Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka
Abstract
It is widely assumed that a well-designed and well-implemented constitution can help ensure religious harmony in modern states. Yet how correct is this assumption? Drawing on groundbreaking research from Sri Lanka, this book argues persuasively for another possibility: when it comes to religion, relying on constitutional law may not be helpful, but harmful; constitutional practice may give way to pyrrhic constitutionalism. Written in a lucid and direct style, and aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law explains why constitutional law has deepened, rather than diminished, conflicts over religion in Sri Lanka. Examining the roles of Buddhist monks, civil society groups, political coalitions and more, the book provides the first extended study of the legal regulation of religion in Sri Lanka as well as the first book-length analysis of the intersections of Buddhism and contemporary constitutional law.
... The ZI Publications case is not the only decision where the meaning of Article 3 shifted. This change is also apparent in 32 ZI Publications Sdn Bhd & Anor v. Kerajaan Negeri Selangor [2016] 1 MLJ at 164. 33 One of many examples that can be offered here are the periodic and highly publicized raids on lower-end hotels to combat khalwat ("close proximity") infractions. 34 ZI Publications Sdn Bhd & Anor v. Kerajaan Negeri Selangor [2016] 1 MLJ at 160. litigation over use of the word "Allah" in the Malaysian Catholic newspaper, the Herald. ...
... This change is also apparent in 32 ZI Publications Sdn Bhd & Anor v. Kerajaan Negeri Selangor [2016] 1 MLJ at 164. 33 One of many examples that can be offered here are the periodic and highly publicized raids on lower-end hotels to combat khalwat ("close proximity") infractions. 34 ZI Publications Sdn Bhd & Anor v. Kerajaan Negeri Selangor [2016] 1 MLJ at 160. litigation over use of the word "Allah" in the Malaysian Catholic newspaper, the Herald. In this case, the publisher of the Herald, the Titular Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur, received a letter from the Minister of Home Affairs forbidding use of the word "Allah" in the Bahasa Malaysia version of its publication. ...
... Coupled with this is that the Sri Lankan state, in its present stature, is foundationalist in nature. Sri Lanka is constructed as a Sinhala Buddhist state, and its constitution asserts this ethno-theological foundationalist polity, which does not foster unity but rather aggravates the particularistic differences in terms of post-independence ethnicity and religion (Schonthal, 2016;Wijeyeratne, 2013). This foundationalist disposition of the Sri Lankan state should also be addressed in conjunction with the colonial legacy in re-signifying the Sri Lankan state. ...
Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel, Funny Boy, set before the Civil War, alludes to two complicated issues in Sri Lanka pertaining to the burgeoning interethnic conflict and the stigmatization of homosexual practices and behavior. Though it has been three decades since the novel’s publication and theCivil War has ended, the two issues persist. In addressing them, this paper, firstly, establishes colonialism as the reason for these issues and links them in a continuum with the Sri Lankan state; secondly, to overcome these issues and envision a Sri Lankan future, this paper employs a metapolitical reading of the novel through the lens of Badiou’s emancipatory politics. Thus, this paper connects the Sri Lankan past with the present to offer a future premised on the logic of universal emancipation. Additionally, the notion of colonial tropicality, which is intertwined with colonial legacies that presuppose tropical states as incapable of stable governance (which is then historically legitimized by interethnic conflict and civil war), is disproven as the engendered future offers a state with a vision of universal emancipation at its core.
... This threat, once again, has historical roots, as the propagation of Christianity is associated with colonial missionary projects through which large numbers of Buddhists converted to Christianitymostly voluntarily (or opportunistically), but occasionally due to coercion. Presentday propagation also evokes historical memories of physical, non-physical and structural violence by successive colonial administrations targeting Buddhism (Schonthal 2016). For example, historian KM de Silva argues that Roman Catholicism was propagated under the Portuguese through the infliction of 'tremendous suffering and humiliation' on the adherents of traditional religions including Buddhism (de Silva, 2005). ...
Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of religion or belief, and the freedom of expression. The article illustrates how organs of the Sri Lankan state have equated notions of ‘public interest’ with the majority community’s conceptions of ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘health’ and ‘morals’. It argues that this practice reflects a cleavage between the moral legitimacy and the legal claimability of fundamental freedoms of minorities and satirists in Sri Lanka. It concludes that legal regimes designed to guarantee fundamental freedoms offer very little protection to minorities when the underlying politics driving the application of law is majoritarian.
