Religious freedom and public order: fundamental-rights lawfare and the construction of majoritarian national identities in Pakistan and Malaysia

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• Dr Matthew Nelson, SOAS
• Wednesday 14 November 2018, 17:00-18:00
• Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Barbara Roe.

Building on constructivist theories concerning national identity formation as well as institutionalist theories regarding the regulatory power of law (here, constitutional and international human-rights laws protecting religious freedom ‘subject to’ politically shifting claims regarding public order), this paper examines a pattern of ‘religious’ national identity formation in Muslim-majority Pakistan and Malaysia. Specifically, it illuminates a pattern of intra-religious boundary-formation grounded in what I call fundamental-rights lawfare—a pattern in which majoritarian political actors urge senior judges to operationalize existing religious-freedom provisions in ways that help to ‘securitize’ certain self-identifying co-religionists as provocative ‘heretics’ who, posing a risk to ‘public order’, lie outside the boundaries of each country’s majoritarian constitutional community.

This talk is part of the Centre of South Asian Studies Seminars series.

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• Centre of South Asian Studies Seminars
• Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT

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