The politics of restoring religion

At the height of the influence of the secularisation thesis, religion was understood to be absent from affairs of state and the law, including international politics and international law. Today things have changed, and scholars and practitioners of International Relations (IR) are interested in religion's presence, rather than assuming its absence. As the critique of secularisation has gathered momentum over the past two decades, the presumption that religion was irrelevant to international law and politics has fallen into disarray. The background understanding provided by the secularisation thesis has been replaced with the notion that religion – often understood in ontologically fixed terms – has to be ‘brought back in’ to IR.Footnote ² Religious actors, institutions, and practices need to assume their proper role in international political theory and practice. Religion has work to do. It is both the problem and the solution. The momentum behind this new engagement with religion is captured in a recommendation of the 2010 President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships: the President, the Council suggests, should ‘request the appointment of senior staff for multi-religious engagement in each of the major agencies tasked with international affairs, including the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Security Council (NSC), and the Department of Defense’.Footnote ³

International Relations scholars have responded in different ways to the turn to religion. For some it has meant incorporating religious actors, traditions, and institutions more fully into the study of international theory, politics, and history.Footnote ⁴ For others it has meant including religious leaders and communities in processes of conflict management and resolution.Footnote ⁵ For others still, religion is seen as a variable that can explain international outcomes such as the frequency and longevity of violent conflict.Footnote ⁶ All of these approaches involve an attempt to restore religion to its proper place in International Relations theory and practice. Doing so, we are told, will help solve the myriad problems posed by religion, and by having ignored religion, in international and comparative politics. And the catalogue of international political shortcomings attributed to having missed or misconstrued religion is long and depressing: violent extremism, failure to achieve foreign policy objectives, faltering development projects, incomplete transitions to democracy, misguided attempts at nation-building, a rise in gender-based oppression, stymied efforts to achieve religious equality, suffering minorities, and so on. Religion can no longer be ignored.

The basic assumption animating this restorative turn to religion in International Relations is that once religious moderates are understood, engaged and empowered, and religious fundamentalists identified, sidelined or reformed, the problems posed by religion will lessen and religious freedom will spread across the globe. In certain US government circles pursuit of this agenda is referred to as ‘operationalizing religion’. A CSIS report, for example, bemoans the fact that ‘efforts to operationalize religion are still limited to boutique programs and discrete job functions’.Footnote ⁷ This approach to religion, as something that can be operationalised, has gathered extraordinary academic and international public policy traction. It is influential in ways that have yet to be fully accounted for in the discipline and beyond. The assumption that IR scholars, government officials, and foreign policy practitioners know more or less what religion is, where it is located, who speaks in its name, and how to restore it to IR enables academics and practitioners to leap straight into the business of quantifying religion's effects, adapting religion's insights to international problem-solving efforts, and incorporating religion's official representatives into international political decision-making and institutions. As the President's Advisory Council concludes, ‘We simply cannot understand our Nation or our world without understanding religion.’Footnote ⁸ If religious actors and practices are incorporated into theory and practice in the right way, the story goes, problems associated with religion will be resolved and the potential for religion to contribute to the betterment of the world more fully realised. As Robert Bosco puts it, ‘the project of “bringing religion into international relations” becomes less one of understanding than of predicting when, where, and why religious-based violence will occur, or discovering how to harness such volatile forces into a more palatable “Post-Westphalian” future wherein religious traditions are conceived as containing the normative content needed for and ecumenical “dialogue of civilizations”.’Footnote ⁹

The restorative narrative has largely replaced the secularisation thesis as the default position in religion and IR, particularly in the US and in certain international policy circles. It is not, however, the only account of religion and IR available. There are other contributions to the field that do not reflect the restorative impulse and actively problematise the assumptions on which it is based.Footnote ¹⁰ Though important, this scholarship is not the focus of this discussion. My concern is, more narrowly, with the production of particular forms of knowledge about religion and IR and its connection to specific forms of contemporary international power over religious affairs. This relationship between knowledge and power, captured in the phrase ‘strategic operationalization of religion’, is more than a matter of academic concern. The move to restore religion has laid the groundwork for a striking array of legal and administrative initiatives to intervene in religious affairs around the world. It creates the conditions of possibility for international interventions to secure religious freedom, create religiously tolerant subjects, and instruct governments on how to cultivate and oversee religiously diverse societies. These programmes are becoming institutionalised as natural attributes of international public life in the twenty-first century. They are becoming regular features on the global landscape. The attempt to restore religion to international public life and the forms of knowledge that underwrite it are creating new religious and political realities. They designate acceptable spaces for religion and acceptable forms of religion that are regulated legally and politically, domestically, and transnationally.