... For example, it scrapped the second chamber in order to consolidate the unitary structure of the state. It also removed provisions, for example, Section 29 (2), that guaranteed minority rights (Schonthal 2016). ...
... 4 With the introduction of modern political systems, this has been interpreted in different ways. Sri Lanka introduced universal suffrage as early as 1931, and accordingly the monks gained civil and political rights on a par with all other citizens (Schonthal 2016). This is completely different from the situation in Myanmar (and Thailand), where Buddhist monks and nuns are deprived of their political rights. ...
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
... Therefore, the design of contemporary monastic judicial systems in Sri Lanka (and in other countries where there is no state-backed monastic system) should not only align with principles of fairness and truthfulness taken from Buddhist texts, but also be structured so as to discourage monastic parties who receive unfavourable decisions from ignoring those decisions or, more disruptively, relitigating the "temporal" aspects of the issue in state courts whose judgments are backed by coercion. 18 On the status of Buddhism in Sri Lankan constitutional history and practice, see Schonthal (2016a). 19 This was a rubric established in English common law in the case of Middleton v. Crofts (1736) and then applied to religious groups, including monks, starting in the British colonial period. ...
Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles, as is often assumed. According to Buddhist (monastic) principles of judging, legal procedures —similar to those used in state legal settings—are equally essential. These procedures govern everything from making legal complaints, to the structuring of trials, to determining jurisdiction, and many other topics. By examining Buddhist judicial systems, this article not only casts new light on the pluri-legal landscape of Asia; it also offers new reflections on the intersection of religion-based and state-based systems of law in the contemporary world.
This chapter looks at the influence of the Irish Free State Constitution outside the borders of the State. It examines the way in which constitutional theorists outside Ireland adapted and adopted the provisions of the Constitution for their own constitutional experiments. This can be most clearly seen in South Asia, and the chapter looks at the particular influence of the 1922 Constitution in India and Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The chapter also considers a particularly critical view of the Irish Free State Constitution that can be found in the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly and analyses if the criticism was warranted. It concludes by looking at the influence of South Asian constitutional theory on a recent development in Irish constitutional jurisprudence.
The rise of Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar after independence certainly caused major troubles in the post-colonial state-building processes in both countries. While the constitutional process became malleable to the influence of the growing Buddhist nationalism, this also continued to be a crucial factor in deciding the political leadership of both countries. This article argues that the conflicts emerging from Sri Lanka’s and Myanmar’s twisted identities weighing between modern statehood and Buddhist nationalism are rooted in the historiography of both states, which was dominated by Buddhist cosmological narratives. The article shows how the influence of Buddhist cosmology in carving a ruler who stood above mundane polity did not wither away after the British colonial experience in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The troubled stage of constitutional practices that brought some negative impacts on the respective country’s minorities has risen from the effects of Buddhist cosmological notions on the public consciousness of both Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
In this article I consider religion in international political scholarship and suggest a study of its epistemological politics and conceptual history. I argue that scholarship which strives to ‘engage’ or ‘recognize’ religion in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, I ask if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of recognition scholarship. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jens Bartelson I argue that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. In order to assess the costs of recognition I propose a study of its conditions of possibility, that is, a study of the ways in which the subjects of recognition become recognizable as such. In the final section of the paper, I apply this to the example of religion in global politics and the formation of the Muslim subject in the lead-up to the partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan.
Faiz Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising enters several historical subfields through a textured study of Afghanistan's modern history. This introduction to the kitabkhana offers a snapshot of these contributions—and their limits—through the lens of recent developments in imperial history, legal history, and global history.
