A RC43 Religion and Politics Panel, 24th IPSA World Congress of Political Science, July 23-28, 2016, Istanbul, Turkey.

In this era of public religions, religious revivalists of various traditions have become powerful forces not just socially but politically in many parts of the globe. In the more successful among such cases, they have either captured the whole (as in Iran) or penetrated some crucial parts (as in Turkey and India) of the modern state, thereby garnering institutional (including discursive) leverages through which to enforce their versions of rather totalizing ‘post-secularities’ over their variously-oriented and thus multidirectional societies.

Following the footsteps of the recent scholarships built on the notions of multiple and diverse secularities, this panel proposes to historicize and compare various local efforts at resecularization, or societal (often national) struggles over reformulating and reinstitutionalizing state-religion relationships after experiencing significant periods of religious resurgence or dominance. As in secularization processes, such resecularization processes are analytically better approached as phenomena that are inherently multi-level and dimensional, contentious and mutually constituting, and nationally varying.

This panel aims to focus on cases in which resecularization involves imagining and institutionalizing alternative ‘post-secular’ state-religion relationships in their national contexts, and comparatively examine and discuss various locally-rooted cultural articulations of, and struggles for, such alternative ‘post-secular’ states.

Convenor & Chair: Yasuyuki Matsunaga (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)
Co-Chair: Umut Azak (Okan University, Turkey)
Discussant: Naser Ghobadzadeh (Australian Catholic University, Australia)

Deadline to submit Paper proposals: October 7, 2015