Suhraiya Jivraj

Conceptualising the Economy-Society Nexus in Well-Being and Happiness Initiatives: Gross National Happiness in Business in Bhutan and Social Impact Bonds in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article explores how well-being and happiness (WBH) is conceptualised in different geographical contexts, and how this understanding is able to affect policymaking and engender socio-economic and legal change. Whilst WBH initiatives seemingly stem from a critique of gross domestic product as a measure of societal “progress,” we show how, in itself, such critique cannot be the basis for understanding WBH as a unitary transnational phenomenon that offers a radical re-thinking of the relationship between economy and society. By focusing on two concrete instances and specific sites, that of the Social Impact Bond in the United Kingdom and the “Gross National Happiness in Business” project in Bhutan, we argue that individual contexts and initiatives must be closely studied, and suggest that conflations between different well-being agendas need to be avoided to pay closer attention to the ways in which well-being can be co-opted or fashioned through policymaking and government initiatives.

Faith in Schools: Racialized Religion, Community Cohesion and Belonging

Under the former New Labour (NL) government (1997–2010), faith schools (re)gained an increasingly prominent place in the public consciousness, causing a barrage of media controversy and anxiety over the divisiveness of these schools, particularly the Muslim ones. Within its first year in office, the government agreed state funding for two Muslim schools for the first time (Burtonwood, 2003, p. 415). By 2001, it had outlined its plans for the expansion of a range of faith schools, including a significant expansion of Church of England (CoE) schools, in a Green Paper, Schools: Building on Success (Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2001a) and a White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success (DfES, 2001b). These plans elicited heavy criticism from various quarters, including from NL members of Parliament (MPs) critiquing government policy, for example, in select committees as well as through a cross-party amendment to the Education Bill tabled by Labour MP Frank Dobson. Indeed, Frank Dobson, with the support of 45 other Labour MPs, expressed opposition by tabling a cross-party amendment to the Education Bill although it was not successful because of Conservative support for it (the Bill). Even Estelle Morris, the then Secretary of State for Education, privately expressed doubts about the expansion of faith schools (Gillard, 2002, p. 18). Criticism outside of the party continued, particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the ‘race-riots’ in the north of England (Oldham, Bradford and Burnley) in the same year (2001), and religion became increasingly profiled as a factor that gave rise to social divisiveness and political radicalization (Short, 2002; Gillard, 2002; 2007).

Conceptualizing Law’s Religion: Socio-Legal Perspectives

In this chapter, I first critically examine some of the key perspectives from within socio-legal literature around religion, focusing on how they come to conceptualize law’s religion in predominantly onto-theological terms. The impetus for doing so is that this scholarship has come to be particularly influential in debates impacting upon and shaping juridical developments on religious freedom, as well as other law-and-religion (LAR) issues in Britain and in relation to the European Union (EU) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (Bradney, 1993; Hamilton, 1995; Ahdar, 2000a; Oliver et al., 2000; O’Dair and Lewis, 2001; Edge, 2002; Eekelaar, 2004; Ahdar and Leigh, 2005; Barzilai, 2007; Ghanea et al., 2007; Vickers, 2008; Bradney, 2009).1 Moreover, as I discuss later in my case study chapters, the role of religion, particularly the issue of religious/civic values in education policy within Britain and northern Europe, is increasingly being influenced by public policy thinkers and scholars from the United States. Whilst ‘character education’ has a long history in England, for example, there is clearly a resurgence of this values discourse within current socio-legal and juridical thinking more broadly, where Christian values are believed to play a significant role in engendering children, in particular, with a greater sense of citizenship and community.

Interrogating Law’s Religion: Critical Perspectives

In this chapter I shift my discussion from socio-legal perspectives on religions to critical ones that make up, for example, the Critical Religion Category Network. These perspectives predominantly come from within anthropology and religious studies as well as the more interdisciplinary field of critical race studies. In particular, I examine how the term religion has come to be understood as a predominantly onto-theological phenomenon, not just within law, but also more broadly. I highlight its emergence as a modern term from within orientalist academic scholarship during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this historicized perspective is an important analytical frame within which to understand how onto-theological and racialized notions of religion have become so embedded in contemporary juridical discourse. This approach also facilitates a closer study of the ways in which religion can come to be conceptualized and authenticated through various socio-political, historical and juridical discourse.

Non-Christianness in Adoption and Child Welfare Cases: Prioritizing Racialized Religion

In the previous chapter I argued that the socio-legal law-and-religion (LAR) literature has tended to conceptualize religion predominantly as an onto-theological belief and practice phenomenon, one that also sometimes comes to be an ethnicized/cultural phenomenon in relation to non-christianness. By way of reminder, I use the term onto-theological to denote a conceptualization of religion as belief in a transcendent or distinctly divine being as the very essence or ontological status of religion itself (De Vries, 2008, p. 12). I offered a critique of this view of religion as I suggested that it obfuscates the contingencies of what might be included under the rubric of religion. My critique focused, firstly, on religion as a concept that emerged from a particular orientalist historicity and, secondly, in terms of the work it has done, in the (colonial) past and in the contemporary period, in authenticating particular signifiers of religion over others with regulatory effects for manifestations of non-christianness.

Orientalism, Belonging and Nationhood

In my analysis of the cases in the previous chapter, I argued that non-Christian religion circulated in the cases mainly as a racialized concept, implicating lineage and belonging within a nation that one is linked to by blood. In Chapter 2, I argued that socio-legal law-and-religion (LAR) scholarship, in conceptualizing religion in predominantly theological terms as belief/faith and practice, tends to marginalize this racialization of non-Christianness. I made a further point that, because religion circulates in different yet overlapping ways, for example, as faith, race and nationality, it also needs to be understood as a contingent concept that can come to be produced within law.