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
As one of the world’s only constitutions to recognize Theravada Buddhism as the state religion yet not include a religious exemption to the universal franchise for its monastic community, Cambodia’s Constitution stands out as an anomaly. This article traces the ways in which the realities of this remarkably inorganic approach to religion—enshrined in Cambodia’s Constitution in 1993, pursuant to a heavily internationalized peace process—have subsequently been shaped by debates occurring within Cambodia’s Buddhist institutions, rather than judicial ones. Drawing on data derived from archival research and a series of ethnographic interviews conducted during 2017 and 2018, I home in on decades-old debates about the voting rights of Cambodian monks to show how individual monks justify their participation in electoral politics through a mixture of both secular and religious arguments. The on-the-ground reality of the extension of the franchise to the Buddhist clergy in Cambodia, in other words, is ultimately shaped by an ongoing contestation within the sangha , with proponents and opponents of a religious exception grounding their arguments simultaneously in constitutional and theological vocabularies. The article sheds light on a singular constitutional arrangement—a unique relationship between religious and state institutions that has so far received relatively little scholarly attention—and highlights an instance of constitutional practice that occurs beyond the reach of both judicial and other state institutions.
How is ethnic domination produced, legitimised, and sustained under conditions of liberal democracy? This article engages with this problem and provides a re-conceptualisation that draws on the experience of Sri Lanka. Ethnic domination is typically understood in terms of a liberal normative framework, through the lens of the state, or primarily in terms of the one-sided coercive power of the dominant group. This article points instead to the importance of looking into inner processes, moral frameworks, and the way these are acted upon by contending ethnic groups. Instead of outcome typologies such as “ethnic democracy” and “ethnocracy,” it emphasises the need to look beyond and below the state, and in particular, at the mechanisms through which stable hierarchies are produced.
This comparative study of the constitutional jurisprudence of three East Asian jurisdictions investigates how the rulings of the Constitutional Court of Taiwan, the Constitutional Court of Korea and the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal have converged. The unique political contexts of all three jurisdictions have led to strong courts using the structured proportionality doctrine and innovative constitutional remedies to address human rights issues. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea have the only courts in Asia that regularly use a structured four-stage Proportionality Analysis to invalidate laws, and routinely apply innovative constitutional remedies such as Suspension Orders and Remedial Interpretation to rectify constitutionally flawed legislation. This volume explores how judges in these areas are affected by politics within their different constitutional systems. The latest developments in Asian constitutional law are covered, with detailed analysis of key cases.
This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.
Proponents of secularism often describe their support for this form of governance in terms of the protections it provides against the excesses, dangers, and coercions of religious governance. In reality, however, the differences between secular and religious systems of governance are often overstated, with secularism’s promises being in conversation with secularism’s failures. This article explores one recent and important instance of such secular failure, namely the high-profile Indian case of Shayara Bano v. Union of India deciding the legal legitimacy of “triple talaq ,” a common Indian Muslim divorce practice. During the litigation of this case, a prominent Indian Muslim organization ended up engaging in sectarian modes of argumentation, whereby aspersions were cast on the Muslim bona fides of certain persons and communities. Further, in the course of deciding Shayara Bano , a religiously diverse set of Indian Supreme Court justices found themselves disagreeing along communal lines about either the necessity or ability of the secular state to “reform” Muslim family law. In all this, sectarian and communitarian divisions in India were heightened, and the social peace and religious freedom promised by secularism were severely undermined.
To date, international law has not featured prominently in academic analyses of Buddhism. Especially absent from this small body of literature are real-life examples of Buddhist monks and laity turning to international law to resolve grievances or protect Buddhism against perceived threats to it. This article seeks to fill this void. Drawing on interview and archival sources from Sri Lanka and the United Nations, it analyzes how one particular monk from Colombo became a key agent in the interpretation and transformation of international law. By so doing, this article complements existing scholarship concerning Buddhism’s philosophical or conceptual sympathies with international legal principles and provides further empirical ballast for understanding how, when and why Buddhists turn to international law.
This work is the first systematic discussion of arbitration from a constitutional perspective, covering the most important types of arbitration, including domestic arbitration in private law, international commercial arbitration, investment treaty arbitration, and state-to-state arbitration. Victor Ferreres Comella argues for the recognition of a constitutional right to arbitration in the private sphere and discusses the constraints that the state is entitled to place on this right. He also explores the conditions under which investment treaty arbitration is constitutionally legitimate, and highlights the shortcomings of international adjudication from a constitutional perspective. The rich landscape of arbitration is explained in clear language, avoiding unnecessary technical jargon. Using examples drawn from a wide variety of domains, Ferreres bridges the gap between constitutional and arbitral theory.
