Religion is an increasingly salient issue within the United Nations (UN), especially in relation to its human rights activities. There is 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 polarized, 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 is exploring 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.
This issue is becoming increasingly central in public debates, as states tend to mobilize religious ideologies to advance and uphold new visions of human rights and justify the most heinous violations of core human rights norms in contemporary conflicts.
The project’s aim is to write a revisionist history of the sources and consequences of the conflict between secular and religious visions in the field of human rights. It proposes a new theory to conceptualize the dialectic conflict between these two visions. These positions are being assessed in relation to various critical junctures in the development of human right norms and institutions from the creation of the UN to the present. It is based on primary sources collected from UN archives and semi-structured interviews, analyzed 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 dominating academic and public debates.
