Conflicts over religious symbols in the public sphere, gay marriage, abortion or gender equality have shown their disruptive potential across many societies in the world. They have also become the subject of political and legal debates in international institutions. These conflicts emerge out of different worldviews and normative conceptions of the good, and they are frequently framed in terms of competing interpretations of human rights. One newcomer voice in conflicts over rights and values in the international sphere is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which in recent years has become an active promoter of ‘traditional values’ both inside Russia and internationally. This article studies the ideational prerequisites and dynamics of Russian Orthodox ‘norm protagonism’ in the international arena.

This article offers a case study of the Russian-American pro-family organisation the World Congress of Families, explaining its emergence, strategies, and religious and political agenda from 1995 until 2019. The article adds to a growing body of research that sheds light on transnational networks of conservative and right-wing political and civil society actors. It zooms in on Russian pro-family activists as connected to such networks and thereby takes an innovative perspective on the Russian conservative turn as part of a global phenomenon. The article also makes the argument that a specific Russian Christian Right movement, comparable to and linked with the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Europe, is taking shape in Russia.

Abstract:This article is dedicated to analysis of the traditionalist agenda, promoted by Russia, in recent debates in the United Nations Human Rights Council (‘Traditional values’ from 2009 to 2013, ‘Protection of the family’ from 2014 to 2017). The traditionalist agenda could be interpreted as yet another chapter of contextualist opposition to the universalist application human of rights and as a successor to the cultural relativism in human rights promoted in the past by the Organization of Islamic States or countries from the Global South. This article seeks to challenge such an interpretation and instead makes the argument that the traditionalist agenda employs novel aspects of illiberal norm protagonism in the human rights sphere. The article undertakes an in-depth analysis of the discourse coalitions of both supporters and opponents of the traditionalist agenda, using the tools of discourse analysis in international relations and drawing on a constructivist approach to norm diffusion in international organisations.

This paper investigates how immigration and concerns over integration are changing established modes of cooperation between church and state in Austria. Focusing on the relationship between officially recognised Muslim and Eastern Orthodox organisations and the state, we examine how the mounting politicisation of immigrant integration has led the state to collaborate with minority religious organisations as representatives of immigrants and is increasing the opportunities for such religious groups to be visible and express voice in the public sphere. Based on interviews, policy documents and literature, we analyse how the modes of cooperation between religious organisations and the state are moving from a narrow and institutionalised collaboration on policy issues exclusively related to religion to a broader but more fluid and uncertain form of symbolic cooperation. We argue that, within this modified setting, recognised minority religious organisations are gradually assuming the function of political entrepreneurs who speak for the entire immigrant community. This, in turn, creates tensions within and between religious groups, and risks overstating religion as a factor in the integration of immigrants. Our comparison between Muslim and Eastern Orthodox religious organisations shows that, notwithstanding the greater salience of Islam, they both benefit from the new role of religion in integration issues.

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This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being either ‘liberal’ or ‘fundamentalist’ and ignores a third, in-between group, namely traditionalist religious actors and their claims. After having explained what makes traditionalist religious actors different from liberal and fundamentalist religious actors, the author develops 4 areas in which political liberalism should be pushed further theoretically in order to correctly theorize the challenge which traditional religious actors pose to liberal democracy. These 4 areas (blind spots) are: (1) the context of translation; (2) the politics of exemptions; (3) the multivocality of theology; and (4) the transnational nature of norm-contestation.

This article introduces a distinction in the paradigm of multiple modernities between a comparative-civilizational and a post-secular perspective. It argues that the former perspective helps us to understand modernization processes in large cultural-civilizational units, whereas the latter viewpoint focuses on actors and cultural domains within civilizational units and on inter-civilizational crossovers. The two perspectives are complementary. What we gain from this distinction is greater precision in the use of multiple modernities to explain the place of religion in modern societies. The example of Russian Orthodoxy is used to clarify the difference between these two perspectives: whereas from a comparative-civilizational viewpoint, Russian Orthodoxy may appear as Europe’s ‘other’; from a post-secular viewpoint, Orthodox religion is part of Europe’s religious pluralist landscape and partakes in an ongoing process of defining the meaning of European political and cultural integration.

Postsecular Conflicts non-religious people could lead to better mutual understanding and thus to a better quality of the democratic process. Against Habermas, one could argue that there already exists a sociological model that conceptualizes the moral and religious diversity of modern societies, only in less consensual terms: the model of culture wars described by James D. Hunter. 10 In the United States this concept denotes the conflict between representatives of a culture holding on to traditional teachings, values, and life plans on the one hand, and the representatives of a culture of change and individual freedom on the other. Where Habermas's idea of postsecular society highlights consensus, the culture wars model highlights conflict. Both operate under the assumption that pluralism is the default condition of modern societies, but they come to different conclusions. Habermas's conclusion is optimistic, Hunter's is pessimistic. Culture wars, Hunter writes, precede shooting wars. 11 This introduction is not the place to settle the question whether conflicts over values in modern pluralistic societies always take the form of a postsecular consensus or a culture war. Instead, what this introduction, this edited volume, and in general the whole Postsecular Conflicts research project 12 tries to do, is to define in greater detail the conditions of these conflicts. By "conditions" we mean what actors, what political dynamics, and what ideas and intellectual genealogies are at play in today's postsecular conflicts? 13 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America