Marat Shterin

Reconsidering Radicalisation and Terrorism: the New Muslims Movement in Kabardino-Balkaria and its Path to Violence

Abstract The paper calls for more attention to be paid to the heterogeneous character of new Islamic groups, including the need to avoid assumptions about the origins of radicalism, extremism and recourse to violence adopted by some of them. By focusing on a new movement of young Muslims in the Northern Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria in the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s, we suggest that conceptualising some new Islamic groups as New Religious Movements (NRMs) can sharpen our understanding of the tensions, conflicts and violence often associated with them. This, in turn, can encourage us to take fuller account of factors including their social provenance, the appeal of their beliefs and practices, the demographic characteristics of their membership and the dynamics of their internal and external interactions with the wider society.

Constitutional Courts in Postcommunist Russia and Hungary: How Do They Treat Religion?

Abstract This research compares the treatment of religion, especially minority faiths, by constitutional courts in Russia and Hungary, with the goal of testing an assumption in the literature that such courts in former communist countries protect human and civil rights, including religious freedom. We found that the ability of constitutional courts to fulfil this function depends on the degree of their independence from governments, with the Hungarian Constitutional Court having offered more effective protection for minority religions than its counterpart in Russia. This outcome in Russia has led minority religions to seek redress with the European Court of Human Rights, where they have experienced considerable success.

Muslim Young People in Britain and Russia: Intersections of Biography, Faith and History

The idea of this volume was born out of a series of workshops on Muslim young people in Britain and Russia that took place in 2008–09 in Windsor, Novgorod and Edinburgh, sponsored by the AHRC/ESRC ...

Religion and the rise of populism

The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism has caught observers by surprise. Donald Trump’s US election victory, the Brexit referendum in Britain, and President Erdoğan’s emboldened power in Turkey are just three of the many cases in which populism has radically altered the tenor of contemporary politics. In these three examples, religion seems to have played a significant role, yet is often overlooked. In this special issue, we aim to provide a corrective to the general neglect of religion in academic work on populism. The contributors to this special issue shed light on roles of religion in the three populist cases already mentioned as well as in an array of other examples of populist discourse and action, stretching from Germany to Kyrgyzstan. In this brief introductory piece, we draw on key existing works and the case studies included in this issue to suggest useful ways of approaching the intersections of religion and populism.

Editorial 46.1

As Editors of Religion, State & Society we never fail to be fascinated and inspired by our contributors’ abilities to discern and illuminate multifaceted and unexpected configurations in the human relationships highlighted by the journal’s title. This already stems from the numerous possibilities of interpreting the very concepts – ‘religion’, ‘state’ and ‘society’ – that constitute our title, and particular that of ‘religion’. Our multiregional focus provides further opportunities for seeing these complexities and for attempting to identify regularities and patterns in the relationships between specific aspects of ‘religion’, ‘state’ and ‘society’. Finally, RSS’s interdisciplinarity brings together different perspectives and methods of illuminating these relationships. This issue opens with an article fromMariya Omelicheva and Ranya Ahmed in which the authors analyse the roles of religion in political participation. While the bulk of the literature on this topic focuses on the United States, with a few studies offering other single-country analyses, Omelicheva and Ahmed’s work stands out as an ambitious cross-national and cross-religious quantitative comparison. The authors use hierarchical multilevel modelling to pull apart different influences at the country, institutional and individual level, from the 1980s until 2014. Across a global range of cases, they ascertain how different facets of religion work in divergent ways. They find that religiosity by itself tends to impede political engagement, while membership in a religious organisation increases the likelihood of political action. Beyond this central finding, there are interesting results from the comparative breakdown between religious traditions. Buddhists and Jews are found to be exceptions, with higher religiosity resulting in a greater likelihood of engaging in a few specific political activities such as boycotting products. In contrast, self-identifying Muslims are shown to be less likely than other groups to engage in all forms of political activity. This latter finding is perhaps surprising given the unrelenting media and academic interest in Islamist politics. The second article in this issuemoves our attention from how religion influences political engagement with the state to how states attempt to influence religion. Serawit Bekele Debele’s in-depth qualitative approach enables investigating nuances that may not be visible in the comprehensive picture based on a large-scale study. Her case study focuses on the Oromo ethnic minority group and Waqqeffana, an African traditional religion which some of thempractice. Each year Waqqeffana followers hold a lively festival of thanksgiving, known as Ireecha, which has recently taken on an increasing political dimension as an expression of self-determination, leading state authorities to worry that it is ‘dangerous’. Debele builds from Bryan Turner’s well-known two-part framework on managing religion with ‘upgrading’ (modernising and secularising religions into state logics) and ‘enclavement’ (policies of exclusion and segregation). She adds to Turner’s categories two other management strategies exemplified by the case of Waqqeffana in Ethiopia. These are ‘repression’ RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY, 2018 VOL. 46, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2018.1432197

