Pastoral Geopolitics: Ethnoreligious Minorities as Geopolitical Others

• In Event: Religion, Populism, and Geopolitics

Abstract

Political, sociological, and legal research on the governmental and wider social treatment of ethnoreligious minorities in liberal democracies details important relations of ethnoreligious othering, exclusion, inclusion, and integration (Fox, Finke and Mataic 2018; Mahmood 2016; Fox 2016; Fox and Akbaba 2015; Kunst et al. 2012; Grigoropoulou and Chryssochoou 2011; Fox, James and Li 2009; Fox 2000). Nonetheless, social-scientific concepts and analytics integral to that research tend to obscure the impact of dominant religious discourses and practices on ethnoreligious minorities by either abnormalizing or normalizing religion altogether. Specifically, social science abnormalizes religion by framing it as a threat to modern/secular politics. Alternatively, research normalizes religion by reducing it to an expression, strategy, or instrument of ‘more fundamental’ ethnic, racial, economic, or sovereign struggles or by qualifying it as ‘just another’ cultural discourse among others. Therefore, this paper asks how faith practices, relations, and vocabularies can be studied as politically consequential on their own terms without being (ab)normalized or, likewise, dissociated from politics as ‘sacred’ and ‘apolitical’. First, I argue that avoiding social-scientific reductionism requires grounding the question of religion’s impact on ethnoreligious minorities in actual faith (doctrinal and confessional) discourses and practices instead of bracketing them off in the interest of (ab)normalization. As ethnoreligious relations in liberal democracies largely involve Abrahamic religions, this paper explores how their practices, relations, and vocabularies (pastor-flock relations, salvation, sacrifice, sin, etc.) shape the political subjectivities, rights, and freedoms of ethnoreligious minorities. In other words, the paper asks how Abrahamic religions produce and position their social Others. Second, as Abrahamic faiths are involved in “global struggles for souls” rather than nationally isolated antagonisms (Agnew 2010, 48), I frame the effects of the various strands of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam on their ethnoreligious Others as a geopolitical relationship. Thus, I understand ethnoreligious minorities as geopolitically othered subjects who are both inside and outside the body politic and who are, therefore, further excluded, controlled, integrated, assimilated, or protected depending on the context. Finally, I outline the concept of pastoral geopolitics as a concrete tool that can help study what enables Abrahamic religious discourses and practices to treat ethnoreligious minorities “at home” as geopolitical Others that essentially belong “abroad”. Thereby, I draw on Foucault’s genealogical research on pastoral power (2021, 2014, 2009) as it studies faith relations on terms and through vocabularies meaningful to believers rather than as a function of some other form of ‘more fundamental’ politics. To test the utility of the concept, I apply it to a comparative case study of the treatment of Balkan Muslim and Palestinian Muslim refugees in the United States. Comparative analysis helps show that pastoral geopolitics explains how faith can both empower and marginalize ethnoreligious minorities as geopolitical Others.

Author

• Bojan Savic, University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies