Research from a Distance: Digital Methods and Etic Positionality

PeaceUnite is a large transnational interfaith network with members in nearly a hundred countries. Founded in 1970 by an international (German, Indian, Japanese, and North American) and multireligious (Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Shinto) group, PeaceUnite has aimed to build a global network of interfaith peacebuilders working at local, regional, and global levels to tackle obstacles to world peace. The organization's central committee, WCPU, is positioned to know about local issues from local PeaceUnite members, referred to as “local experts.” Between 2020 and 2022, I spent 13 months digitally immersed in the global web of PeaceUnite. While PeaceUnite was already using Zoom for some of their transnational meetings, like many others they had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. As everything moved online and in- person meetings were canceled, I had to adapt. I first connected with PeaceUnite Australia and was welcomed into their Executive Committee meetings, casual catchups, and copied into their emails and internal communications. From these connections, I was invited to ACPU meetings and introduced to PeaceUnite members across Asia, furthering my network. My shift toward digital ethnographic fieldwork opened my access to PeaceUnite chapters across Asia. I transgressed border closures and isolation, digitally traveling to meetings and interviewing people I otherwise could not have. This allowed me to trace the impact of PeaceUnite's internal politics at the regional, local, and transnational levels.

The transnational spread of activities meant there were almost weekly PeaceUnite meetings, webinars, and conferences to attend. In addition to these events, I conducted phone and video interviews with members of PeaceUnite Australia, the ACPU Secretariat, and national chapters across Asia, participated in phone and video calls with PeaceUnite Australia members and attended one in-person trip to Canberra for PeaceUnite Australia's annual Interfaith Lecture. As a significant aspect of PeaceUnite's engagement with its network is through websites and social media, it was crucial to also analyze these platforms to provide more depth to my understanding of the relationships between the organization's international, regional, and local levels. This data informs my analysis of the tensions between neoliberalism, the humanitarian desire to do good, and the faith-informed moralities of my interlocutors.

A recurring debate in the anthropology of religion is researcher positionality as an “insider” or “outsider,” and how this identity affects data. Indeed, many who study interfaith are scholar- practitioners. Although baptized and raised Catholic, I consider myself agnostic. I emphasized this to participants as an impartial frame, which particularly resonated with those in interfaith contexts. Being honest about my religious background showed participants I understood what it meant to “be religious” in the world. Additionally, my interlocutors were often more interested in my background of “difference” (as a child immigrant from South Africa with patrilineal Armenian/Lebanese ancestry, including ancestors who fled the Armenian genocide). Coming from an etic perspective, then, into a community built upon difference, my (lack of) religious identification did not interfere with my understandings of interfaith nor PeaceUnite members’ acceptance of me. While my background still influences my research, I provide a different perspective to the scholar-practitioners who study interfaith.

PeaceUnite: Religion and Politics in Humanitarianism

Modern interfaith emerged from historic encounters between diverse religious communities working together in times of need. The 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago brought diverse religious representatives together and, despite being predominantly Christian, sowed the seeds of the modern interfaith movement (Seager 1993; Swidler 2013). Subsequently, various councils, organizations, and conferences developed into the extant interfaith movement, emphasizing that interreligious dialogue is socially necessary, internationally relevant, and theologically significant (Fahy and Bock 2020).

From the late twentieth century, religious institutions increasingly encouraged interfaith dialogue to foster “peace on global, regional, national, and local levels” (Fahy and Bock 2020: 8). As interfaith organizations grew, so did expectations that they perform roles often neglected by state governments (Griera et al. 2020; Nagel 2020). Globalization increased the need for harmonious coexistence, with transnational and diasporic communities creating societies rich in diversity (Appadurai [1996] 2003; Sökefeld 2001) and invigorating the formation of transnational interfaith humanitarian organizations working across geographic and social borders to foster peaceful societies.

Within this environment, in 1970, PeaceUnite was founded to advocate for and “[advance] common action among the world's religious communities for a comprehensive, holistic and sustainable peace” (PeaceUnite communications 2022). PeaceUnite's mission statement claims that religious communities, not local governments, step up to help people in times of crisis due to their ubiquity and strong global networks. As one interlocutor told me, referring to a PeaceUnite adage, “Even before there was a government, places of worship have always existed, and will always exist.”

