Rezza P. Setiawan
Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies
Polarization is so pervasive that it touches almost every aspect of our lives, including the issues of religion, environment, social, politics, and economy. Thus, polarization cannot be viewed separately from other interrelated issues, which requires scholars to observe its many aspects in order to understand the phenomenon.
ICRS’ (un)conference titled “Polarization and its Discontent in the Global South: Mitigation Measures, Strategies, and Policies” was held on 24–25 April 2025 at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta. The discussion invited four speakers from diverse backgrounds: Daniel Medina from the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), Colombia; Ana Carolina Evangelista from the Institute of Studies on Religion (ISER), Brazil; Nicholas Adams from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; and Nurhuda Ramli from IMAN Research, Malaysia; with Dicky Sofjan from ICRS and Globethics moderating the discussion. This article will present polarization not as an isolated entity but as a complex phenomenon in entanglement with many other intersecting phenomena by highlighting several talking points of the plenary session speakers.
The Many Limbs of Polarization
The moderator began the session by posing a question: “What is polarization?” In response to the question, Medina recognized the need for further development in conceptual understanding of polarization. He then proposed a definition of “polarization” as the prominent division of clustering views/beliefs in antagonistic boxes. Medina views polarization not as an isolated problem in itself, but as a “hyper-problem,” which he explained as a problem that complicates the other intersecting problems.
To further understand polarization as a hyper-problem, Medina and Evangelista presented cases of polarization from their own contexts in Colombia and Brazil, respectively.
The people of Colombia experience social fractures with the ongoing conflict between the ruling government and revolutionary forces led under the banner of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia; FARC). In this case polarization manifests through ideological conflicts, which are also entangled with issues of religion (Parisi & Ibarra Padilla, 2025), politics, and economy (Guáqueta, 2003), with the entangled polarization further stirring the complexity pot by becoming a psychosocial barrier against efforts toward peace (Villa-Gómez et al., 2024). All of these interrelated issues have amalgamated into decades of prolonged violent conflicts.
Brazilian people and their political affairs are also entangled with religious traditions that complicate polarization as well. Evangelista claims that the incorporation of Christian values in public policy creates polarization among the people, between the secular and the religious, between the Catholics and the Neopentecosts (Moreira, 2018; Segatto et al., 2022). One of the secular narratives against this shift is on how “religious businessmen” profit from such incorporation of religious affairs into public policy. This polarization resulted in the election of a candidate from a far-right party in the 2018 presidential election (Layton et al., 2021). From this case, one could see that societal polarization in religious realms is inevitably tangled with the social, economic, and political realms of Brazilian society.
These two cases demonstrate the contextually-specific nature of polarization in entanglement with other phenomena. What might cause severe polarization in one case might not matter as much in other contexts. Although, it might not be entirely absent from the specific case. Conflicts in Colombia are fueled mainly by their ideological differences, but are also related with other factors as well, including religion. Inversely, the influence of ideology in Brazil might not be readily-apparent, but it is still related nonetheless.
Whose Agenda is Being Served?
One implication of Evangelista’s description of the Brazilian case of polarization is that there are some people who become advantaged and others who become disadvantaged by the polarization. This is an important consideration that Adams also offered to the forum, which highlights the instrumental aspect of polarization that works as a tool for a specific agenda in a specific context. It then boils down to the question of whose agendas are served by the polarization.
Polarization was and is still used because it is structurally-rooted in Malaysia. The Malaysian constitutional foundation was constructed upon the British Empire’s colonial assumption of using division and polarization as their means to control its subjects. Ramli stated that Malaysian society was a very fluid society before British colonization. Then Ramli pointed out that this colonial legacy resulted in Islamic supremacy in a polarized society since the 1980s. This shift toward Islamic supremacy produces majority-minority discourses with the resulting hateful narratives among its society. This mode of governance created a system that serves the interest of one party at the expense of the others. The British imperial agenda was first served by polarization in the colonial era, which is unfortunately followed by the current Islamic rulers.
Following this matter, the question of who benefits from polarization, according to Adams, is more important than that of how “toxic” a polarization is. How one defines a problem through a specific differentiation would produce a specific discourse as well, which in turn would lead to a specific kind of response. For example, while Ramli views that the problem of polarization is coming from urban areas, Adams believes that cities are also the source of solutions against violent polarization. Evangelista also added that the solutions against polarization come from below, from the lives of everyday people, to which Medina also stated that polarization would always be there and it does not grow in a vacuum, which makes the responsibility of guarding against violent tendency fall not only to one party but to everyone as part of the society.
Conclusion
There are two important assumptions in the discussion that would be helpful to better understand the phenomenon of polarization. First, polarization is a hyper-problem that complicates other problems. It cannot be viewed separately from other issues, but rather highlights the inseparability of one issue from the others. Polarization is not a singular entity that can be isolated, but a process that flows along with other phenomena. Second, polarization serves certain interests. Any question regarding the effects of polarization in society would need to pay close attention to who is benefitting from the polarization because those are the ones who would try to conserve the polarization.
Thus, lingering questions remain, albeit transformed. Instead of merely asking “What is polarization,” one could also ask “How does polarization manifest in our specific context?” Instead of only asking about the solution to polarization, one should also remember to ask both “Who benefits from polarizations” and “Who is being disadvantaged?” To quote Adams, it is our task to provide the “distinctions that matter,” because from these distinctions we could transform the polarizations that matter the most to the most vulnerable.