What are the possibilities of agency in which resistance and conformity are taken seriously? How can scholars “take ‘the religious’ seriously” within conceptualizations of agency? This dissertation studies the religio-political ethics of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a persecuted and marginalized Muslim group that originated in 1880s when India was under British colonial rule and is legally designated a ‘non-Muslim minority’ in Pakistan today. I argue that even if it might appear to researchers and external observers that this community is resisting its heterodox labels by calling itself the “True Islam,” Ahmadi ethical intentionality is more complex. The intention for Ahmadis is to enact the “True Islam” by submitting themselves to Allah as part of their religious ethic – while opposition is not an explicit part of their logic, it is constitutive of their enactment due to their marginalization. With this, I theorize Ahmadiyya agency such that resistance and conformity are mutually constitutive and held in tension with one another, and term this as sabr [perseverance]. Within my conceptualization of sabr as co-constituted by resistance and conformity, I emphasize the importance of ethical intentionality in how I hold goals of empowerment and submission in tension with one another. Furthermore, the exclusion of the Ahmadiyya from the Muslim ummah [global community] in various geographical and discursive contexts is an important part of why Ahmadis are not “just” enacting conformity. Ahmadiyya agency cannot be disentangled from resistance because the community’s claims to be the “true” Islam inherently opposes those who deny this claim. As such, I interrogate the importance of Ahmadiyya subaltern identity to unpack how the interplay between resistance and conformity is enacted by Ahmadis across geographic contexts. In North America and Ghana, where I have conducted virtual and in-person fieldwork observations and interviews, the subalternity of the Ahmadiyya is not as clear and takes on different forms from that of South Asia. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the ethical intentionality of religious actors is not taken seriously within existing scholarship on agency and resistance, and this under-theorizes the importance of intentions within actors’ religious ethics. The Ahmadiyya is a generative case to explore the tensions between the community’s ethical intentionality and participation in religio-political spaces because of its complex subalternity.

Advocating for Themselves: Seeking Security Through Women’s Peacebuilding Organizations in Cote d’Ivoire, is a study of the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security agenda and how it is implemented in Côte dʼIvoire. I examine local and national women’s security and peacebuilding organizations’ understandings of security and the ways they establish and advocate for their priorities while working with the United Nations, transnational NGOs, and the national government. Much of the prior research on this topic suggests that international efforts to implement this agenda clash with national and local priorities. But I demonstrate that the reality is more complex: while multiple international and transnational discourses have sometimes-competing, sometimes-cooperating effects on the local implementation, Ivorian women’s understandings of security also shape the agenda' implementation. To understand the local dynamic of women's advocacy, I interviewed local NGO, government, and UN representatives and conducted participant observation over eleven months in Cote d’Ivoire, funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. I make three central arguments. The first is that two kinds of global actors—international and transnational—try to shape the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, but they do so in distinctive ways: through the state and bypassing it, resulting in poorly coordinated directives. The second is that this agenda in Côte dʼIvoire has narrowed to a focus on security sector reform at the national level, with the assistance of international actors, which privileges mechanisms of traditional security and co-opts women into existing structures of power. Third, local women’s organizations perform a pragmatic skepticism, working with international, transnational, and national actors to achieve their own goals, reclaiming some of the essentializing discourses told about them. With insights from African feminism and critical feminist peacebuilding literatures, my findings call into question the assumptions of women's roles in international security policies and the interrelation of actors in policy implementation.

How does Indianismo – an indigenous movement from the Andean region of Latin America - construct and discuss conditions of possibility for a reflexive form of multi-relational global coexistence? Indianismo proceeded from political intellectual productions and Aymara religious notions practiced in the Andean region of Latin America, but its work has important implications at the global level. In order to analyze these discussions and implications, I study the historical process through which Indianismo developed from 1962 to 2017 by using archival research in Bolivia. The genealogical study of Indianista intellectual practices shows how the movement created a political form of decoloniality against different kinds of patriarchic, capitalist, racist, and anthropocentric colonialisms. According to Indianismo, these forms of colonialism, together with other hierarchicalizations potentially ignored, were not only imposed domestically in Bolivia, but also globally in international institutions such as the United Nations. Indianismo thus questioned these colonial legacies and it constructed a dynamic, reflexive, and multi-relational alternative of global coexistence. My dissertation thus analyzes the genealogical construction of Indianismo while also producing important questions for the United Nations and its construction of global coexistence.

Incomplete Peace and Strategies of Resilience in Colombia focuses on interactions between the state government, the international community, and local communities as they attempt to once again build peace after the 2016 Peace Accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Immediately after the signing of the divisive peace accords, many different communities and populations within Colombia were hopeful as they imagined a new future. Five years after, it has become clear that rather than ending a part of the conflict, the accords and their implementation created a moment of reconfiguration for it. This dissertation examines the realities of how peacebuilding is carried out in Colombia, the ways that the national and international communities have shaped those processes, and how marginalized populations utilize strategies of resilience and self-help in the face of continued everyday violences committed by the state and other armed actors. From the halls of the Colombian and United States’ Congresses to rural communities in the Pacific Coast, this dissertation interrogates the complex and ever-changing relationships which make up how peace “gets done” beyond a state-centered vision of peacebuilding.