PeaceUnite asserts that our tumultuous global environment requires concerted efforts through a “global network of interreligious bodies” to build world peace. Originally, PeaceUnite's International Secretariat was headquartered in New York City. Since 2022, PeaceUnite's organizational documents have acknowledged the spread of its leadership team in the United States, United Kingdom, Peru, Kenya, and Japan. This change decenters the United States, reflecting the organization's transnational nature, and including PeaceUnite's regional chapters across Africa, Asia, North America, Middle East/North Africa, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Structurally, PeaceUnite works across national borders to connect interfaith communities and ultimately relies upon local groups similarly committed to their goals of peace as a humanitarian “moral and political project” (Ticktin 2014: 275).

Religion and faith-informed morality are essential to PeaceUnite's humanitarian approach. Often, my interlocutors described humanitarianism as fundamentally religious, as service and charity are common religious tenets (Feener and Wu 2020). Despite the prominence of religious communities, there has been a growing “secularization” of humanitarianism due to perspectives of the secular as “neutral” (Ager and Ager 2011; Fountain 2013: 24). Interfaith organizations trouble these secular/religious distinctions due to the inherent diversity in their organizational and target demographics. Meanwhile, scholars caution against “a too neat distinction” between the religious and secular (Horstmann 2015: 129). The measures of governance for secular and religious organizations are the same, and, as Philip Fountain (2013: 23) argues, essentializing religion “[conceals] the politics at work.” PeaceUnite's self-characterization as apolitical aims to avoid conflict and stay neutral, and they describe their commitment to “peace” and “love” as transcending religious and cultural differences. PeaceUnite thus sees their peace work as more neutral than secular work, framing religion as “beyond” politics. This creates a challenge for PeaceUnite as they acknowledge the damaging effects of politics and the possibilities religion has to ease, heal, or mediate, and yet they face the same problem Fountain (2013: 23) highlights of “concealing the politics at work” within their own organization. The “messiness” of interfaith that Elisa stressed is prevalent here, as tensions arise between the visions of local PeaceUnite chapters and volunteers, and the directives of the organization and leadership team.

At times, PeaceUnite's apolitical stance requires compromising people's faith-informed values, limiting some forms of direct action. For example, responding to events/crises often requires careful analysis of political implications and potential negotiations to appease hurt parties. Consequently, “discourse” usually prevails over “action.” As Rev. Maria, a Christian from Indonesia, said, chuckling: “It's always meeting, and meeting, and meeting.” This discourse usually focused on the human impact of political decisions (e.g., decrying the effects of war on innocent civilians) rather than distributing aid to one party lest the other is insulted. PeaceUnite is thus profoundly political. Considering their diverse composition, this is unsurprising, but it contrasts with PeaceUnite's apolitical stance. This requires increased management from PeaceUnite's governing body, WCPU, to ensure chapters are aligned with the organizational stance and do not cause political upset.

Working across diverse contexts requires diplomatic negotiations and political decision- making. PeaceUnite thus embodies state-like behaviors, deploying neoliberal mechanisms of power and governance to manage relationships with state and non-state actors. These extend to internal management, where responsibilization discourses levy the volunteer efforts of local actors, requiring increased “professionalization” (Ager and Ager 2015: 5), praising them as experts and utilizing their labor to further PeaceUnite's mission. Responsibilization in this context refers to how individuals are enmeshed in discourses that encourage a sense of accountability and, in the case of interfaith, self-responsibility for the world's issues. PeaceUnite's increasing reliance on volunteers who demonstrate individual responsibility aligns with its administrative push for measurable outputs. Individuals pursue local projects to demonstrate organizational efficacy and help secure funding. Internal auditing practices centralize power to the governing body away from regional and national chapters. These entanglements create obstacles for PeaceUnite's mission.

Neoliberal Mechanisms in PeaceUnite's Meetings

Interreligious organizations like PeaceUnite function as global assemblages, deploying and negotiating power to develop their goals of peace. This framework helps us visualize interfaith as a diverse and continually shifting phenomenon, shaped by geographic and sociocultural politics (Ong and Collier 2005), taking the form of transnational “politics beyond the state” (Victoria 2016: 250). William Walters (2010: 143) similarly argues that humanitarianism is a “complex assemblage” comprised of malleable and shifting “forms of humanitarian reason, . . . authority [. . . and] certain technologies of government.” Interfaith actors are embedded in local contexts which are unavoidably “molded by global power relations” (Victoria 2016: 255) and simultaneously engaged in transnational exchanges, working within and beyond state-based power. The entwining of transnational, cross-cultural, and interreligious elements creates a space where different forms of authority and power are valued and distributed.