A rising tide of international legal and administrative initiatives, policies, and campaigns fit this description. Examples include the promotion of religious freedom, humanitarian intervention, foreign aid, nation-building and democratisation, counterterrorism, and peace-building efforts, military chaplaincies and other purveyors of religious services overseas, and the pronouncements of supra-national courts. Many of these initiatives reflect a commitment to the ‘strategic implementation of religious knowledge’.Footnote ¹¹ Rather than ignoring or shunning it as before, the drive to operationalise religion sets the terms for these international public policies and programmes. The first half of this article explores these connections between academic and official narratives about religion, and international public policy. The objective is to understand the relationship between knowledge and power in a specific set of circumstances. Efforts to restore religion to IR, I suggest, authorise particular forms of political and religious authority. The second half introduces an alternative approach to the study of religion and IR based on a different set of assumptions. Rather than bringing religion ‘back in’ to an allegedly secularised international public sphere, religion is not and never was entirely outside of power, in search of an opportunity to be publically resuscitated. To the contrary, religion is often wielded most powerfully by those in power, including states, market forces, institutionalised religions, international organisations, and others. From this perspective, the question for international theorists is not, ‘how to bring religion back in?’ Instead, it is what kind of work is accomplished in and through discourses of religion in particular circumstances? What forms of transnational power and authority are authorised through the promotion of religious toleration, religious freedom, and religious pluralism? How are religious and political lives transformed in the process? The next section takes a closer look at the strategic operationalisation of religion, the world it is creating, and the potential for alternatives.

The ‘two faces of faith’ and the strategic operationalisation of religion

A survey of IR scholars before 9/11 would likely have yielded a consensus that religion is, and should remain, on the margins of the study of the building blocks of world order. States are assumed to deal with religion internally, or not at all. In the aftermath of 9/11, two exceptions to this logic emerged both in the discipline and outside of it. First, religion is relevant to IR when dangerous forms of it escape the control of the state and are in need for international discipline. This is accomplished by states working in concert with other actors to contain dangerous or intolerant religion. Second, religion becomes relevant when it can be put to use to promote the common public international good. This is accomplished through humanitarian and development projects, human rights campaigns, transitional justice efforts, and so on. These two ‘sides’ of religion – dangerous religion and peaceful religion – are what Tony Blair refers to as the ‘two faces of faith’. Much of the current operationalisation of religion in IR follows the logic of marginalising dangerous religion and empowering peaceful religion. The two faces of faith are at hard work in the world. They organise how scholars and practitioners frame problems and answer questions involving religion and world affairs. They provide a sense of purpose to attempts to bring religion back in.

The first side of the restorative coin involves the need to contain allegedly dangerous forms of religion that states fail to control domestically. If these forms of religion leak out and contaminate global order, religion is transformed into an object of securitisation and a target of state control or violence. It is subject to international censure. If activities designated by global authorities as ‘religious’ refuse the terms of their confinement and are in need for discipline by a state that fails to mete it out, they are deemed a threat to international security and attract the attention of international security experts, academics, and policymakers. This fearful religion is associated in this account with the violent history of Europe's past and much of the rest of the world's religious present. It includes both the sectarian violence of the Wars of Religion during the European Reformation and afterwards, as well as the intolerance, gender and sexual inequality, fanaticism and terrorism associated with certain forms of contemporary extremism, particularly but not exclusively Islamist extremism. Such forms of ‘bad’ religion are understood to slip easily into violence, unlike peaceful religion, which curbs it. As Brian Goldstone points out, contemporary notions of religious violence are anchored in an opposition between a terrifying figure of the premodern past, on the one hand, and an Enlightened believer at home in the world on the other. ‘While the latter is rendered normative, the former has to be subject to correction or made extinct. The discourse of [bad] religion is what makes this project work.’Footnote ¹²

