Volume 15, Issue 2, 2024
Teaching and Researching Religion and Violence
Kallista Samlal
Pages 198-211
https://doi.org/10.5840/asrr20241112119
From Swords to Pens
Journalism Taking Place as a New Form of Colonialism
The modern world has become overwhelmed by numerous divisions, categories, and labels that cause conflict among various communities. These divisions and categories then result in prejudiced and biased perspectives about various aspects of a community, a culture, or even a whole nation. One of the most pervasive divisions is between ¡®religion¡¯ and ¡®secular.¡¯ It is a very common stance in the West to believe that religion and politics (which is secular) should be separate. This stance results in the West judging how non-Western countries separate their ¡®religious¡¯ and ¡®secular¡¯ aspects of their societies. This prejudiced perspective can readily be found in journalism reporting on conflicts that involve religion, violence, and politics. As a result, journalism becomes a new tool for the West to further undermine and destabilise the countries that it had previously colonised. This renders journalism an apparatus for implementing neo-colonialism. This article is an investigation into the violence occurring in Burma and the resulting journalism that explains it for Western audiences. Using the ideas of William Cavanaugh, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Jason ?nanda Josephson, I conclude that the very concept of ¡®religion¡¯ is a Western construct put in place to facilitate colonisation of non-Western countries. Hence, the discussions surrounding religion in the West follows this construct and associated ideas, and thus further colonises the non-West.