Editorial 45.2

Relationships between religion, state and society often involve ‘invisible’ qualities that may escape the attention of social scientists and other researchers before, at certain junctures, they reveal themselves in observable societal trends or movements. The four research contributions in this issue of Religion, State and Society, different as they are in their themes, arguments and geographical locations, aim to scrutinise precisely the ‘invisible’ and seemingly inscrutable qualities that can produce unexpected and polarising configurations in religion and politics. This theme is most evident in the first two articles, both focused on Poland. Krzysztof Zuba investigates two parties on opposing fringes of Polish politics, which have had impressive yet short-lived electoral successes: the Catholic-led radical right League of Polish Families (LPR), associated with Radio Maryja, and the radical left anticlericalist Palikot Movement (RP). Zuba describes LPR and RP as ‘political meteorites’. Soon after their founding, each of these parties gained great momentum with around 40 representatives in parliament (in 2001 and 2011, respectively), only to rapidly fizzle out and lose parliamentary status. Why did Polish political fashions shift so radically from fringe to fringe? Zuba puts forward a five-part explanation: secularisation, including anticlericalism of many Polish voters; hidden religious cleavages that temporarily emerged; sociocultural changes driven by populism and postmodernism; political opportunities created by events, such as the quarrel over the Smoleńsk cross; and the shifting electoral strategies taken by the two parties. Zuba’s observations seem to resonate with trends and developments we find elsewhere in the world, particularly the ways populist and other polarising movements use emergent opportunities, sometimes related to religion, to catalyse radical political shifts. Moving beyond Zuba’s analysis of the LPR and RP parties, there are elements of the rise and fall of radical politics that may seem to defy social scientific prediction altogether. In his study of The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, Charles Kurzman (2004) grasps at this volatility with what he calls an ‘antiexplanation’: many people who join growing movements do so simply because these movements are growing. Victoria Kamasa’s article on the symbolic reach of the Catholic Church in Poland considers a different configuration of polar oppositions. Her article concerns the Catholic Church and its relationship with atheists, its symbolic opposite. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Kamasa argues that the power of the historically dominant Catholic Church can be understood by the degree to which it shapes the linguistic habitus of other groups in society. Kamasa’s analysis of Catholic and atheist online discussion forums bears out the importance of the church’s liturgical categories in shaping various discussions on the topics of love, death and sin. Polish social imaginaries, to use Charles Taylor’s (2004) term, are imbued with Catholic metaphorical categories. Even if Polish atheists reside in an opposing philosophical pole to Catholics, if they wish to speak intelligibly on the brokenness of society or on human affection or mortality, they may find themselves having to engage with Catholic-infused language. RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY, 2017 VOL. 45, NO. 2, 85–86 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2017.1323423

Tributes to Philip Walters (editor from 1988 to 2015) by Edwin Bacon, Jonathan Sutton and Grace Davie

Philip Walters stepped down as this journal’s Editor at the end of 2015, after having served for nearly 25 years. Our own early editorial experiences make us deeply appreciative of the formidable and inimitable role Philip played in transforming an important religious freedom advocacy periodical into a major academic forum on religion, politics and society. The three contributions included in this tribute section are written by people who knew Philip at different periods in his life and work and from different angles. Edwin Bacon, Jonathan Sutton and Grace Davie each shows something of the combination of human and professional qualities – intellectual insight, personal integrity, empathy, patience, rigour and sense of humour – that Philip uniquely brought into his work with RSS. A common thread that emerges from the tributes is Philip’s remarkable intuition for changing times in society, politics and religion. He made the journal a home for those capable and willing to address the intellectual and moral challenges arising from such inescapable change. We are immensely grateful to Philip for this legacy and for his generous assistance in the early months of our editorship. We know that he continues to be engaged in good causes, which have marked his entire professional life. We wish him and his wife Anne every success in these and enjoyment in his retirement.