The second side of the restorative coin is a friendlier one. In this scenario, irenic religion is restored to IR and takes on a positive role cementing and enhancing international public order. The promotion of peaceful religion is a corrective attempt to resuscitate religion by insisting that it is relevant to politics after all, especially internationally, and has much to contribute to global relief efforts, nation-building, development, and the moral foundations of international public life. Peaceful religion pundits and scholars distinguish themselves from those who dismiss the public significance of religion by positing, often enthusiastically, that religion is important or downright necessary for politics to unfold democratically and religious freedom to flourish globally. The excitement is palpable. As Robert Joustra explains:

Religion ‘done right’ is not only good for the individual but indispensable to international public life. It is a public good. It is a ‘force multiplier’.

The marginalisation of violent or intolerant religion is a minor note in this otherwise celebratory narrative. Intolerant religion is associated with division, violence and intolerance and the failure of the state to properly domesticate it, or of the religion to properly domesticate itself (more on this shortly). This wariness is tempered, however, by an insistence on a public and transformative role for peaceful religion, tolerant faith-based leaders, and authentic religious texts that are waiting in the wings to ensure religion's proper place in international and domestic public life. These religious goods are touted as contributors to global justice campaigns, engineers of peace building, agents of post-conflict reconciliation, and a countervailing force to terrorism.Footnote ¹⁴ Peaceful religion is bound to triumph over its intolerant rivals. The pronouncements of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation capture both sides of the restorative consensus. In Blair's words, ‘there are two faces of faith in our world today. One is seen not just in acts of religious extremism, but also in the desire of religious people to wear their faith as a badge of identity in opposition to those who are different. The other face is defined by extraordinary acts of sacrifice and compassion – for example, in caring for the sick, disabled or destitute … All over the world, this battle between the two faces of faith is being played out.’Footnote ¹⁵

Like dangerous religion, the peaceful religion narrative appears in stronger and less insistent varieties. Many of these rely on familiar conventions for conceptualising religion that have been discussed and deconstructed elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet there is a twist, because religion is no longer seen as private, as Casanova has argued since the early 1990s, and more significantly, because a small army of international public authorities with significant financial means is now eagerly awaiting an answer to the question: what can we do to recognise and promote tolerant religion?Footnote ¹⁷ Purveyors of the restorative consensus have an answer to this question: certain religions, and certain forms of certain religions need to be recognised, reorganised, and rescued without delay from secularist condemnation or marginalisation. These religious inputs need to be identified, promoted, and propelled into the international public spotlight to serve as global problem-solvers by opening the door to their representatives, insights, and practices in domestic and international public life. Echoing Blair's insistence on the two ‘faces of faith,’ for instance, Banchoff and Wuthnow introduce their ‘more inclusive approach to the religious politics of human rights’ by observing that religious actors provide ‘vital resources – most centrally the belief in the transcendent equality and dignity of all human beings’ to enrich and provide ‘emotional foundations’ for an increasingly desiccated secular rational global rights discourse.Footnote ¹⁸

This narrative resonates powerfully across international public policy domains. It is reflected and naturalised in political projects of striking reach and variety. International public policy areas subject to this framing include transitional justice,Footnote ¹⁹ human rights advocacy, development assistance,Footnote ²⁰ nation and public-capacity building efforts, the UN Alliance of Civilisations, humanitarian and emergency relief efforts,Footnote ²¹ foreign policy legislation and implementation (advocacy leading up to the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998), and state-sponsored violence. The USAID development assistance programme RelHarmony,Footnote ²² for example, attempted to foster religious harmony in Albania by approaching religion both as a potential problem to be solved and as its own solution, insofar as interfaith cooperation and tolerance could be taught and institutionalised by outside authorities in cooperation with local religious actors.Footnote ²³ Similarly, the American government and much of the media promoted the US war in Afghanistan as, in part, an attempt to rescue Muslim women from their male oppressors. The US insisted upon the need to ensure a progression from a repressed religious (Muslim) Afghan woman confined to the private sphere to a correctly religious (tolerant, secularised Muslim or post-Muslim) woman active in the public sphere, shopping, wearing lipstick and taking off the headscarf – once and for all.Footnote ²⁴