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on persons with disabilities are beginning to emerge in the global south. This exploratory article documents and examines how the critical impacts of COVID-19 further restrict the mobility of persons with disabilities as they negotiate their survival through government and health restrictions. It draws on preliminary insights from two case studies of women with disabilities from different ethnic backgrounds, whose experiences are situated within a broader set of implications for persons with disabilities facing COVID-19. Specific challenges were the lack of access to essential services, the aggravated impact of the inability to work, obtain aid packages, and access to education and information. These experiences were heightened by their position as disabled, gendered, rural, low-income individuals who are at greater risk because of structural exclusion. They face a higher rate of poverty and exclusion that undermines government public health protections aimed at reducing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. They require, therefore, additional and more targeted forms of assistance. Our preliminary findings are located within a broader legal framework in order to open up the possibilities for advocacy on systemic change and real social inclusion that can have lasting effects on the everyday lives of persons with disabilities. The article argues that government responses to protect and uphold the dignity of the People, as stipulated in the Constitution, must include specific provisions for persons with disability to ensure their legal mobilization and advance universal disability rights.
In the last few decades, the study of law and religion has undergone considerable reconstruction. Less and less constrained by modern statist construals of rights talk or tied to confessional contexts, the comparative study of the intersection of law and religion by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars is undergoing a real renaissance. Exciting new work explores the entanglement of legal and religious ideas, institutions, and material objects across the entire space and time of human history. This article models an engagement between the academic study of religion and sociolegal scholarship by introducing scholars in both fields to contemporary debates in the study of law and religion. These debates examine how and when state law persists as a meaningful arena of contestation; the role of indigenous elites and arrangements of legal pluralism in colonial contexts; and new approaches to economy, race, and sovereignty and citizenship. By mobilizing an understanding of law that does not take for granted the state's alleged monopoly on generating and regulating legal normativity, the article argues that holding law and religion in abeyance as normative traditions invites a far more expansive imaging of these universals in their singularity, in their copresence, and as overlapping domains.
Cambridge Core - Constitutional and Administrative Law - Redrafting Constitutions in Democratic Regimes - edited by Gabriel L. Negretto
Catholic priests and advanced seminarians in Sri Lanka often describe their entrance to the seminary as the response to a strong spiritual calling that they could not ignore. Young seminarians offer more ambiguous narratives, where a combination of material anxieties, local cultural traditions and individual aspirations, encourage them to consider joining the clergy. This article examines how seminaries highlight aspects of religious formation where vocational discernment and the authenticity of one's calling are left for later stages of formation. Emphasizing aspects of career mobility, graduate studies overseas and missionary work, seminaries provide an attractive alternative for prospective priests in Sri Lanka. I argue that there is no contradiction between the spiritual dimensions of religious vocation and the material aspirations of seminarians. Although ethical dispositions emerge and replace the mundane impulses that initially attract young men to the seminary, material incentives are never completely eliminated from the vocational map of seminarians.
Cambridge Core - Comparative Law - From Parchment to Practice - edited by Tom Ginsburg
The act of giving is among the most fundamental acts within the Buddhist world, particularly in the Theravāda communities of Southeast Asia. In many of these communities, lay followers give food and other dāna (merit-making gifts), providing monastics with the ‘requisites’ that they need to survive. Yet there is relatively little discussion within Buddhist or scholarly communities about what should be given, with formulaic lists representing the majority of discussions about these gifts. However, sometimes, the gifts given to monastics are not always appropriate, even bad. What to do in those cases is not always clear. In this article, I explore the ways in which monks in Thailand and Southwest China think about gifts that are not good. What becomes clear is that, despite the prevailing view that discipline is a universal process based on the vinaya (disciplinary code of Buddhism), monks have different views about what constitutes a ‘bad gift’ and what to do about it. I argue that paying attention to bad gifts allows us to see that lay communities have significant voice—although this is often implicit rather than explicit—about what constitutes ‘proper’ monastic behavior.