Tracing PeaceUnite's entanglement in global power flows illuminates how the organization embodies state-like behaviors. They move “beyond” borders while simultaneously reinforcing them, and they attempt to centralize control to prevent local actors contradicting each other or the WCPU. I developed much of my insight into the workings of PeaceUnite through mundane meetings in which the complex organizational dynamics became visible. PeaceUnite meetings—international, regional (ACPU), and local (PeaceUnite Australia)—involved careful conversations, mediation, and diplomatic negotiations that highlighted internal power struggles through questions of authority and confusions over structure and hierarchy. The WCPU as the primary governing body is globally representative with selected leaders from each regional group. This committee supports the President of PeaceUnite International in making decisions, approving documents, and discussing organizational matters. Some ACPU members saw PeaceUnite as a parental figure supporting their chapter from the sidelines. When they were reminded of the control implicit in this relationship, they expressed discomfort, uncertainty, and even anger.

At one regular ACPU meeting, the ACPU Secretary General Rev. Takumi, a Japanese Buddhist, updated the regional leaders on documents recently approved by WCPU. “You should have all received copies and read through each document,” Rev. Takumi informed the attendees. “As heads of the national chapters, you must communicate any changes to your local groups, so if you have any questions about these documents, you may ask me here.”

As Takao, the administrator, prepared the document screenshare, I scrolled through the gallery to watch people's reactions, which mostly reflected casual interest interspersed with the occasional blank, bored face. As with most PeaceUnite meetings, the members were predominantly men, highlighting the gender imbalance of volunteers. I wondered who had read the documents. One person distractedly eyed the screen while talking animatedly on his phone. Another scanned their desk looking through piles of paper, perhaps hard copies of these documents. The Code of Conduct appeared on screen, scrolling in front of our collective eyes, Takao haphazardly navigating and pausing randomly. I tried frantically to read the revisions I had not yet seen. It soon became clear, to Rev. Takumi's dismay, that few had read all nine documents. As he explained WCPU's approval of these documents, a voice crackled through my laptop speakers, momentarily disembodied until Mr. Krishnan's image became outlined in the blinking yellow denoting the current speaker on Zoom. Mr. Krishnan, a Hindu, holds a prominent position in a local South Asian PeaceUnite chapter and has been a member of WCPU and ACPU since their formation. “Yes, I agree that this is an important document. But I would like to know whether it is necessary to first consider,” he raised his finger with a confident smile, “that this be sent to the national chapters, and they will consider in their committees.” He paused before firmly nodding, “And they will decide.”

A subtle exasperation broke through Rev. Takumi's usually stoic expression, a smile ticking the corner of his mouth. Mr. Krishnan then turned to the next document to ask, “How has this tripartite agreement become necessary at this stage? What is our relationship with WCPU? This needs to be studied thoroughly,” he said, lifting his shoulders as if gesticulating just off- camera. The Tripartite Affiliation Agreement to which he referred was a change in how PeaceUnite welcomed new chapters. Not every country was represented in the organization; previously, regional groups had this power, often helping local groups to form national chapters. Now, however, WCPU would make final decisions. For Mr. Krishnan, who had been involved with ACPU since its foundation, WCPU's centralization of power removed ACPU's independence and agency.

When Rev. Takumi responded that WCPU approved these documents two months ago, Mr. Krishnan frustratedly asked, “Why did we not know about this? Why did we not see these documents before they were approved?” This frustration is common for interfaith disagreements discussed with calm, terse words, reminiscent of political negotiations. The back and forth between Rev. Takumi and Mr. Krishnan revealed that the documents were circulated months ago to offer members a feedback opportunity, but Mr. Krishnan had missed this communication. Rev. Takumi then stated that the ACPU president and deputy president were invited to the WCPU meeting where the documents were ratified, and the president accepted the documents on behalf of ACPU.