The logic of publically supporting and promoting tolerant religion at home and abroad has a long history in the United States. Before 9/11 it energised attempts to remedy what was perceived as secularist bias in US government contracting by increasing the involvement of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in the provision of domestic social services and foreign assistance. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Charitable Choice bill, making it easier for FBOs to bid for government contracts without suppressing their religious character and obviating the need for them to establish separate ‘non-religious’ nonprofits to offer social services.Footnote ²⁵ In 2001 the Bush Administration created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI, now the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, or OFBNP), paving the way for more religious organisations to receive government funding.Footnote ²⁶ Further executive orders created Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI) in the Departments of Justice, Labour, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Agriculture, and USAID.Footnote ²⁷ The US also doubled total foreign aid dollars allocated to FBOs.Footnote ²⁸ Of particular significance to these programmes is a 2004 USAID ruling ‘Participation by Religious Orders in USAID Programs’, (known as the ‘Rule’),Footnote ²⁹ which transformed USAID policy on engagement with FBOs by reversing the ‘pervasively sectarian’ doctrine previously upheld by the Supreme Court:

The ‘Rule’ prevents discrimination against organisations which provide social services in a religious setting (such as a building decorated with religious icons, scriptures, or symbols) or which engage in discriminatory practices in the hiring of staff or in their management procedures (such as restricting paid employment or election to a Board of Directors to adherents of a particular faith).Footnote ³¹ FBOs cannot discriminate against non-believers in the provision of USAID-supported services.Footnote ³²

The shift toward funding FBOs is part of a global restorative trend that went into full gear after 9/11. The UK Department of International Development (DFID), the British equivalent of USAID, has doubled the share of its aid funding going to FBOs, moving from what Clarke describes as ‘estrangement to engagement’.Footnote ³³ In 2005, DFID launched a five year £3.5 million research programme on ‘faiths in development’ in conjunction with the University of Birmingham, and in 2003 ‘the British government launched a cross-Whitehall dialogue on faith issues to co-ordinate inter-departmental engagement with UK faith communities’.Footnote ³⁴ Under James Wolfensohn, the World Bank and World Health Organization also became interested in funding development through FBOs, marked by the launch of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and the Bank's efforts to establish working dialogues between donors, governments, and faith leaders through the Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics programme.Footnote ³⁵

The logic of the ‘two faces of faith’ underlies much contemporary theory and practice at the intersection of religion and international affairs. A proliferating number of well-funded projects are occupied, or even defined by, campaigns to discern, decipher, and defend peaceful religion and project it internationally through states, international courts, and international and non-governmental organisations. Other projects, and sometimes the same ones, are occupied by similarly urgent efforts to discern, reform, or suppress intolerant religion and ensure that it is not projected internationally. Both agendas rely on the authority, and if necessary the use of force, by states and other powerful actors to realise these objectives. These initiatives enact new forms of international political and religious authority. They privilege particular understandings of religion, empower certain religious actors and institutions to speak in the name of believers, and sanction particular legal arrangements between states and religious institutions. They have a disciplinary edge. As Blair firmly reminds us, ‘those who feel that their faith compels them to act in a way destructive of mutual respect must be persuaded that this is a wrong reading of their faith’.Footnote ³⁶