The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Constitutional Law - edited by Roger Masterman October 2019
This article centers on the relationship of rules (nīti) to the monastic form of life of contemporary Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka. A genealogy of scholarship focusing on the rules of Buddhist monks and nuns led scholars to affirm a clear-cut distinction between nuns who have the higher ordination (bhikkhunῑs) and those who do not have it. However, that distinction is not self-evident, because bhikkhunῑs and other nuns lead lives that do not foreground a juridical notion of rules. The lives of nuns focus on disciplinary practices of self-restraint within a tradition of debate about their recent higher ordinations. Whether or not they are bhikkhunῑs, nuns today refer to rules in ways that are different from that which dominant Vinaya scholarship assumes. This article proposes that it is misleading to differentiate Buddhist nuns based on an enumeration of their rules and argues that nuns’ attitudes to rules say more about attempts to authorize claims to power in current debates about their ordination than about their disciplinary practice as a communal form of life.
In both India and Pakistan, parliament is constitutionally endowed with ‘constituent power’, that is, the power to introduce constitutional amendments via procedures laid down in the constitution itself. Duly promulgated amendments, however, are occasionally struck down when Supreme Court judges see them as violating what the judges themselves define as the ‘essential features’ of each country’s constitutional ‘basic structure’. I trace the migration of basic structure jurisprudence from India to Pakistan, focusing on the ways in which it has elevated the power of judges over that of elected officials in the realm of religion-state relations. Specifically, I highlight the ways in which judicial independence vis-à-vis judicial appointments has been described as an essential feature of each country’s constitution, greatly enhancing the autonomous power of judges to mould constitutional benches that, in turn, define India’s constitutional understanding of secularism and Pakistan’s relationship with Islam.
A substantial scholarship has studied the extent to which states across the political and geographic spectrums rely on legal, bureaucratic, and judicial institutions to govern religion. However, a deeper inquiry into the mechanisms through which regulation occurs has yet been achieved. This article foregrounds conversion, understood as mobility between social groups in which belief and sincerity may figure but is not reducible to either, to observe these dynamics. Through an analysis of Egyptian jurisprudence on the right to change religion as well as interviews with complainants and litigators, the article challenges widespread assumptions about who and what constitute the regulatory field. It also shows how religious difference is produced in the legal‐bureaucratic encounter. By accounting for institutions that are not typically considered part of the regulatory field nor thought to be bound by the strictures of legal positivism, this article further occasions a rethinking of the public–private distinction within critiques of secularism.
The relationship of religion to armed conflict initiation, as opposed to occurrence, remains understudied and undertheorised. The same is true for the relationship of religion to armed conflicts between states, cf. intra-state or extra-state conflict. This contribution adds to the understanding of both of these conflict outcomes. It examines the relationship to interstate armed conflict initiation of state religion, operationalised as government involvement in religion in the Religion and State dataset of Jonathan Fox. We find sufficient evidence to conclude that religion–state entanglement does raise states’ propensities towards first use of military force. Official religion and official support are both strongly correlated with that outcome. Legislative support to the majority religion is also well correlated with it. State-level discrimination against minority religions is weakly but positively correlated, but heavy regulation of majority religions is not correlated. We further find evidence that minority discrimination, majority regulation and legislative support wield their effects in tandem more strongly than they do individually. The foregoing supports the theory that official religious preference does make states more militant.
This text was published at Oxford Research Encyclopedias: http://oxfordre.com/, on 26 September 2018.
