Conference on Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights

March 16, 2007

Are “universal” human rights in fact an imposition of Western or Christian ideas? Is democracy, the “rule of the people,” compatible with God’s law? How does religion inform—and impede—the struggle for human rights around the world? The Berkley Center conference on “Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights” brought together leading anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and political scientists to explore questions on the ways in which religion intersects with the global human rights agendas. It breaks with the dominant “top down” approach centered on the principles found in sacred texts and authoritative theological and legal interpretations. Participants grappled with the issue “bottom up”—the interaction of human rights and religion in practice and the challenges they pose for national and international politics.
This conference, convened by Thomas Banchoff, director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, was the third in a series. In April 2005 Georgetown University sponsored the "Conference on New Religious Pluralism and Democracy." In March 2006, the Berkley Center hosted the inaugural "Conference on the New Religious Pluralism in World Politics." Two books based on those conferences were published with Oxford University Press and edited by Banchoff: Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (2007) and Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (2008).

SCHEDULE

March 15

Keynote Address: Are Religion and Human Rights Contradictory or Complementary? | Kenneth Roth

March 16

Latin America and Africa | Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Tom Banchoff, Paul Freston, Alfred Stepan

Islam in Transnational Perspective | Yvonne Haddad, Paul Heck, Robert Hefner, Riva Kastoryano

Russia and Asia | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Charles Keyes, Pratap Mehta, David Ownby, Robert Wuthnow

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Other Participants

Related Publication

Book March 21, 2011

Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights

In Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights, editors Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow bring together leading scholars to explore the religious politics of human rights across the world's major regions, political systems, and faith…
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