NERELUN: Negotiating Religion at the United Nations
Religion has become a salient issue within the United Nations (UN), especially in its human rights activities. This is especially due to a widespread perception of the growing threat posed by Islam, especially to the universality of human rights. The academic debate on the topic is highly polarised, with one view defending secularism as a basis of the universality of human rights and the suppression of religion, and the other seeing religions as the ‘real’ sources of human rights, and secularism as a distortion of religion; a more critical view questions both the neat distinctions between these rival views, and their internal coherence. Taking a different path, this project takes secular and religious visions as two sides of the same equation, and explores the question of how states negotiate the unending conflict between these two visions in relation to the construction of human right norms and institutions within the UN. It aims to write a revisionist history of the sources and consequences of the conflict between secular and religious vision in the field of human rights. The project proposes an entirely new theory to conceptualise the dialectic conflict between these two visions, and to select the case studies that exemplify the different configurations of the positions of states on the matter. These positions are then assessed in relation to five critical junctures in the development of human right norms and institutions, based on primary sources collected from UN archives and semi-structured interviews, analysed through the process-tracing method. In producing a theoretically informed and empirical investigation, the project aims to reframe the terms of the debate across disciplines, in a way that transcends binary or absolutist perspectives that dominate both academic and public debates.
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CALL FOR PAPERS
RELIGIOUS WORLDMAKING
Exploring ideological uses of religion in making or breaking fundamental norms in contemporary world politics
PARIS, Sciences Po, Centre de recherches internationales, 25-26 November 2024
INFORMATION AND APPLICATIONS HERE
November 15, 2023
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University
Visions of World Society Beyond the West
The emerging literature on peripheral approaches to the global order has sparked debates on the contingent character of the so-called ‘Liberal International Order’. It has retrieved less visible or forgotten voices in world politics, as well as reconstructed the ways in which these voices have contested international norms and institutions. However, much of this literature has focused on recovering the different forms of resistance by a so-called ‘non-West’ to the dominant order imposed by ‘the West’. How these actors have acted beyond responding to Western scripts and practices calls for more exploration.
This conference aims is to investigate the full spectrum of agency beyond the West, with a focus on how different actors have shaped and contested the normative structure of the world order, as well as imagined and constructed alternatives to it. It will seek to shed light on how a variety of actors have articulated their own visions of the relationship between states as well as the relationship between the state and the individual. It will explore the diversity of visions from peripheries, the ways in which they have been pursued, and the degree to which they have been realized.
The workshop puts together contributions from the disciplines of International Relations, History, Sociology and Philosophy, as well as multidisciplinary approaches, speaking to the following core dimensions of global order:
i) The political: distribution and regulation of power
ii) The normative/legal: shared norms and rules that should form the basis for all countries to act on their own or collectively in pursuit of their self-interest or collective interest
iii) The economic: (re)distribution of resources and wealth
The whole program is HERE
Image credit: Walid Siti