Religion, state, and society in an uncertain world

As new Editors of Religion, State and Society (RSS), we would like to take this opportunity to share our thoughts on the journal’s origins, its present and its future direction as a British journal with a global reach. It seems fitting that we are writing our first editorial in what appears to be a watershed moment for the themes of the journal. When Britain’s European Union (EU) Referendum result was announced on 24 June, 2016, the vote in favour of leaving sent shockwaves across the world. The value of the British Pound fell precipitously, plummeting the United Kingdom from the world’s 5 largest economy to its 6 largest, below France, in the span of less than 24 hours. Global markets were thrown into a nail-biting period of uncertainty. British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his imminent resignation, while Conservative and Labour politicians plotted almost Shakespearean intrigues against their rivals to take leadership. The Good Friday Agreement peace in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom’s grasp of Scotland both seemed precarious. Across the continent, far-right demagogues such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France were emboldened to call for their own national referendums to leave the EU, placing its future in doubt. So far, religion has not played as key a role in the analysis of this turn in European – and global – history as it should. While pundits on economics and politics dominate current commentary on this topic, many of the public debates in the run-up to the referendum were deeply rooted in issues related to religion. Consider, for instance, fears of Muslim immigrants as a reason to leave the EU, which may have been behind the claim that accession of Turkey was imminent and dangerous. Although not to the same extent, ‘Remain’ campaigners also used fears of Islamist terrorism in their arguments to stay in the EU, due to the benefits of security and intelligence cooperation. A vision of Britain as a Christian country may have been a contributing factor in many people’s votes. Issues of identities and their religious dimensions have, in various ways, already featured in debates on the EU among its other member-states such as Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, Croatia and Poland. Furthermore, in earlier decades, many proponents of the pan-European project expressed their Durkheimian concern about its binding and overarching aspects, with some pressing for Christianity to be recognised as Europe’s cultural glue. We can now only speculate on whether this idea will be renewed in the wake of Brexit. Beyond the identity issues, a number of ethical questions could be raised about social visions of Christianity in contemporary Europe and their relationship to neoliberal economics: feelings of social injustice and neglect most likely accounted for a significant portion of ‘Leave’ votes. Finally, we should also think about the implications of Brexit and its possible counterparts in other countries, for religious minorities and religious freedom in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights is among the key targets of anti-EU politics (even though its jurisdiction is based on a country’s membership in the Council of Europe, rather than RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY, 2016 VOL. 44, NO. 2, 93–95 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2016.1212524

Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union

Mathias Pelkmans has put together and edited a highly illuminating volume that contributes a great deal to our knowledge of and thinking about some of the key contemporary issues at the interface between faith and society: postsocialist changes in religion, the worldwide resurgence of Pentecostalism and the pervasiveness of individual religious conversion. It is the latter, the experience of religious conversion, that provides a sharp focus for exploring these issues in a variety of postsocialist locations, from generally better-known Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania and Ukraine to much less familiar ethnic homelands in Russia such as the Altai in south-western Siberia, Chukhotka in the far north-east and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the north. The eight case studies are presented by social anthropologists, all of whom do full justice to what their discipline is best at: engaging with real people in their actual social contexts, thereby revealing the multifarious choices and challenges that individual paths to and lives with religious faith (or ‘conversion careers’, to use James Richardson’s concept) entail. The insightful introduction by Pelkmans masterfully navigates the reader through the wealth of diverse material and insights from these studies, while also raising further issues about the nature and dynamics of conversion in the context of postsocialist social transformations in the former Soviet Union. The concluding chapter by John Peel, the prominent scholar of African religions, adds further value to this discussion through directly comparing manifestations and consequences of conversions to Pentecostal Christianity under conditions of postcolonialism and postsocialism. The theme that keeps the reader most engaged, even fascinated, throughout the book is that of ‘crossing the boundaries’ that the experience of conversion entails on multiple levels and that makes this intimately personal experience so profoundly social. As Pelkmans argues in his introduction, embracing a new faith reflects broader shifts – and boundary crossings – in postsocialist societies, including understandings of what religion is about and how it relates to other categories of identity and belonging, such as kinship, ethnicity and nationhood. He convincingly points out that seeing the readily observable return of religion in public life in the former Soviet Union as simply revivals of old traditions is misleading for at least two major reasons. First, the seven decades of Soviet modernisation disrupted the taken-for-granted, communally ‘embedded’ character of religion and produced people with a different sense of identity and with a notion of choice in relation to faith. Second, the postsocialist conditions of incipient market capitalism, in its global dimensions and Religion, State & Society, Vol. 40, No. 1, March 2012

Russia and Islam: State, Society and Radicalism

Ideology, 5, pp. 40–54. Saroyan, M. (1997) Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (ed. E.W. Walker) (Berkeley, University of California Press). Suleimanov, E. (2007) An Endless War: the Russian–Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang). Whitlock, M. (2002) Land beyond the River: the Untold Story of Central Asia (New York, St Martin’s Press).