One implication is that some religions, or certain forms thereof, are seen as inherently less inclined toward mutual respect and in need for more vigorous modes of persuasion. Islam is often held up as an example. As a Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder entitled ‘Islam: Governing under Sharia’ warns readers, ‘the debate is growing as to whether sharia can coexist with secularism, democracy, or even modernity’.Footnote ³⁷ This ominous language is echoed in countless policy documents weighing the merits and dangers of Islam.Footnote ³⁸ As Salomon and Walton observe, ‘the past decade has witnessed the progressive categorisation of Islam as the most ‘religious’ religion – that is, the religion most incompatible with the dictates of political liberalism’.Footnote ³⁹ Islam is a special target of contemporary transnational efforts to restore and reform religion. Islamic fundamentalism, and not religion, is often posited as the problem to be solved by teaching tolerance. Hirschkind has argued that, ‘the enemy of Enlightenment is no longer “religion”, now understood as one of Europe's greatest moral assets, but fundamentalism: namely, those traditions of religious practice that fail to accede to the universality of post-theistic Christianity and therefore sit uncomfortably with the liberal sensibilities of modern Europeans’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The two faces of faith offer structure and simplicity for academics, officials, and practitioners. They provide signposts for decision-makers and academics grappling with the task of responding to religion by simplifying a complex series of religio-political landscapes into something that appears universal and comprehensible. The process of managing religion according to this template generates impressive amounts of work for governments, think tanks, foundations, foreign policy pundits, and religion experts. In the US foreign policy community experts on all things religious have produced an avalanche of scholarship, offering up for public and official consumption what Samuel Moyn aptly describes as ‘theoretical rationales for the policy shop that they sometimes directly serve’.Footnote ⁴¹ The industry associated with restoring religion is changing the world. While the dynamics of regulating religion have animated local and state-level jurisdictions for some time – as long as there has been something defined as ‘religion’ to be overseen – a denationalisation, deterritorialisation, and reconfiguration of legal and political authority described by scholars such as Paul Berman and Saskia SassenFootnote ⁴² is bringing the transnational dynamics discussed in this article into much larger relief. These developments are worth tracking. Extending beyond the American academy, foundations, and military and foreign aid establishments, authoritative constructs of religion, religious toleration, and religious freedom are developing – and processes of discernment, enforcement, and administration occurring – in new venues, among new actors, and via new institutional channels. These authority structures operate on a global scale. The ‘two faces of faith’ narrative and the political work it accomplishes are features on a much broader landscape in which the transnational legal and political administration of religious affairs is not the exception but the rule.

Responding to the critique of secularism by opening spaces for religious voices, actors, and institutions in international public life initially appeared to solve certain problems posed by the unthinking exclusion of religious actors and institutions from public life. It also created new ones. In practice, the assumption that religion needs to be ‘brought back in’ has tended to privilege powerful institutionalised authorities, both secular and religious, at the expense of dissenters and those on the margins. The hierarchical, institutionalised forms of religion defended by religious freedom advocates, for example, have the potential to harden and reify discrete religious identities and communities, sanctify established authorities, and put pressure on (or close down) spaces in which non-established, unorthodox, and emergent ways of being religious (or not) have room to flourish. By politically empowering those formally authorised to speak in the name of religious believers, and positing hard lines dividing one group of ‘believers’ from the next, the advocacy of religious freedom has the potential to bolster established authorities at the expense of dissenters within communities and those for whom questions of religious identification are less black and white. As the epigraph to this article suggests, religion is often the product of a creative symbiosis of insiders and outsiders, populated by individuals who cannot be placed into the rigid categories of believer and unbeliever. If the attempt to restore religion to IR has led to a selective valuation and public empowerment of particular religious authorities in international public life, is it possible to imagine an alternative that would pay heed to a more ambivalent and complex understanding of religion? Is there a way to study religion and IR that avoids both the exclusionary impulses of certain strains of secularism and the exclusivist privileging of religious authorities selected to publically represent ‘religion’?

By starting from a place where religion is allegedly absent (and thus in need for restoration), the restorative narrative relies on an oppositional ‘secular versus religious’ landscape that arguably never existed in the world. What if religion never left, but has assumed different forms and occupied different spaces under modern regimes of governance? As Jean Comaroff argues, “despite its protestations to the contrary, modernity never was truly disenchanted … religion proper has not actually been absent from the public life of most modern nation-states, although its precise place within them may have varied’.Footnote ⁴³ What if, moreover, most actual religious lives are ‘eclectic, adaptive, and acculturating’, mixing not only with other religious traditions but also with practices from the broader cultures that surround them?Footnote ⁴⁴ Modernity, in these accounts, is ‘characterized not primarily by the dismissal or displacement of religion, but by the persistence, transformation, and sometimes fragmentation and dispersal of religion under what still might be termed “secularizing” dynamics’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this view, which I share, religion is not outside of power. It is often wielded most powerfully in complex formations by those in power, including states, market forces, and other global institutions. Rather than ask, ‘what is religion and how can it be brought in to help solve global problems?’ the question becomes, what is accomplished in and through discourses of religion? What forms of authority are mobilised through particular discourses of religious toleration or religious freedom? What are their effects on the organisation of social and political life in different contexts? Defining religion is never merely an academic exercise. As Asad argues, it helps to organise social life and the possibilities of personal experience:

