What motivated you to write your latest book Beyond Religious Freedom?
Beyond Religious Freedom is my response to what I see as a need to rethink how we approach the study of religion and politics in the field of international relations. There’s been a gold-rush mentality lately as scholars scurry to ‘get religion right’ – but many of these efforts are confused, or even troubling. The problem, as I discuss in more detail elsewhere, is that international relations ‘got religion’ but got it wrong. Beyond Religious Freedom encourages scholars to step back from the political fray. It neither celebrates religion for its allegedly peaceful potential nor condemns it for its allegedly violent tendencies. Instead, I propose a new conceptual framework for the study of religion and public life. It accounts for the gaps and tensions that I perceived between the large-scale international legal, political and religious engineering projects undertaken in the name of religious freedom, toleration, and rights, and the realities of the individuals and communities subjected to these efforts.
This disjuncture is reflected on the cover, in a photo taken by Samia Errazzouki of the desert with a sand berm in the distance and hand-made flowers sticking out of the sand in the foreground. The Moroccans built the berm in the 1980s during the war against the Polisario in an effort to divide Western Sahara, which they control, from the free zone controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The flowers … {more here}
The interview was conducted by John A. Rees during a symposium on ‘The Politics of Religious Freedom in the Asia-Pacific’ hosted by the Religion and Global Society Program, an initiative of the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame Australia.
Book: Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton University Press, 2015. – amazon | barnes&noble