banned from the war zone. The battle finally ended in May 2009. The documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields shows highly disturbing mobile-phone footage from soldiers (the state disputes its authenticity) with what looks like mass executions of bound and kneeling people, along with the naked and violated dead bodies of Tamil women, among other violations. An estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians died between January and May 2009. When the war ended 285,000 Tamils from the war zone were interned by the state, and thousands of Tamils also disappeared from the camps into detention with no notification to families of their return. In pursuit of transitional justice and reconciliation, the Sri Lankan president announced the formation of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in 2010, which from the very beginning was denounced as a farce (Thiranagama 2013). What emerges from this almost three decades of civil war are various forms of materiality implicated in the war ranging from the occupation of the Tamil land, the killings by the Tamil Tigers, to the bloodbath by the Sri Lankan state, but also the material tangibility of death the Tamil Tigers were wearing on their bodies, the pictorial portrayals of suicide-bombers as martyrs, and the monuments that become a point of concern for the Sri Lankan government. After the deaths of the Tamil fighters, they were commemorated, and memorials were used to mobilize their communities physically and emotionally. Also, what makes the case of the Tamil Tigers comparable with the Hezbollah case discussed above is that the violence was committed not to spread ideology or religion, nor to defend them, but to create a ‘safe space’ and fight for a land ‘to be’. Land, place, and violence done to members are thus material sources with which to kindle attacks, as well as to come to terms with violent conflict. On the other hand, the materiality that emerges out of this is seen as endangering social stability or contesting the state’s narrative.

7 The Amritsar Attack

Sikh suicide attacks in India began following the Indian army’s massive attack – part of Operation Blue Star to root out Sikh militants – on the Golden Temple in Amristar in 1984, the sacred heart of the Sikh religion and an important symbol of the Sikh homeland, and on other Sikh temples in the Punjab (Pape 2005). The Indian government saw this as the only possible response to militant violence and as an endeavour to ‘flush out’ militants who had taken sanctuary within the Golden Temple Complex and fortified it since 1982 (Pape 2005). The military attack left hundreds of civilians, militants, and government troops dead. Chopra (2010) observes that this event is cited most frequently as the source of ‘hurt’ of the Sikh community and that it stands apart as an exemplar of ‘hurt.’ As a term in everyday speech, ‘hurt’ signals a sense of deliberate offence or injury to individual or community sentiment. The architectural mutilation of the Akal Takht, an important building at the temple that represented the site of political authority and autonomy for the Sikh community, by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher represented the ‘hurt’ that struck at the heart of the sacred community (sangat). Two sources of hurt and a material nature stand out here: people died, and the temple was devastated. As in the case of the Tamil Tigers, the Sikh communities held public ceremonies to celebrate fighters such as Bhindranwale who had died defending his community and who was celebrated as a martyr. His portrait now hangs in numerous Sikh homes. These ceremonies were advertised in newspapers. The attack on the temple in June 1984 also resulted in the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31 by two of her Sikh bodyguards as a reprisal for the attack on the temple (Pape 2005, 156). As a result, two representative deaths equally mired in violence, remembrance, and representation are wedged between forbidden and authorized memorials of two lives positioned as the antithesis of each other: Bhindranwale the ‘terrorist’ and a ‘threat to the nation’, and Indira Gandhi, the putative ‘mother’ of modern India (Chopra 2010).

What is instructive here is that commemoration is mired in what this chapter calls the ambivalence and material politics of commemoration. What is commemorated by some as a way to heal and reconcile can be a source of pain and hurt to others. In the same vein, Forty (1999) contends that an “inevitable feature of memorials is that they permit only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten” (9). The construction of monuments inevitably involves a struggle over narratives of the past. Commemoration of conflict and war does not take place in a political vacuum (Evans 2006; Ashplant et al. 2000; Park 2014). It is often materially framed to produce simplified stories about chosen glories and traumas, as well as powerful political and ideological narratives about heroes and villains, martyrs and oppressors, allies and enemies (Howard and Ashworth 1999; Assmann 1995).