At this, Prof. Charles, the Deputy President, said he did not attend because the meeting was held past midnight in Australia. “I am not happy with the times they choose to hold these meetings,” he added. After 11 months of working with Prof. Charles, I knew this subject frustrated him despite looking calm. He previously told me he frequently fulfilled the often-absent president's duties. His frustrations were thus directed both at the unreasonably timed meetings, and an absent president making significant decisions when he was perceived to be disconnected from ACPU's members needs. “It doesn't matter,” said Rev. Takumi, trying to move on, “there is no point debating whether they should be accepted; they already have been.” Later, Rev. Takumi told me he sees himself as ACPU's networker, people manager, and a conduit of information from WCPU. Managing people's reactions was an inescapable part of this role, he said, reflecting how the organization was becoming increasingly hierarchical as the need to manage the expectations, work, and outputs of volunteers and local members increased.

At a later, smaller meeting, Mr. Krishnan garnered support to rehash the argument. Once again, Rev. Takumi calmly, albeit sternly, stated that he did not control these processes. In centralizing their power and imposing stronger governance mechanisms, WCPU undermined their discourse on valuing local expertise. Members like Mr. Krishnan were left feeling forgotten or unimportant. Rev. Kanda, the Senior Advisor to ACPU and a Japanese Buddhist, quietly requested to speak. “My biggest concern,” he said, “is that according to the WCPU document, it is the World Council who says the final welcoming, and there is no international engagement.” He continued, “I'm not criticizing either document, but simply puzzling who will say the final welcome to new members.” Prof. Charles agreed, unhappy with WCPU's growing control, worried that this new process would undo ACPU's negotiations around Asia's complex sociopolitical dynamics. His concern echoed Rev. Kanda's; specifically, who got a say and when. These concerns differed from Mr. Krishnan's around losing independence and centered on the potential for WCPU to undermine ACPU.

The discussion moved from the discomfort over changing organizational processes and hierarchy, to a real potential consequence of formalizing this hierarchy. Prof. Charles, looking thoughtful, verbalized his reticence: “What would happen . . . if the World Council admitted Taiwan to be a member of PeaceUnite International?” The other members’ eyes flicked across their screens, alert, waiting for Rev. Takumi's answer. All knew that China's national chapter, the Chinese Conference of PeaceUnite (CCPU), had three requirements for joining ACPU: PeaceUnite will not engage with the Dalai Lama or the Falun Gong, and Taiwan can never be a member.

In CCPU's case, these demands highlight the complications of in/exclusion in an inclusive movement, and the influence of political and state power on organizational decision-making. If WCPU upset the delicate balance by challenging CCPU and ACPU's agreement, CCPU could leave, and ACPU would lose considerable funding, political support, and the representation of a significant regional population.

As the implications sunk in, Rev. Takumi sighed. “Okay, they cannot decide by themselves, the World Council,” he said, that increasingly familiar tinge of frustration coloring his voice, “They need a consultation, a consensus with us and maybe CCPU. If we oppose . . . What if CCPU oppose? Of course, they oppose it,” there was a hum of laughter before Rev. Takumi continued, describing how difficult CCPU's conditions had been for ACPU to accept. “This is a very controversial issue that the WCPU cannot use their power to accept,” Rev. Takumi said, insisting that WCPU would consider their regional politics. When I discussed assertions of independence with Rev. Takumi, he explained negotiation and communication as a lengthy process. Because some insist that ACPU should be self-governed, he said, “It takes so much energy to sift our consciousness that we are part of the big global family of PeaceUnite.” As liaisons between ACPU, WCPU, and wider PeaceUnite, Rev. Takumi and the ACPU secretariat must remind members of their place in the global organization. Rev. Takumi's diplomatic wording around WCPU and ACPU's roles and responsibilities reinforces this desire to retain connections to all, but with a focus on appeasing those with the most power: in this case, CCPU. This creates a discrepancy between their aims and practice, raising questions about the responsibilities of humanitarian organizations as actors of the neoliberal state remaining dedicated to enacting care (Craig et al. 2020) and about the influence of powerful states providing funding and support to PeaceUnite.

At mundane meetings like these, the inevitable frictions of interfaith, organizational politics, and dynamics of power through contestations over hierarchy became clear. PeaceUnite's depiction of the organization as “a global family” emphasizes closeness, collaboration, and mutual care. However, the core familial quality highlighted in these interactions is hierarchy, making the structure restrictive, instead of collaborative and constructive.