Today religion is overseen legally and administratively through formations of secular power that operate transnationally. Religious diversity is constructed and managed through transnational legal, administrative, and political practice. The law, whether American law operating extraterritorially, international human rights law, or the law of the European Union, contributes to the oversight of religious affairs in jurisdictions around the world. Neither the old logic of separation nor the new logic of restoration is able to capture these dynamics.

International politics after secularism

In an exchange between Bryan Hehir of the Kennedy School, and John Ruggie, then UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Business and Human Rights, Hehir asked: ‘Where is religion at the UN?’ To which Ruggie replied: ‘There is none.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Ruggie has a point. International human rights law as embodied in the major treaties and enforced by the UN bureaucratic apparatus formally recognises no religion. But that is not where the story ends. To enforce a right to religious freedom, as UN bureaucrats are required to do under international law, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and other administrative agencies make determinations about what constitutes religion and religious freedom, who qualifies as a religious subject or association, and who has violated relevant international norms and standards. The avalanche of position papers, urgent appeals, and letters of allegation issued by the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Religion or Belief and other international bodies do not unilaterally determine outcomes on the ground. Yet these administrative practices, procedures, and policy recommendations, repeated over the course of decades, serve as points of reference and even as constitutional templates in legal debates involving the state management of religious affairs. These templates become woven into domestic fields of state and local religious regulation, impacting individual and associational lives.Footnote ⁴⁸ New forms of authority are enacted in the process.

To see these dynamics it is helpful to repurpose an argument made by Hussein Agrama. Writing on secularism, Agrama argues that, ‘what best characterizes secularism is not a separation between religion and politics, but an ongoing, deepening, entanglement in the question of religion and politics, for the purpose of identifying and securing fundamental liberal rights and freedoms’.Footnote ⁴⁹ As international regulatory regimes become more entrenched, as the authority they wield becomes naturalised,Footnote ⁵⁰ transnational actors and institutions wield increasing margins of authority to shape religious and political lives, and how the line between them is drawn. In other words, to secure liberal rights and freedoms involves a series of ongoing, deepening entanglements in the question of religion and politics by secular authorities. These entanglements are now global in scale. Rather than take secularism to be a neutral or natural space for politics that emerges once religion has been privatised, displaced, or diminished, it takes shape here as a contingent series of legal and political claims and projects that are deeply implicated in the definition and management of religion, religious freedom, toleration, diversity, and so on. Secularism is not the absence of religion, but enacts a particular kind of presence. It appropriates religion: defining, shaping, and even transforming it.Footnote ⁵¹ A good argument has been made recently for discarding secularism as an organising rubric altogether and focusing instead on varieties of religious establishment, understood as the mechanisms and practices through which certain forms of religious expression are privileged and others marginalised by the state.Footnote ⁵²

Public international authorities enact forms of secular authority – or varieties of religious establishment – through different channels. One is the identification of a problem or conflict as religious, bringing it under the jurisdiction of relevant international legal norms, authorities, and conventions. Another is weighing in on the justifiable limits that states may enact in the name of ‘public order’ while still maintaining compliance with international norms and legal standards. A third is identifying alleged violations of international standards as religious violations and recommending particular legislative, judicial or administrative remedies. These interventions realise their effects gradually through everyday legal and administrative activities – like drops of water dripping constantly on a stone.

