God is out of the closet in many countries around the world and the amplified role of religion in the global public arena has produced anxieties and contradictions for those committed to secular human rights and liberal democracy. This surge is experienced not only within authoritarian states, but also liberal democracies. The lecture offers some reflections on the implications of ‘faith’ and secularism for progressive, leftist / Marxist politics and critical thought through a TWAIL and postcolonial feminist reading. TWAIL has unveiled how the universal liberal subject that underpins human rights is based on a hierarchy of the subject at the material, normative, and theoretical level, that determines who is entitled to rights and who is not. Religion is an important signifier in determining who is human and who is not, who is superhuman and who is subhuman. These oppositions are invariably displaced onto a global north/global south divide. This structuring justifies interventions that range from aggressive assimilation, through for example, Islamic veil bans in the name of gender equality, to incarceration, infliction of unspeakable cruelty and even genocide in the name of self-defence, through the equation of some religions with violence, terrorism and as threats to the liberal subject, human rights and the liberal legal order.
Speaker:
Ratna Kapur is a legal scholar on human rights and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). She engages with law and rights from a critical, Global South, and postcolonial feminist perspective. She has written extensively on the rights of marginalised, and precarious subjects, including sex workers and sexual minorities, migrants and religious minorities. She has also written on the politics of secularism, the right to religious freedom, and equality from a comparative constitutional law perspective. Her current research interest is on developing a critique of freedom in human rights law and exploring other non-liberal emancipatory possibilities.