Consequences of Changing Organizational Control

International interfaith organizations form networks with diverse and intersecting boundaries continually shifting in response to global politics (Brambilla and Jones 2020). In PeaceUnite, borders are highlighted when members draw upon their local expertise, often referencing their national identity and country's position in regional politics to provide insight and to help coordinate organizational responses to local or regional issues. For example, when ACPU was discussing how to respond to various conflicts emerging between, within, and on the borders of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, representatives from these chapters voiced different perspectives based on their own locally derived knowledge of religious, ethnic, and national conflict and identity. Borders are also present as mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. We see this in the deeply political conversations held between Rev. Takumi, Prof. Charles, Mr. Krishnan, and Rev. Kanda discussing the ramifications of the inclusion of China and the exclusion of Taiwan. This is just one such moment that visibilizes these dissonances. CCPU's demands complicate PeaceUnite's inclusivity and underline the influence of political and state power in transnational humanitarian organizations. To include China and exclude Taiwan sets an uncomfortable precedent of complicity in maintaining the “world order.” This obscures PeaceUnite's overarching mission. Further, introducing policies that centralize decision-making powers to WCPU complicates regional geopolitical power relations and undermines the organizational emphasis on the importance of local expertise.

A foundational element of interfaith is managing (or avoiding) conflict. No matter how small or mundane, moments of friction display a microcosm of how power negotiations (through authority and expertise) work throughout the organization. These encounters demonstrate seemingly minor conversations or disagreements, yet individuals frequently navigate and mediate such issues. In the above vignette, Rev. Takumi represented the ACPU Secretariat and was thus the representative of WCPU. Mr. Krishnan and Prof. Charles were the voices of critique, dissidents fighting the constraints from the “powers above.” Rev. Takumi's reiteration that ACPU members must remember they are part of the PeaceUnite network once again reinforces a sense of responsibility and subordination, emphasizing the organizational hierarchy.

As the above ethnographic vignette attests, contradiction and contestation inevitably permeate PeaceUnite. This includes the struggle to be apolitical, the need to consider equitable representation across countries and faiths, and disagreements over beliefs or cultural politics. Contestations over representation, (in)action, and geopolitics create an environment that restricts the potential for positive impact, a frequent problem with humanitarian organizations, whereby they are often not as impactful as they desire (Markiewicz 2018). While this complicates their ability to abide by their ethos of care, it does not diminish the good-willed intentions of humanitarian actors. Rather, it indicates avenues for change.

Like other humanitarian organizations, PeaceUnite emerged from a desire to help, or “do more.” This is a common refrain justifying action to close the gap left by the retreat of the neoliberal state. While PeaceUnite's founding in 1970 means it predates the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s alongside political figures like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Deng Xiaoping (Harvey 2005: 2), their initial aim of building bridges between diverse religious groups quickly grew to respond to the changing sociopolitical environment heralded by neoliberalism. As such, neoliberal discourses of responsibilization (Saltsman 2022: 38), management (Silva Rocha Lima 2022), outputs, and resource competition (Billaud 2020) shape PeaceUnite's organizational politics. These neoliberal mechanisms enable the diffusion of the nation-state throughout PeaceUnite, as state representatives enable the spread of power beyond borders. In many ways, this reflects a strengthening rather than weakening of states. The geopolitical environment within which PeaceUnite works shapes internal relationships, as borders become solidified despite PeaceUnite's desire to be a “global family,” such as the careful negotiations with CCPU and acquiescing to their three requirements. Despite emphasizing their role as a transnational organization superseding geographic borders, internal conversations and relationships solidify these borders, making them necessary to consider when developing initiatives.

There are also hierarchies in PeaceUnite's organizational structure influenced by geopolitics and made visible through disagreements. For example, when the CCPU argued for more representation in leadership roles due to their large population, or when a female and male leader from one Southeast Asian national chapter argued, with the male accusing the female of bias and partisanship because ACPU had nominated her for a higher leadership role.

