Revisiting the Link: Politicizing Religion in Democratizing Countries (original) (raw)
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The role of Religion in Conflict and Governance ppt Pdf
The role of Religion in Conflict and Governance, 2024
Religion has long been a significant factor in shaping conflicts and governance structures worldwide. While often associated with peace and moral guidance, it also has the potential to be a source of division and violence. This presentation delves into the multifaceted role of religion in relation to conflict and governance, exploring various issues such as interfaith movements, the drivers of conflict, the promotion of peace, the challenges of extremism, and opportunities for transformative change.
Religious versus Secular Politics: Competing Ideologies in a Changing System
The increasing number of religious conflicts and the new focus that accompanied it mostly failed to establish a connection between their arguments and what we observe in the real world. In many of these studies the discrepancy was caused by the conceptualization of the term "religious conflict." While many chose to focus solely on conflicts between groups from different religions or sects, we argue that a wider approach is needed. Instead of basing our case selection on religious or sectarian differences, one needs to look at conflicts that center around the issue of religion in general. The resurgence of religion movements following the recent regime changes in the Middle East requires societies to re-define the role of religion in politics. Since a large number of religious tensions present around the world does not turn violent, we believe one first needs to determine the factors influencing the likelihood and the level of violence in conflicts over the role of religion. Two factors appear to be important: institutional strength and belief system. In order to test this argument we turn our attention to Egypt where following the fall of Mubarak the main axis of conflict is over the role religion will play in the new political system.
Religion and democratisation: when and how it matters
Journal of Religious and Political Practice
This special issue aims to contribute to the growing literature on the role of religion in democratisation by focusing on state-religion interactions. Although the following articles focus on the relations between religion and democracy, they also add to the broader field of religion's influence on politics. Our goal is not to assert that religion is the significant factor in the transition to democracy. Actually, most existing surveys demonstrate that the GDP, level of education, urbanisation, and the existence of a middle class are more relevant triggers of regime transition. Religion, however, may influence the building of new institutions, the legal status of civil liberties, and patterns of political participation-all significant factors when it comes to consolidation of democracy. To capture the specific role of religion in democratic or political changes, it is necessary to move away from the dichotomy of state and religion and explore more deeply the interactions between state and religious organisations and actors. The often-assumed antagonism or tensions between the two represents only one form of interaction, which may be used or combined with competition, adaptation, and cooperation. Consequently, the following papers will examine the roles of multiple actors and their different levels and agencies within the state, religious associations, clergy, religious adherents, diasporas, and purveyors of education. In this regard, this special issue breaks from the dominant approaches in political science which focus on either the strategies of political elites during periods of democratisation or on the nature of the authoritarian state. It sheds light on the nature of state interactions-not only with religious ideas and factors, but also with religious institutions-therefore bringing the state back in the study of democratisation.
Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence
Sociological Theory, 2015
This paper seeks to develop a nuanced and qualified account of the distinctive ways in which religion can inform political conflict and violence. It seeks to transcend the opposition between particularizing stances, which see religiously informed political conflicts as sui generis and uniquely intractable, and generalizing stances, which assimilate religiously informed political conflicts to other forms of political conflict. The paper specifies the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order, as well as the distinctiveness of religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that – in certain contexts – can contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes are not distinctively religious. On the other hand, the paper shows that many putatively religious conflicts are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction.
The article comparatively investigates the role of religious actors in the democratization processes of five ‘young’ democracies from the Catholic, Protestant, Christian-Orthodox and Muslim world: West Germany after World War II (1945–1969), Georgia and Ukraine post-1987/9, Mali (post-1987), and Indonesia from 1998. The analysis provides an overview of the roles religious actors played in the erosion of authoritarian rule, the transition to democracy and subsequent democratic consolidation processes, as well as de-democratization processes. Our three paired comparisons, including one in-country comparison, show that the condition which most affected the role of religious actors in all three phases of democratic transitions was the de facto autonomy they enjoyed vis-à-vis the political regime as well as the organizational form these actors took. Their aims, means, and the political significance of their theology were highly dependent on the extent to which they benefitted from de facto autonomy within the state.
Religion, Conflict, and Regimes: A Two-Branch Model of Non-Democracy
The persistence of religious conflict necessitates analysis of its causes, features, and consequences. This project focuses on one dimension of religious conflict in particular – its impact on democracy. Specifically, this project addresses how religious differences (both in terms of piety and religious diversity in a given country) translate into regime outcomes. It analyzes two mechanisms by which salient religious divisions lead to non-democracy; first, by legitimizing authoritarian regimes, and second, by unsettling democratic arrangements.
Religion in Global Politics: Theories and Themes 2016-17
The so-called ‘resurgence’ of religion in the public sphere and the domain of the political more generally in recent decades is now a significant area of interdisciplinary scholarship eliciting a complex array of responses, ranging from vehement opposition to the very idea that religious concepts and commitments have a right to expression in public, political debates to a reassessment of the provenance and implications of divisions between the secular and the religious and their relationship to the nation state. The current geopolitical landscape wherein ‘religion’ has become a force to be reckoned with has demanded a reassessment of once predominant understandings of processes of secularisation, as well as the meanings of, and tensions inherent within, secular assumptions and secularist positions. The notion that there is no singular secularism, but rather a plurality of secularisms, and of religion as an invention of European modernity and colonialist exigencies are two of many emerging efforts to reconceptualise the meanings of religion and the secular and the entangled relationship between them. This course will offer a comprehensive overview of the various debates around, and theorisations of the nature of secularism and the role of religion in the public sphere in order to we attend to the central issue of how 'the secular' is constituted, understood, and instantiated in both domestic and international or transnational contexts. Other related topics will also be examined, taking a thematic approach, such as the relationship between religious discourses and political violence, the legislative difficulties presented by contradictions in liberalist political principles that underpin the political systems of the global North and models of multiculturalism, theocratic conceptions of the state, the role of religion in identity politics and transnational institutions, and state responses to religious identity claims and priorities, free speech and blasphemy, and religious discrimination amongst others.
Religion and democracy: international, transnational and global issues
European Political Science, 2012
Growing attention is given in IR theory and diplomatic circles to the ambivalent role of religion in world politics. However, there is a need for more analytical clarity, identifying at least four different domains: religions and interstate relations; religions and internationalism; religions and trans-nationalism; and religions and globalism. The most promising approach is the one that concentrates on the transnational projection of religions, connecting it to the way religions address global issues to influence international actors.
Religion and Comparative Political Sociology
Sociology Compass, 2010
In the last decade, religious politics seemed to sweep the world. Calls have been issued for religion to regain its rightful place in the study of politics. We contend that the influence of religion on politics is hardly novel and that religious beliefs and organizations have had a profound effect on polities both in the developed democracies and in developing societies. Drawing widely on the comparative sociology of politics, we trace the role of religion in the generation of political attitudes and preferences, in the process of democratization, in the formation of interest organizations and confessional parties, and consider the contemporary debate concerning religious violence. We will demonstrate the importance of religion in inspiring political behavior, including both electoral and non-electoral politics, and in the shaping of political institutions and the regulatory framework surrounding the religious sphere. Our survey indicates that neither arguments concerning the secularization of polity and society nor for the recent return of religious fervor to politics is persuasive.