Negotiating Religion at the United Nations

Religion has become a salient issue within the United Nations (UN), especially in its human rights activities.

This is especially due to a widespread perception of the growing threat posed by Islam, especially to the universality of human rights.

The academic debate on the topic is highly polarised, with one view defending secularism as a basis of the universality of human rights and the suppression of religion, and the other seeing religion as a basis of universality and secularism as a threat to it; a more critical view questions both the neat distinctions between these rival views, and their internal coherence.

Taking a different path, this project takes secular and religious visions as two sides of the same equation, and explores the question of how states negotiate the unending conflict between these two visions in relation to the construction of human right norms and institutions within the UN.

It aims to write a revisionist history of the sources and consequences of the conflict between secular and religious vision in the field of human rights.

The project proposes an entirely new theory to conceptualise the dialectic conflict between these two visions, and to select the case studies that exemplify the different configurations of the positions of states on the matter.

These positions are then assessed in relation to five critical junctures in the development of human right norms and institutions, based on primary sources collected from UN archives and semi-structured interviews, analysed through the process-tracing method.

In producing a theoretically informed and empirical investigation, the project aims to reframe the terms of the debate across disciplines, and allow for the formulation of innovative policy recommendations to help EU states cope with the tension between secular and religious visions domestically and at the UN, in a way that transcends binary or absolutist perspectives that dominate academic and public debates.