The internal logics they have developed to balance these aspects center around power and include, for example, retaining a decision-making hierarchy that flows from the WCPU to ensure organizational conformity. As mentioned, this includes a revised Code of Conduct that supersedes regional power and grants WCPU power to include or exclude countries from the organization. Alongside these changes, WCPU implemented a revised process for organizational statements. The new process stipulated that WCPU must approve any statement on current events. The rationale was organizational consistency, yet ACPU members felt this international control diluted their agency. These elements again visibilize internal borders, highlight inequities due to disparate geopolitical relationships, and contradict PeaceUnite's emphasis on local actors as experts. The Code of Conduct and Statement revisions created an atmosphere of uncertainty and made members feel that their perspectives could not be trusted, and that they were no longer seen as “local experts.”

Neoliberal Humanitarianisms and Bordering

I now move to explore how the humanitarian entanglement with neoliberalism has consequences for how humanitarian organizations work. This has been explored by Julie Billaud (2020) and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (2022), who both examine the ICRC to demonstrate neoliberal entanglements in humanitarianism through modes of management and quantification, shifting how humanitarian organizations approach their work. This echoes Hande Sözer's (2020: 2172) argument that neoliberalism “recalibrates the expectations from humanitarian outcomes,” shifting from aims to reduce human suffering to increasing the resilience of those suffering. This shift aligns with the drive to measure results (Billaud 2020: 106). These elements form the foundation of PeaceUnite's managerialism influencing how PeaceUnite connects with—and exerts control over—its constituents.

PeaceUnite's common conceptualization of peace involves human security, inclusivity, and care for humans and the earth. Often, individuals would cite Johan Galtung's (1969) idea of “positive peace,” to say that they seek structural and cultural change and commitment to ideas of equity, equality, reciprocity, and dignity, and an active intention to create a harmonious world. Interfaith practitioners know this is difficult and are dedicated to building pathways to peace through the shifting political, moral, and physical landscape(s). Silva Rocha Lima's (2022: 292) work on managerial humanitarianism in the ICRC similarly shows how international humanitarian organizations mobilize local actors: “Expert knowledge production here shifts to the global south, as local state actors, aided by international development organizations, become agents in their own development.” For PeaceUnite, local initiatives are often the most “successful” in terms of neoliberal quantification (Billaud 2020: 102), with direct goals and measurable results: feeding people experiencing poverty, facilitating health and financial support through COVID-19, education workshops to encourage learning about other's beliefs, mediating active interreligious conflict, and fighting climate change through mass tree-planting or rubbish clean-up.

These achievements are quantified and outlined in each chapter's annual report. In 2023, for example, PeaceUnite Pakistan described their work to get clothes and blankets “to over 1,000 flood-affected families,” providing 75 canes, crutches, and walkers for flood-impacted people with disabilities, and handing out food packages to “2500 . . . families with Special Children.” PeaceUnite Japan, as part of their “forestation project,” organized three tree-planting events on a 10,000 square meter plot of land with the local government and residents, attended by a hundred people from diverse religious communities. PeaceUnite Myanmar, with funding from PeaceUnite Japan, provided humanitarian and medical aid to 190 conflict-affected/vulnerable households, with a future target of 905 households. These initiatives have measurable outputs beyond making people “feel good,” providing evidence of active efforts to mobilize PeaceUnite's strategic goals. This produces a clear organizational purpose and characterizes the organization as “useful” (Amsler and Shore 2017).

Anthropological scholarship on neoliberal audit cultures (Shore and Wright 2015; Strathern 2000; Trnka and Trundle 2017) illustrates that individuals are inducted into responsibilization discourses that mark them as autonomous changemakers while monitoring their activities with “benchmarks, standards, and targets established by a strategic plan, implemented by administrative authorities” (Amsler and Shore 2017: 126). Humanitarian volunteers wish to distance themselves from these frameworks, as their engagement with humanitarianism is driven by “paying moral attention to others who are beyond one's immediate sphere of existence” (Tester 2010: vii).

