Communal Threat to Secular Democracy
Author: Ram Puniyani
Publisher: Gyan Publishing House
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9788178358611
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArticles in Indian context.
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Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy
Author: Jean L. Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-12-22
Total Pages: 465
ISBN-13: 0231540736
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPolarization between political religionists and militant secularists on both sides of the Atlantic is on the rise. Critically engaging with traditional secularism and religious accommodationism, this collection introduces a constitutional secularism that robustly meets contemporary challenges. It identifies which connections between religion and the state are compatible with the liberal, republican, and democratic principles of constitutional democracy and assesses the success of their implementation in the birthplace of political secularism: the United States and Western Europe. Approaching this issue from philosophical, legal, historical, political, and sociological perspectives, the contributors wage a thorough defense of their project's theoretical and institutional legitimacy. Their work brings fresh insight to debates over the balance of human rights and religious freedom, the proper definition of a nonestablishment norm, and the relationship between sovereignty and legal pluralism. They discuss the genealogy of and tensions involving international legal rights to religious freedom, religious symbols in public spaces, religious arguments in public debates, the jurisdiction of religious authorities in personal law, and the dilemmas of religious accommodation in national constitutions and public policy when it violates international human rights agreements or liberal-democratic principles. If we profoundly rethink the concepts of religion and secularism, these thinkers argue, a principled adjudication of competing claims becomes possible.
Islam and Democracy in Indonesia
Author: Jeremy Menchik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-01-11
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 1107119146
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explains how the leaders of the world's largest Islamic organizations understand tolerance, explicating how politics works in a Muslim-majority democracy.
Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective
Author: J. Christopher Soper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-10-11
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1107189438
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffers a new framework for understanding how religion and nationalism interact across diverse countries and religious traditions.
Secularism and Its Critics
Author: Rajeev Bhargava
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 550
ISBN-13: 9780195650273
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book puts together the most important contemporary writings in the debate on secularism. It deals with conceptual, normative and explanatory issues in secularism and addresses urgent questions, including the relevance of secularism to non-Western societies and the question of minority rights.
Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India
Author: Amrita Basu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-06-30
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 1316300188
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a pioneering study of when and why Hindu Nationalists have engaged in discrimination and violence against minorities in contemporary India. Amrita Basu asks why the incidence and severity of violence differs significantly across Indian states, within states, and through time. Contrary to many predictions, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has neither consistently engaged in anti-minority violence nor been compelled by the centrifugal pressures of democracy to become a centrist party. Rather, the national BJP has alternated between moderation and militancy. Hindu nationalist violence has been conjunctural, determined by relations among its own party, social movement organization, and state governments, and on the character of opposition states, parties and movements. This study accords particular importance to the role of social movements in precipitating anti-minority violence. It calls for a broader understanding of social movements and a greater appreciation of their relationship to political parties.
The European Court of Human Rights and the Freedom of Religion or Belief
Author: Jeroen Temperman
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-01-04
Total Pages: 630
ISBN-13: 9004346902
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs the tensions involving religion and society increase, the European Court of Human Rights and the Freedom of Religion or Belief is the first systematic analysis of the first twenty-five years of the European Court's religion jurisprudence. The Court is one of the most significant institutions confronting the interactions among states, religious groups, minorities, and dissenters. In the 25 years since its first religion case, Kokkinakis v. Greece, the Court has inserted itself squarely into the international human rights debate regarding the freedom of religion or belief. The authors demonstrate the positive contributions and the significant flaws of the Court's jurisprudence involving religion, society, and secularism.
Secularism Or Democracy?
Author: Veit-Michael Bader
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 387
ISBN-13: 9053569995
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPolicies dealing with religious diversity in liberal democratic states—as well as the established institutions that enforce those policies—are increasingly under pressure. Politics and political theory are caught in a trap between the fully secularized state and neo-corporate regimes of selective cooperation between states and organized religion. This volume proposes an original, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to problems of governing religious diversity—combining moral and political philosophy, constitutional law, history, sociology, and religious anthropology. Drawing on such diverse scholarship, Secularism or Democracy? proposes an associational governance—a moderately libertarian, flexible variety of democratic institutional pluralism—as the plausible third way to overcome the inherent deficiencies of the predominant models.
We God's People
Author: Jocelyne Cesari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-12-16
Total Pages: 765
ISBN-13: 1108604080
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCesari argues that both religious and national communities are defined by the three Bs: belief, behaviour and belonging. By focusing on the ways in which these three Bs intersect, overlap or clash, she identifies the patterns of the politicization of religion, and vice versa, in any given context. Her approach has four advantages: firstly, it combines an exploration of institutional and ideational changes across time, which are usually separated by disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, it illustrates the heuristic value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by statistically testing the validity of the patterns identified in the qualitative historical phase of the research. Thirdly, it avoids reducing religion to beliefs by investigating the significance of the institution-ideas connections, and fourthly, it broadens the political approach beyond state-religion relations to take into account actions and ideas conveyed in other arenas such as education, welfare, and culture.
Modi's India
Author: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-04-11
Total Pages: 656
ISBN-13: 0691247900
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space. Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. He discusses how the promotion of Hindu nationalism has resulted in attacks against secularists, intellectuals, universities, and NGOs. Jaffrelot explains how the political system of India has acquired authoritarian features for other reasons, too. Eager to govern not only in New Delhi, but also in the states, the government has centralized power at the expense of federalism and undermined institutions that were part of the checks and balances, including India's Supreme Court. Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.