From the preceding, it can be argued that the motivation for violence does not lie primarily in religious ideas, but in what is seen, felt, and experienced. The violence of the response is often performative, intense, vivid, catastrophic, and horrifying in its effect on the intended audience (Juergensmeyer 2000; Nanninga 2017). Blood is shed for the message to sink in. It looks easier to ignore propaganda, polemic, and threats than insecurity enacted in material and grisly attacks. The more material and visual violence becomes, the closer it comes to the victims, and the more it calls for responsive action. Despite criticisms of the simplified articulation and conceptualization of ‘religion’ by some scholars of religion and violence such as William Cavanaugh (2009), the perspective of religion as absolutist, divisive, and irrational has survived into the present and has become one of the critical sources of exclusion and conflict in today’s diverse society, due among other things to migrations and crossings-over, to the traversing of boundaries. Here too, feelings of security and insecurity become entangled with perspectives on ‘good and bad’ religion which predominantly relates to land as the possession of including and excluding communities and as a material object in power struggles. The next question is what the presence of materiality and things in violent conflict mean for reconciliation and healing, as it entails such a prominent place in conflict situations. In what follows, the chapter demonstrates the potential of materiality and things in relation to the dynamics of healing and reconciliation, which subsequently strengthens my argument that focusing merely on theologies, macro-narratives, and abstract ideas does not lead to sustainable reconciliation and healing.

8 Reconciliation, Healing, and Materiality

The pain of conflict and violence is often very physical and place-based (Orjuela 2019). As we have seen in the above case studies, this includes “the smell of dead bodies, the unbearable bodily grief of losing a child or a parent, the traces of blood, the bullet holes left in the walls, the piece of clothing that helps someone identify a close family member in an opened mass grave” (439). The pain, woundedness or hurt that engenders the need for healing and reconciliation is tied to matter and to place, both during and after a tragedy.

Consequently, just as conflict and violence are anchored not in abstract ideas, theologies, or meta-narratives, but in the physical, so is healing and reconciliation in various ways, such as remembrance and mourning (Orjuela 2019; Stengs 2009). Reconciliation and healing mean restoring and transforming relationships that have been harmed by conflict so that they reflect a shared humanity and seek a shared future based on truth, justice, mercy, and peace (Lederach 1997, 30). This also means coming to terms with the hurt, wounds, and trauma of the violent past. In this section, I discuss the key dimensions of reconciliation and healing, especially justice and reparations, truth-telling and repentance/apology, and forgiveness, showing how these important aspects of conflict-resolution place significant emphasis on material harm.

To heal or come to terms with the past, victims of violence want to see justice – restorative and retributive justice – to be done following the tragedies they have experienced and witnessed. That justice ‘has to be seen’ to be done, for example, through punishment for war crimes and serious human rights abuses, shows how what matters for sustainable reconciliation and healing is what victims ‘see’ and how they ‘feel,’ rather than mere lectures on abstract and distant ideas about justice. The failure to ‘see and feel’ justice done might wound victims further or make them resort to extremist violence. The articulation of abstract ideas about justice will not heal Hezbollah fighters who see the occupation of their land by Israeli soldiers with troops, tanks, and armoured personnel carriers as unjust, Sikh fighters who see the Indian army’s attack of their temple as injustice, or the Tamils for whom the occupation of their land for large agricultural projects is an act of injustice. Even in cases where religion has been perceived as instigating violence, it is the colonial subjugation of space that is primary. Relatedly, during anticolonial wars too, ‘place’ and ‘space’ became much more important signifiers than religion.