When my participants discussed their reasons for joining PeaceUnite, they often referred to their faith drawing attention to suffering and injustice, spurring them to do something “meaningful.” Alleviating suffering as a moral responsibility reflects a faith-led response to global issues. This tension between faith-based moral imperatives and neoliberal frameworks frustrates interfaith practitioners who feel that WCPU should enable, not disrupt or dictate, their peacebuilding work. WCPU's request for all national chapters to transition to, or create, Interreligious Councils (IRC) is one example of this tension. WCPU envisioned IRCs as more legitimate and standardized formations of national chapters, which could liaise with state governments to demonstrate the value of interfaith dialogue. This standardization reflects a bureaucratic rationalization and assertion of hierarchy, despite the necessary adaptations diverse groups require based upon their sociopolitical contexts. The varied interpretations of WCPU's vision led to some chapters simply adding “The Interreligious Council of” to their name, while others such as PeaceUnite Australia saw it as a new formation that would require restructuring and dissolving their current chapter. Because PeaceUnite works across diverse environments, people are passionate about different initiatives and PeaceUnite's management must prioritize their resources and support. While some feel WCPU are doing their best, others frustratedly told me that WCPU were not adequately listening to diverse voices or providing equitable support. One example is the routine organization of meetings according to Western time zones. In the Global South, these meetings fall between midnight and 5:00 a.m., making members feel insignificant. Excluding some members and privileging others contradicts PeaceUnite's emphasis on local expertise and removes local actors’ agency.

While they claim to empower local agents, WCPU and PeaceUnite International impose managerial control over regional and local groups, obstructing their engagement in organizational decisions. WCPU demonstrates a disconnect between their goals and practice by implementing documents and processes at largely inaccessible meetings, measuring outcomes, making chapters compete for resources, and monitoring political stances. Scholarship on interfaith and humanitarian organizations recognizes this potential for disconnect between discourse and action (Fahy and Haynes 2018), where goals do not align with the work on the ground (Markiewicz 2018). For PeaceUnite, this manifests in the diffuse neoliberal rhetoric as the leadership team tries to combine their humanitarian purpose with the need to prove their value and secure funding.

Although scholars and practitioners talk about transnational organizations transcending borders, neoliberal discourses around power reinforce borders (Glick Schiller 1997; Saltsman 2022: 9). Borders are often discussed in terms of their relationship to violence, conflict, and state control through governmentality and policing (Fassin 2011), as well as the restructuring of borders through “information flows” and exchanges, increasing mobility and loosening the nation-state's grip (Waldinger 2023). Chiara Brambilla and Reece Jones's (2020: 289) concept of “borderscapes” acknowledges the permeability and flexibility of borders, and highlights borders as “[sites] of the production of sovereign power but also of resistance and struggles.” Walters's (2010: 138) concept of “the humanitarian border” recategorizes the “border as a space of humanitarian government” reflecting how humanitarian issues cross physical and political borders. PeaceUnite engages with borders in multiple ways through humanitarian outreach and in its transnational organizational structure. The issues they choose to address visibilize borders and reinforce global power dynamics about what is necessary or urgent. Regional issues are viewed with different categorizations of urgency, reflecting Didier Fassin's (2007: 500) “politics of life,” whereby human life is quantified, creating a “dialectic between lives to be saved and lives to be risked.” PeaceUnite members must therefore navigate transnational relationships and organizational politics. Their focus and decisions are sometimes strategic, marking attempts to retain transnational relationships, appease certain powers, or secure funding. This often impedes their ability to prioritize their mission of peace (Peake 2020).

At the regional ACPU and international WCPU levels, borders become solidified through daily interactions: used to justify decisions, discuss cross-border disputes or events, describe local activities, highlighted in disagreements on “cultural grounds,” and visibilized in acute border crises. People draw upon borders to (re)emphasize national boundaries and organize people within PeaceUnite, reflecting geopolitical and internal organizational power dynamics.

PeaceUnite's emphasis on grassroots activity and local experts reflects the intention of responding directly to local voices according to their needs and contrasts with dominant humanitarian narratives of the local actor as helpless victims who rely on external saviors (Fassin 2007: 501; Silva Rocha Lima 2022: 292). PeaceUnite aims to engage local actors to recognize the expertise that a global organization cannot recreate. This could be an effort to avoid the oft-universalized dichotomy of the local as beyond recourse and “passive” or “as an idealized harmonious culture” (Bräuchler and Naucke 2017: 424). In a subversion of implicit global hierarchies, PeaceUnite seeks to amplify and engage with local actors as “active peacemakers with their own resources and cultural competence to draw on” (Bräuchler 2019: 1447), providing support and a global community to encourage the growth of established local expertise. However, because geographic proximity decides the regional groups, they vary in size, demographics, and most importantly, histories of conflict and turmoil. Consequently, the differences in overall function and purpose of each regional group are drastic, as they each include countries with complicated histories and conflicts.