An example is a campaign in Egypt by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, working alongside local civil society and human rights groups, which contributed to a 2009 decision by the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court to amend the Egyptian state regime for governing religious identity through the national identity card system. As a result of this ruling Baha'i and other Egyptian citizens who do not identify with one of the three state-recognised ‘heavenly religions’ were able to legally obtain national identity documents without (mis)representing their religious affiliation. Similarly, in contemporary Sri Lanka legal debates involving state regulation of religious conversion unfold in a broader context in which international human rights norms, as well as foreign religious and secular actors, play an important structuring role.Footnote ⁵³ In the Philippines, legal reform initiatives sponsored by local civil society groups in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (the ARMM) have relied on the normative force of Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In this case local reformers mobilised CEDAW in an attempt to improve women's access to justice through revision of the Code of Muslim Personal Laws.Footnote ⁵⁴

The force of these interventions and their complex and constitutive interactions with local fields of religious practice and religious governance suggests a different response to Ruggie's question, ‘where is religion at the UN?’ It is not that Ruggie was mistaken, and that there is religion at the UN and other sites of international authority that has slipped under the radar due to secularist bias. That is the standard response after the critique of secularism, often accompanied by an admonishment to pay closer attention to established religious authorities. If this restorative impulse leads to a political revaluation of established authorities at the expense of dissenters and doubters, as I have argued, then a different set of questions needs to be posed about religion and international power. How is the legal administration of religious affairs undertaken by the UN? Who defines and oversees religious diversity in global and transnational spaces, treaties, and contexts? What are the administrative mechanisms and processes through which this is this accomplished? Who determines what stands as legitimate or true religion, which forms of religion can appear in public, who speaks with religious authority, and which religious actors receive public attention and funding?

These questions point us toward what Jakob deRoover describes as the quandary of secular law: the moment when law is faced with deciding which practices are religious and which are secular. The problem and the paradox is that, ‘to require of secular law that it verify the religiosity of practices is to condemn it to giving up its own secularity’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In short, there is no such thing as legal neutrality vis-à-vis religion:

Giving up on law's secularity makes it easier to see how contemporary religious lives, bodies, places, and practices are shaped and transformed through cross-border legal and administrative interventions by states and other public transnational actors. As Sullivan, Taussig-Rubbo and Yelle suggest, ‘transnational political and legal institutions, both governmental and non-governmental, have begun to enforce regional and international legal regimes that impact religion’.Footnote ⁵⁷ States such as the United States and Turkey undertake ambitious projects to reform religious landscapes beyond their territorial jurisdictions. Supra-national tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) project regulatory authority across state boundaries. International human rights activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch shape domestic legislative and administrative practice in jurisdictions around the world.Footnote ⁵⁸ Religious actors respond, resist and adapt to these efforts. These entanglements are creating new political and religious realities.

To see these developments requires contextualising state and local practice in the broader fields of advocacy, activity, and control in which they are embedded. As Sassen argues, globalisation ‘is not simply growing interdependence – its typical definition – but the actual production of spatial and temporal frames that simultaneously inhabit national structures and are distinct from national spatial and temporal frames as these have been historically constructed’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is well established that states inhabit national structures to shape religious fields domestically.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Evans and Petkoff observe, ‘in many states, rightly or wrongly, religious difference is seen as a threat to public order and the law is used to differentiate between those forms of religion which are politically welcome and those which are not’.Footnote ⁶¹ The French Stasi Commission, an investigative body created by the National Assembly in 2003 to debate the principle of laïcité, stated that, ‘the secular state … cannot be content with withdrawing from all religious and spiritual matters’.Footnote ⁶² The Thai state sponsors Buddhist missionaries (dhammaduta) that are active in border areas among the country's tribal populations. According to the National Buddhism Bureau there are 5,609 appointed dhammaduta working nationwide.

Yet the transnational angle is less well understood. Returning to Sassen's argument, what happens to regulatory practices at ‘water's edge’? In what ways are these activities also distinct from national spatial and temporal frames as historically constructed? In the case of Thailand, in addition to sponsoring Buddhist missionaries at home the government has also appointed 1,857 dhammaduta for international travel, and there are 1,380 dhammaduta working overseas in thirty countries.Footnote ⁶³ Other states are also active in religious fields beyond their borders, impacting the politics of religious diversity in contexts around the world. Religion is overseen not only through the law, including international human rights law, but also through political and administrative policies and procedures. While some of these activities are conventionally classified as religious (that is, chaplaincies), others are not (such as foreign assistance, stabilisation and nation-building). These distinctions are not natural but are constructed through practice. According to Courtney Bender, ‘what we observe and experience as “natural” distinctions between religions, and religion and secular interests, are in fact not natural but conjoined to specific secular projects, shaped by history, developing in time’.Footnote ⁶⁴