Retributive justice, whose material dimension is enacted in the reparations discussed below, refers to the repair of justice through the unilateral imposition of sanctions or punishment in order to restore a moral balance that was disturbed by wrongdoing (Wenzel et al. 2012). It contributes to the healing of victims in so far as it is connected to the dignity and self-value of the victim. It is important that society does not downplay the suffering of victims by failing to act against the perpetrator. To do so might be understood as dismissing the victims. It is crucial to ensure that the victim is given equal status to everyone else by society. Retributive justice thus can persuade the victim that whatever his, her or their position in life is, they are recognized by society as someone whose dignity is affirmed (Villa-Vincenio 1999). Those who perceive their land as occupied or whose infrastructure has been violated, like the Lebanese people, the Sikh fighters or the Tamil Tigers, seem to suggest that reconciliation means restoration and recognition of their dignity achieved through retribution. The dignity of those whose land has been occupied is undermined by the occupation of their land and/or by the attacks on their sacred buildings, like a temple. Restorative justice must be seen not as a mode of punishment but rather as a means of restoring the moral order of society and seeking to restore the perpetrator as a moral agent in society (Villa-Vincenio 1999). It can thus be a way to communicate to the offender the evil they have committed in the hope that they will come to positive remorse. Punishment, often by the courts, acknowledges the dignity of the victim and makes reconciliation an outcome that does not come cheap (Philpott 2006, 21). In the cases discussed above, the chapter hazards the suggestion that Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers, and the Sikh violent extremist attackers see themselves as meting out justice on the Israelian government, the Sri Lankan government, and the Indian government respectively. Likewise, the Israelian, Indian, and Sri Lankan governments may be convinced of their own actions in the same way. The destruction both sides undertake is perceived as an enactment of retributive justice and demonstrates competitive victimhood between the two camps, with both sides claiming to have suffered much more than the other.

Reparations in the form of medical care and economic relief in response to the destruction of persons and sources of livelihoods and investments can help to heal the victims of brute physical, psychic, economic, or emotional harm. In some cases, reparations are perceived as retributive justice. They are a way of punishing offenders by making them pay their victims. Reparations require real tangible actions that address social and material structures. It is such visible actions that address feelings, emotions, and the body that matter for healing and reconciliation. These actions include a psychological medical intervention to address the trauma, stress, and anxiety that inhibit agency, reparations and compensations, and strengthening social networks and family support (Murphy 2010, 138). Following the 2006 capture of soldiers by Hezbollah and the heavy-handed and indiscriminate response by Israeli forces, feeling the responsibility to protect the citizens against Israel, the Lebanese government put together a reparation programme not only to address the immediate needs of the victims but also to acknowledge their status as ‘victims’. The government developed a project, Rebuilding Lebanon, which had two aspects: to directly compensate victims of the war, and an adoption scheme, whereby individuals, institutions or foreign states could adopt an area and directly contribute to its reparation and reconstruction. Direct compensation addressed three types of harm: human indemnity (i.e., those who had been injured or whose family members had been killed), housing indemnity, and loss of income (Ghosn and Khoury 2013).

The three-decade-long civil war between the Tamils Tigers and the government, which destroyed livelihoods, ended with a decisive government victory against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. The families of the victims of enforced disappearances, frustrated by numerous government commissions that provided no answers to the fate of their loved ones, have been holding street-side vigils for well over a year. A case in point is the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission), established in 2010, which analysts have characterized as a state performance (Ganguly 2018). The state represents itself in Sri Lanka using rhetoric that is not grounded in victims’ lived experiences. An Office of Missing Persons (OMP) established in 2018 published a report in which it recommended some interim relief measures to alleviate the hardship until there are answers, justice and, reparations (Ganguly 2018).

In the Sikh case, many commissions have been set up to deal with post-conflict reconciliation. The Ahooja Committee was given the task of establishing how many Sikhs had been killed in the riots and recommending compensation to the victims and their families. Official figures claim that almost three thousand people were killed and many more injured or displaced in the four days of rioting aimed at the Sikh population of Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. However, despite multiple commissions of inquiry, compensation schemes and a prime ministerial apology, India is still struggling to do justice to the victims (Jeffrey and Hall 2020).