While geographically practical, these groupings perpetuate global inequity due to vastly different regional geopolitical circumstances (Cons and Sanyal 2013). Additionally, the economic status of these countries and regions influences the work they can do. National governments or interested major religious groups fund chapters in countries such as Japan and China, allowing them to pay their leadership, administrators, and occasionally project officers. Most other chapters are volunteer-run, including Australia, creating an environment of labor precarity and restricting who can be involved due to time and resources. Elisa Pascucci (2019: 746) says this is the nature of “precarious labor in humanitarian spaces,” which involves the “unstable politics of location,” whereby the precarity of individual positions across sociopolitical and geographic contexts relies upon economic security and funding support. The nature of volunteering excludes certain demographics, as not everyone can engage in humanitarian action. This was a noticeable element of inequity raised with members of PeaceUnite. There is a complex tension between the attempt to standardize and professionalize volunteer-led humanitarian work to ensure inclusivity and reduce precarity, and the inevitable hierarchies and distances created between paid staff and volunteers. As Kath, a Quaker and the Secretary of PeaceUnite Australia, told me, she wanted to find funding to ensure PeaceUnite Australia had a more secure and reliable structure, which would allow for hired staff and encourage inclusivity and diversity beyond those who do not have the resources to volunteer and would ensure PeaceUnite Australia had a future.

Adam Saltsman (2022: 9) argues that many transnational humanitarian organizations call themselves “transnational” or “international” despite their overwhelming Western, or Global North influence and that using these terms “masks the geopolitical and economic power relations that inform their agendas, discourses, and practices.” Saltsman (2022: 9) uses the terms Global North and Global South, not as geographic markers, but to trace “global power flows” and to frame humanitarianism in a way that reinforces the sometimes-implicit hierarchies involved. In this case, these global power flows influence the form and function of PeaceUnite and create dissonance between the attempted apoliticism and equality, and the necessarily political, transnational, and hierarchical structure of the organization.

Conclusions

Although PeaceUnite tries to equitably address issues from a faith-informed positionality, there is an unavoidable tension between global politics and internal neoliberal technologies of governance. This creates an innate hierarchy in which global powers influence political decisions, conflicting with the organization's principles of equality. This is common in humanitarian spaces and reflects neoliberal rhetorics of organizational management, individual growth, and responsibility that supersede notions of care (Trnka and Trundle 2017: 12). The aim of political neutrality is challenging and contradicts many of PeaceUnite's actions. Negotiating religious differences alongside complex internal politics creates an environment where relevance and urgency categorize different issues. This inevitably means that the priorities of some countries are not addressed. Consequently, zones of tension emerge, limiting PeaceUnite's work as they balance their goals of care for humanity and the earth with the need to survive economically, function efficiently as an organization, and remain apolitical to avoid alienating or harming their members. Bordering mechanisms are enacted in numerous ways: distinguishing countries’ distinct roles, emphasizing national differences, comparing local approaches, and working through intranational and international tensions. This demonstrates how state control is ever-present at the transnational level, countering the belief that neoliberalism weakens the state.

In making decisions such as accepting China's terms for membership, PeaceUnite takes a political stance despite its apolitical intentions (Ager and Ager 2011). This creates a dissonance between organizational aims and practice, whereby the reality of geopolitical relationships impedes their desires for “good.” This is an integral risk for transnational humanitarian organizations, as the number of countries involved increases the potential influence of geopolitical tensions. The reinforcement of borders based upon internal relationships exacerbates this issue, particularly as people involved in PeaceUnite attempt to overcome these borders to help “all” people. Despite ideals of equality, an innate hierarchy shapes the agency and autonomy of local chapters and individuals. While humanitarian organizations like PeaceUnite have many benefits and positive outcomes, they are constrained by the inherent contradictions in their work, between their aims of overcoming borders to enhance their global peace work and the restrictions imposed by the realities of funding and political control. The bureaucratization and state-like management of PeaceUnite demonstrates their attempt to increase the impacts of their work. Yet, this introduces issues of hierarchy and organizational politics that hinder their work toward world peace.