From the late 1970s to its defeat by the Government of Sri Lanka in 2009, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka. The ultimate aim of what was often considered to be one of the world's most disciplined and efficient insurgency groups was to create an independent Tamil homeland (which they called Tamil Eelam) in the northern and eastern parts of the island. The LTTE based itself on a unique mix of Tamil nationalist, socialist, and feminist visions of a new future for the marginalized Tamil communities of Sri Lanka. The LTTE became feared for its extensive use of suicide missions, carried out by soldiers of both Hindu and Catholic backgrounds. Because of the marginalization of the Tamil-speaking Muslims from the Tamil nationalist project, none of the LTTE soldiers were Muslims. Generally speaking, religion played—and in the 21st century continues to play—a minor role in the ultimate nationalist goal of establishing Tamil Eelam. Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka centers around Tamil culture, language, literature, and regional identity, not religion. The LTTE's official ideology was strictly secularist, expressing a clear separation between religion, the state, and politics. The LTTE accepted individual religious practices in its ranks—for example, having a personal crucifix or a holy picture within military camps, but did not facilitate institutionalized religious practice. Yet religious formations, controversies, and practices have been important, if not crucial, to Tamil separatism and, ultimately, to the LTTE itself. In a short period of time, the LTTE developed a unique martial culture and martyr cult, drawing on numerous cultural and religious sources in Tamil society. This martyr cult encompassed references to the Christian tradition of martyrdom, Hindu bhakti (devotional) literature, and classic Tamil heroic poetry. Each martyr's self-sacrifice formed part of a symbolic universe that was fundamentally nationalistic, but Christian and Hindu references and ritual language were employed to help to legitimize the sacrificial act. The ideology of martyrdom transcended the martyrs' religious backgrounds, and instead of a place in paradise or release from the cycle of reincarnation, it promised eternal life in the memory of the nation. Within the cultural and political universe of the LTTE, the nation and its territory became sacralized, and the LTTE's meticulously articulated martial culture began to take on quasi-religious qualities. At the ideological level, the LTTE propaganda machinery managed to balance secularism, deep religious sentiment, and religious diversity, and religion functioned as a multilayered concept used for a variety of purposes by military and political leaders. Religion can also be identified as various ―fields within the movement: ―civil religious, ―Śaiva religious,‖ and ―Tamil Catholic religious, allowing for overlapping yet distinct Hindu, Catholic, or nonreligious identities under the sacred canopy of Tamil nationalism.
Cambridge Core - Constitutional and Administrative Law - Judicial Review in Norway - by Anine Kierulf
Ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka is a chronic problem, and it can be sustained even without the active support of a particular government. This understanding of violence prompts further reflection – both on the factors that drive such violence and the complex relationship between ethnicity, religion, and the Sri Lankan constitution. This article delves into the post-war context in Sri Lanka and examines how and why ethno-religious violence has persisted regardless of the government in power. It is presented in three sections. The first analyzes the current state of ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka. The second offers a hypothesis on why such violence has persisted despite the democratic transition of January 2015. It argues that democratic transitions alone cannot prevent chronic ethno-religious violence due to certain factors that serve to entrench violence within the country’s constitutional practice. The final section discusses the relationship between ethno-religious relations, the nature of the Sri Lankan constitution, and the space for meaningful constitutional reform. It concludes that the Sri Lankan state – informed by Sri Lanka’s ‘political constitution’ – embodies a certain structural dispensation towards ethno-religious violence. Until this fundamental dispensation is in some way transformed, meaningful religious freedom and power sharing will remain elusive aims.
Cambridge Core - Comparative Law - The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review - by Theunis Roux
Constitutionalism, Religion, and Inequality: Perspectives from Asia - Melissa CROUCH
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Constituting Religion - by Tamir Moustafa
Law, Religion, and Constitutionalism in Asia - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Andrew HARDING
Buddhism and Constitutional Practice - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Benjamin SCHONTHAL
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Constituent Assemblies - edited by Jon Elster
This paper proposes alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relation between religion and violence, Buddhism and terror(ism). An important body of scholarship seeks to theorize religion and violence as transparent objects of disciplinary knowledge in terms of their supposed difference or interrelation, while chronically failing to appreciate them as discursive categories. The relation between religion and violence, the paper contends, is not available for disciplinary canonization as it is conventionally conceived in the now familiar terms of "Buddhism Betrayed?," "religious violence," "religious terrorism," etc. Rather the questions, terms, and parameters defining which persons, practices, and knowledges can and cannot count as religion or violence, civilization or terror are produced, battled out, and subverted in minute contingent conjunctures. Put differently, they are authorized to come into (central) view and fade from view, to emerge and submerge, to become centered and decentered within a microspace of competing authoritative "native" debates and discourses.
In contemporary India, government assessments of the legitimacy of conversions tend to rely on two assumptions: first, that people who convert in groups may not have freely chosen conversion, and second, that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to being lured into changing their religion. These assumptions, which pervade the anticonversion laws as well as related court decisions and government committee reports, reinforce social constructions of women and lower castes as inherently naive and susceptible to manipulation. Here, Jenkins contends to carefully scrutinized the assumptions since like "protective" laws in many other contexts, such laws restrict freedom in highly personal, individual choices.