Truth-telling is one acclaimed aspect of reconciliation and healing because it is conceived to be cathartic (Brounéus 2007, 12). It takes the process of reconciliation from knowledge to acknowledgement that harm was done. It is engendered by numerous material aspects, ranging from secrets about missing and disappeared bodies, which remain unknown due to misinformation or falsehoods peddled by the perceived enemy, to ignorance about various developments during the violent conflict. After the violent death of a family member or friend, the survivors have to deal with the reality or imaginations of the brute harm perpetrated on the dead. Relatives want to know what happened to their loved ones, how exactly they died, how violent their death was, who pulled the trigger if the dead victims have gun wounds, and where the bodies are. They need to know how the army, police, and secret services operated. Truth-telling thus heals wounds of ignorance (Philpott 2006, 17). Not knowing the truth creates a wound within the bereaved. In violent conflicts, some deaths are shrouded in mystery. People are blown up, disappear or are killed in secrecy, only to be discovered as decomposed and abandoned bodies, if they are found at all. Such abandoned bodies are sometimes found with grievous scars and bruises which merely speak of how violently they were violated and liquidated. This therefore raises many uncomfortable and unsettling questions. Ignorance of how a family member or friend died is in itself torture for the survivor (Hayner 2011, 151). In cases of disappearances and abductions, the absence of a body to bury is a source of trauma and internal wounds to relatives and friends because burial is a vital material aspect of closure following the death of a family member. The gravesite is an essential truth aspect of dealing with the loss of a dear one towards healing and consolation. It provides the focal point for the burial ceremony and the attendant rituals. It is, so to say, the material manifestation of truth. In cases where graves are not found, healing is compromised because of the absence of closure.

Concerning the surviving victims of violence, truth-telling makes violence a part of the historical record and restores a sense of dignity and worth to people who have often been brutalized, whose self-esteem has been reduced to the minimum. It provides an opportunity to say: “I am somebody. I matter”. The victim regains some sense of worth, recognizing that their suffering has been taken seriously (Villa-Vincencio 1999). The need to tell one’s story of victimhood and heroism is seen in how violent extremists develop websites through which they tell their narratives when they feel they are not being given an opportunity to be heard. These websites show both their victimhood – how they have been brutalized – and their heroism (Nanninga 2017). No wonder most of the websites are a collage of pain or great bravery with graphics and pictures that are meant to capture the emotions and feelings of the audience (see Guenther 2021; Nanninga 2017; Armstrong 2014). The Tamils and Sikh tells their victimhood story, as well as describing their heroic acts through public displays of commemoration and publishing stories of martyrs in newspapers and commemorative albums, creating a visual culture of commemoration. They see this as a restatement of their dignity and worth, as well as of their position as martyrs.

Public memorials and monuments are self-referential sites for remembrance that establish a more permanent memorial structure. Concerning healing and reconciliation, the assumption is that the “very materiality and design of memorials has the power to shape the ways people relate to a difficult past” (Orjuela 2020). As shown above, to cement their embeddedness in the communities and to facilitate healing and reconciliation with the violence, suicide organizations carry out commemorative activities. In the suicide attacks of the 1980s, Hezbollah commemorated ‘martyrs’ who had killed themselves in order to kill American, French, and Israeli troops. Such ritual practices facilitate the closure of the death of their martyrs, a crucial dimension of dealing with the death of martyrs in post-violent conflict situations. No wonder the absence of a body to mourn creates a scar or wound for surviving friends and family. In the case of disappearances, missing victims are denied a place among either the living or the dead because their families and friends do not know whether they are dead or alive, and thus have no focal point for carrying out death rituals. Yet, ritual practices are a common phenomenon in the search for healing and in coming to terms with violent situations. In the absence of actual remains, memorials become reminders to be looked at, touched, and prayed beside (Mitchell 2012), a focal point for rituals for the dead. This is the reason why the Tamils and the Sikh built monuments so the community could acquire closure over the deaths of their martyrs by laying flowers in honour of the departed.

Major streets were named in honour of these fallen ‘heroes’; their pictures being widely used as positive symbols in political discourses (Mitchell 2012). Reconciliation and healing are about memory and remembering. The feeling of keeping faith with the dead, that is, of respecting and honouring a society’s martyrs, brings calm and satisfaction. It makes society feel that it is not betraying the martyrs. The self-sacrifice of the Sikh suicide attackers was recognized through the widespread practice of holding public ceremonies in celebration of the ‘heroic’ fighters (Mitchell 2012). However, the way commemorations are undertaken can create anger, disintegration, tension, resentment, and enmity, rather than the social cohesion and reconciliation needed in a society, especially when one party frames the tragic events of the war in a form that legitimizes its rule and justifies its actions while delegitimizing those of its perceived enemies. The controversy over the commemoration of two lives positioned as the antithesis of each other – Bhindranwale the ‘terrorist’ and a ‘threat to the nation’, and Indira Gandhi, the putative ‘mother’ of modern India (Chopra 2010), which we noted above – is a case in point. Some political powers choose either to erase or control memory by allowing the memorialization of specific figures or activities but not others. This is what this chapter calls ideological memorialization because it is not focused on reconciliation and healing but on political control. Monuments can thus have a double or ambivalent function.

