Religious Worldmaking

Final conference of the NERELUN project (Negotiating Religion at the United Nations)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant agreement n. 101032546.

In a world dominated by states, secular practices may appear to underpin the basic common framework that enables state and non-state actors alike to pursue their individual goals and projects. Yet religion remains a potent force, mainly because it serves as a means for states to advance their ideological projects, but also because of confessional actors that defend their beliefs in a world system marked by secular ideology. There is a myriad of ways in which religion serves to advance ideological projects domestically and internationally, that destabilise or stabilise shared understandings of basic norms underpinning international order, or give rise to new norms.

The aim of this workshop is to account for the types of effects that the ideological use of religion has on the normative structure of world order, against a backdrop of global reordering and fundamental uncertainty about basic norms and their sustainability. More specifically, it seeks to explore three aspects of ideological uses of religion that aim to:

i. redefine or undermine fundamental norms (e.g. ius cogens) that are universally shared and accepted; 

ii. restore or strengthen fundamental norms; 

iii. create new fundamental norms or universalise particularist practices. 

The overarching objective is to explore the diversity of effects and the vector of their movement in relation to change and continuity in the global normative structure. 

Day 1 II 25 November II

14.30-14.45 Introduction

14.45-16.00 -  Keynote lecture 

History and the Limits of the Political Imagination 

Prof. Faisal Devji, University of Oxford  (45 min lecture, 30 discussion)

Break

16.10-18:10 Panel I – RECASTING NORM
Religious soft power and youth (re-)education: Competing Orthodoxies and war in Ukraine

Precious N Chatterje-Doody, The Open University

Israel’s right to self-defense: messianic manifestations in international law

Sara Troian, Maynooth University

Israeli nuclear weapons and the divine

Heba Taha, Lund University  

The culturalisation of Chinese environmental discourse

Valentina Pettosini, University of Siena

Day 2 II 26 November II

9.30 -11.00 Panel II – APPROPRIATION/RESTORATION OF NORMS

The religious challenge to the secular: The case of Turkey

Ceren Lord, University of Oxford

Secular Islam: Moroccan ‘Ulama and the Conception of Modern State

Salim Hmimnat, University Institute of African, Euro-Mediterranean and Ibero-American Studies, Mohammed V University, Rabat

Islam and Securitization in the Anthropocene: Muslim Responses to Environmental Challenges 

Ibrahim al-Marashi, California State University 

Stigma-management at war: Hezbollah and the protection of civilians

Marina Calculli, CERI - Sciences Po

11:30-13:00 Lunch Break

13.00-15.00 Panel III – CREATION OF NEW NORMS

The religious origins of the “just war” ideology and its consequences in recent international armed conflicts

Vinícius Alexandre Fortes de Barros, University of Cambridge

Postcolonial Populists - Decolonial Worldmaking after its Appropriation by the Authoritian Religious Right

Kira Huju, London School of Economics

‘Third Worldling’ International Organization: The Parallel Quests of Santa-Cruz and Aga Khan for a New International Institutional Order (1946-2002)

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement (Geneva, Switzerland) and Negar Mansouri, Copenhagen Business School.

The geonarrative of Iranian soulcraft 

Mohamed Forough, Erasmus University Rotterdam

15:00-15.15 Concluding remarks 

Gjovalin Macaj, University of Leiden