Comparative Politics

B08 - Religion and Politics

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 08:45am to 10:15am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Shelly Ghai Bajaj (University of Toronto)

Security, Populism and the Construction of Identity: Evidence from India’s Bharatiya Janata Party: Nidhi Panwar (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Studies of populism have generally been conducted from a comparative lens in a largely European context. The recent elections in India, the largest democracy in the world, brought the populist right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power for a second term. Given that the BJP’s rhetoric defines the Hindu identity against antagonistic “others,” its populist appeals have focused on the security threat of the Muslim “other,” both at the external level from Pakistan and internally, from Bangladeshi migrants in India. By exploring the rise of the BJP as a non-western case of populism, this study argues that focusing on the instrumental role of security doctrine in an International Relations context can explain the ascendance of populism domestically. It analyses the 2019 Pulwama attack and the resulting Balakot airstrike against Pakistan through a discursive lens whereby a collective identity of “the people” against a dangerous “other” was propagated by the BJP during the national election campaign as part of its nationalist and populist agenda. Against the realist and liberal understandings of the state as a unitary actor or a “black box,” this study investigates the interactions between the international and domestic spheres that construct identities underlying India's right-wing populism.

The Iranian Calendars and the Contestations over the Collective Past: Ehsan Kashfi (University of Alberta)
Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate how commemorative practices and holidays are invented and recast for political purposes, to reinforce and sustain a particular narrative of national identity. It argues that the choice of particular moments of a country’s past, commemorated in calendars as national holidays, the way in which the collective past is preserved and remembered reflect as well as articulate a country’s visions of their present essence, of who they are. Recognizing the link between the collective memory and national identity, the Iranian states before and after the 1979 revolution made special effort to articulate their narrative of the past through commemorating a particular set of holidays and rituals. Viewing calendar as a political artifact this paper compares changes in the Iranian national calendars in the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Republic. It examines the inclusion of new religious holidays, the removal of national days associated with the monarchy as well as the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones since the 1979 revolution as the signifiers of a political maneuver to articulate a new public memory and narrative of identity. It then examines two nation-wide celebrations before and after the revolution, representing two state-sponsored, competing narratives of Iranian identity: firstly, the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire in 1953, a ritual expression of ‘desired’ connection to a ‘golden’, ‘Aryan’ past and its ‘lost’ set of imagined ethnic traditions and, secondly, the Arbaeen Pilgrimage in 2018, a religious commemoration dedicated to the remembrance Shia Imams.

Religious Competition and Violent Islamist Mobilization: Indonesia and Beyond: Alexandre Pelletier (Cornell University)
Abstract: This paper seeks to explain variations in violent Islamist mobilization. It argues that Islamist groups radicalize when established Muslim leaders are weak, and competition for religious authority is intense. The paper shows that these religious “markets” are conducive to Islamist success because 1) they lower the barriers of entry to new religious entrepreneurs, 2) incentivize established leaders to support Islamist mobilization, and 3) push moderate leaders into silence. The paper develops this argument by examining sub-regional variations in Islamist mobilization on the Indonesian island of Java. Using newly collected data on Java’s 15,000 Islamic schools, it compares and contrasts religious institutions and market structures across more than 100 regencies in Java. In addition to these results, it uses dozens of field interviews with Indonesian Islamists and Muslim leaders to show how market structures have facilitated the growth of Islamist groups only in some regions of Java.

Migrant Deportation and Religious Conversion: How Liberal States Accommodate Identity Change: Salta Zhumatova (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: My paper examines how European states accommodate cultural identity change in the case of conversion to Christianity of Muslim migrants from the Middle East. The migrants, who convert from Islam to Christianity after coming to Europe, claim asylum on religious grounds by indicating that they will risk persecution if deported back to their countries of origin (Iran, Afghanistan) where apostasy is criminalized. It is incumbent on the state to decide whether the conversion is genuine or is used as a way to receive refugee status. Why does the state approve some religion-based claims and refuse others? The paper, which is based on policy analysis and interviews with migration officers and church leaders in Sweden, looks at how state and non-state actors evaluate the legitimacy of religious beliefs. I argue that due to the institutional legacy of the state’s neutrality in religious matters, the state does not have well-developed mechanisms to evaluate identity change in the sphere of religion, which results in policy failures and human rights violations.