These secular projects are now global in scope. Legal and administrative practices serve as vectors through which states, international courts, international organisations, and other transnational actors shape and interact with religious (and secular) bodies, places, and practices. They work in tandem with, and at other times in tension with, other projects sponsored by other transnational actors and authorities. Together they enact what Ilana Feldman describes as the ‘work of rule’Footnote ⁶⁵ of governing religion. These activities unfold on a daily basis at the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the US and other state foreign policy establishments, the EU, and international advocacy organisations.

Their scale and reach is impressive. In April 2012 the United States and Afghanistan signed a strategic partnership agreement pledging American support for Afghanistan for ten years after the withdrawal of combat troops in 2014, effectively keeping American troops in Afghanistan until 2024. The agreement covers social and economic development, institution building, regional cooperation, and security. It is also likely to involve building madrassas, fixing up cultural centres and charging chaplains with establishing relationships with local religious leaders. According to CSIS, ‘research conducted to date indicates that the US government's approach to religion in conflict-prone settings has in fact improved in recent years. Parts of the intelligence community address religion as a transnational concern; the military services are increasingly developing doctrine and training on approaching religious leaders and communities in stability operations; USAID works with faith-based organizations and incorporates religious sensitivities into some development programming; and State Department officials promote international religious freedom and are focused on improving relations with the Muslim world.’Footnote ⁶⁶ It is not only the American government that is involved in these activities. Gutkowski and Wilkes describe a meeting in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, prompted by the Muslim chaplain for the British Army, in which senior clerics from the Helmand ulema urged chief of the General Staff David Richards to deploy British imams to Afghanistan ‘in a “hearts and minds” role to highlight the importance of Islam in British society, to counter Taliban claims that British Muslims are oppressed and to explain Islam to British soldiers’.Footnote ⁶⁷

This is a world in which the notion of separation ‘breaks down as a useful structuring description of the relationship between law and religion’.Footnote ⁶⁸ To grasp these developments requires moving beyond the confines of legal debates over the First Amendment and political debates over the meaning of secularity.Footnote ⁶⁹ It requires understanding how particular forms of knowledge about religion authorise specific legal, political, and administrative interventions in religious and political landscapes around the world.

An example is the promotion of religious freedom.Footnote ⁷⁰ Contemporary international religious freedom advocacy does not merely enforce a universal norm, as is often suggested, but helps to create individual subjects and ‘faith communities’ for whom choosing and believing in religion are seen as the defining characteristics of what it is to be a modern religious subject, and the right to choose to believe (or not) as the essence of what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief, belief in belief, as it were, across communities of belief (and non-belief), is for many contemporary advocates what it means to have achieved religious freedom.Footnote ⁷¹ Responding to concerns about both the political and religious implications of this top-down model of religious freedom requires an alternative understanding of religious freedom, explored in my current work that draws on a notion of freedom as articulated by Foucault. In this image, Connolly explains, freedom is ‘not reducible to the freedom of subjects; it is at least partly the release of that which does not fit into the molds of subjectivity and normalization’. This leads to a ‘conception of rights attached not to the self as subject, but especially to that which is defined by the normalized subject as otherness, as deviating from or falling below or failing to live up to the standards of subjectivity’.Footnote ⁷² In this conceptualisation religious freedom emerges as a site of resistance or insurrection against powerful institutionalised authorities both religious and secular, rather than as a form of religious and political discipline. This alternative ethos of religious freedom also corresponds with Clark Gilpin's notion of ‘areligious secularism’, which Sullivan describes as ‘a still emerging post-Christian space that honors religion as a human universal and in which religious pluralism can be creatively renegotiated in the many contemporary sites of cultural exchange; a disestablishment that implies multiplicity and heterogeneity rather than homogeneity or absence’, thus rejecting ‘both enlightenment epistemologies and the dogmatic constraint of religious authorities’.Footnote ⁷³