Apology and forgiveness are another important set of healing and reconciliation dimensions following a violent conflict. Through an apology or by showing repentance, the offender expresses contrition and sorrow and assumes responsibility for the violence. The apologizer names the exact offence or at least how they remember it, for which they are apologizing, which often turns out to be the violation. A well-known case in point is the amnesty process during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Perpetrators could receive an amnesty upon confessing and making full disclosure of the offence they committed during the conflict in South Africa (Tutu 1999). Repentance is an inward act which an offender can be encouraged to make. However, it is more than an apology, remorse or regret. It includes all of these, but also a deliberate turning away from patterns of behaviour that led to those past wrongs and that often involves attempts to make appropriate reparation or restitution for the past. In this way, it is linked to reparations. To apologize and to forgive are strenuous exercises which sometimes require some inducement. To facilitate and persuade perpetrators and victims to apologize and forgive, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, employed Christian metaphors and ritual practices (Campton 2008, 12; Shore 2012). During the meetings and hearings, candles were lit and crucifixes were used, accompanied by church hymns and prayers in the act of consecrating space. Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers, and the Sikhs might want the Israeli government, the Sri Lanka government, and the Indian government to apologize for the violence committed against them, and vice versa. However, an apology has a political risk for the apologizer. If the government of Sri Lanka were to apologize for marginalizing Tamils from the late 1940s to the onset of the civil war in 1983 and beyond, it would clear the air. But it also might have complicated the government’s attempt to arrange a permanent cessation of hostilities with the Tamil Tigers (Rotberg 2006). However, apologies that arise out of a detailed forensic (read ‘material’) examination of the bloody grievances and hurts are more potent than mere executive utterances in healing the wounds of a traumatized people (Rotberg 2006). However, corporate apologies – for example, by a government – remain contested because they sound abstract and distanced, and the victim is not individually identified. Bentley (2016) argues that state apologies tend to reconfigure the patterns of domination. The apologies advance the state’s particular interests and are laden with tropes and narratives that are remarkably reminiscent of the core legitimizing tenets of domination and oppression. The chapter argues that state apologies that are divorced from the real lived experiences of the people in the sense of bloody grievances and hurts generate suspicions that they are not effective as a reconciliation gesture that stands alone.

9 Conclusion

This chapter has argued that interrogating conflict and violence, and facilitating healing and reconciliation, cannot be fully undertaken without reference to objects, feelings, and bodily performances. This is despite the preponderance of ideas, beliefs, and metanarratives that are seen as the main features of ‘religion’. Certain trends in modernist thinking accentuate beliefs and doctrines while marginalizing materiality and ‘things’ in the conception of conflicts and violence, as well during processes of healing and reconciliation. The material and everyday turn in critical security studies confirms the centrality of materiality in conflict and violence. The igniters, processes, and consequences of conflict and violence are often seen, felt, and experienced. While accentuating the centrality of materiality and things, the chapter does not mean to deny that ideas are also significant in mobilizing people and in instigating conflict and violence, including those with a religious dimension. Instead, it sees the two as constitutive of each other. It maintains that there is a sense in which materiality is an expression of underlying ideas, ideologies, and narratives, while at the same time speaking back to the ideas, ideologies and narratives. With the aid of concrete examples, the chapter has argued that conflict and violence, including that which is religiously articulated, are replete with objects, feelings, and bodily performances. In the examples discussed, place, land, and sites are important elements creating social perspectives on the legitimacy of using violence against ‘oppressors’ and ‘occupiers.’ For this reason, healing and reconciliation must also take materiality and things as their points of departure. Focusing only on belief will not lead to sustainable healing and reconciliation because the motivation and effect of conflict and violence lie in materiality and things as well as in belief. This chapter thus has articulated the following points: religious ideas are not the source of conflict, materiality is the first port of call in understanding both conflict and violence, and materiality (things, bodies, money, land) should be taken into account during healing and reconciliation processes.