Benjamin Schonthal

The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar

Abstract A large proportion of mainstream media coverage of Sri Lanka and Myanmar has grouped Bodu Bala Sēnā (BBS), the 969 Movement and the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha in its Burmese acronym) as a single phenomenon. Referred to variously as Buddhist terrorism, Buddhist militarism or Buddhist nationalism, these groups appear in popular media as separate iterations of a shared type. However, beneath the many ostensible symmetries—particularly commonalities at the level of group representation—subtle but significant differences also exist in the groups’ political and religious positionalities and their dispositions towards the promises and perils of development and globalization. Not only are these points of specificity important for purposes of descriptive precision, they are essential for understanding the various stimuli, formations and directions of Buddhist activism in South and Southeast Asia today.

Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom

Although “rule of law” is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. These mechanisms include the procedural requirements and choreography of litigation (Sri Lanka), the strategic use of legal language and court judgments by political and socioreligious groups (India), the activities of partisan activists who mobilize around litigation (Malaysia), and the exploitation of “public order” laws in contexts framed by antagonism targeting religious minorities (Pakistan).

Securing the Sasana through Law: Buddhist constitutionalism and Buddhist-interest litigation in Sri Lanka

This article examines the history and effects of Buddhist constitutionalism in Sri Lanka, by which is meant the inclusion of special protections and status for Buddhism in the islands 1972 and 1978 constitutions, alongside guarantees of general religious rights and other features of liberal constitutionalism. By analysing Sri Lankan constitutional disputes that have occurred since the 1970s, this article demonstrates how the ‘Buddhism Chapter’ of Sri Lankas constitution has given citizens potent opportunities and incentives for transforming specific disagreements and political concerns into abstract contests over the nature of Buddhism and the states obligations to protect it. Through this process, a culture of Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation has taken shape. This article also augments important theories about the work of ‘theocratic’ or religiously preferential constitutions and argues for an alternative, litigant-focused method of investigating them.

Can ‘pooling teaching tips’ be more than ‘pooling teaching tips’?

There is increasing interest in how academic development of various kinds influences university teaching and student learning. To date the focus has been on formal, expert-led opportunities to learn how to teach. Our institution has developed a less formal, participant-led forum for teaching staff that was initially established to share ideas on teaching techniques and skills. We report here on participant-led research that explores if and how this model of group learning works, and how it might relate to other models that have been applied to tertiary teaching development. Authors adopted a self-study research framework incorporating a collaborative autoethnography. The data emphasises how participants use this forum as a community of practice, as a means for deep engagement with learning about teaching, and as a means to rationally manage their learning against a backdrop of challenges associated with learning to teach in research-led higher education.

Economies of expert religion in Sri Lanka

Abstract In recent years, international campaigns to promote religious freedom have come under sustained scholarly scrutiny. At the core of much of this scrutiny are concerns about a pernicious misfit between legal categories and local realities. Recent scholarship suggests that international advocacy campaigns often rely on narrow and partisan understandings of religion and religious freedom and, in turn, marginalize or ignore local practices of worship, asceticism, textual engagement and moral self-fashioning. However, in Asia, as in most parts of the world, international religious freedom advocacy campaigns do not enter a blank space of lived religion. Rather, they participate in a broader ‘economy’ of organisations and advocacy campaigns designed to promote, protect or liberate particular forms of religion. The politics of religious freedom in Asia is not, then, simply an encounter between translocal categories and local religiosities. It also involves competing domestic campaigns to redeem and reform particular types of religiosity. To make this point, this article considers one important religious freedom campaign from Sri Lanka in 2004 and examines how that campaign participated in and responded to an existing economy of what Elizabeth Shakman Hurd calls ‘expert religion.’