Aberdeen: Comparative Religious Freedom

Despite formal guarantees entrenched in modern international conventions and national constitutions, religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities have emerged as contentious and charged issues in human rights law, politics and praxis. There are multiple reasons for this, including the increased salience of religious identity in the world, and the intellectual and political resistance posed to secularist assumptions about human flourishing by a variety of social movements. While the larger consequences of such developments are unknown, what is clear is that the right to religious freedom has become a key site of legal and political struggles to negotiate individual and communal relations across lines of religious difference. This course provides a critical introduction to questions of freedom, religion, community and the individual as they are today being contested in normative and legal discourses on the right to religious freedom.