Events

This workshop is jointly organized by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and hosted by Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at the Pardee School for Global Affairs, Boston University – with funding from the Henry R. Luce Project on ‘Religion and NGOs in Asia.’

In many parts of Asia, NGOs influenced by diverse religious traditions play significant roles in service delivery, community organization, advocacy and mediating flows of information and resources. Their religious inflections can both enhance the effective reach of particular projects and complicate the already fraught policy environment in which NGOs operate. Policy frameworks influence the kinds of activities that religious NGOs are able to undertake, but they rarely dictate practice. Religious NGOs depend on their ability to elude, enrol, and subvert the state – while states themselves adjust to the impact of these new actors in turn. These complications and negotiations are the focus of this conference.

Among the factors that impact on the policy frameworks for religious NGOs, at local, national, or transnational levels, the notions of ‘religious freedom’ have held a prominent place, particularly in American legislation and foreign policy where ‘religious freedom’ is conventionally posited as a fundamental good and has been promoted as necessary for stable democracy, vibrant civil society, economic growth, and social harmony (Farr & Hoover 2009). But, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2014) has recently argued, the idea of religious freedom, even in the United States, is a politically-charged “fiction”, while the project of expanding religious freedom is not an apolitical endeavour. As Elizabeth Shakman-Hurd (2013) has demonstrated, despite the intended purpose of securing “human flourishing and peaceful co-existence”, the actual implementation of ‘religious freedom’ can “enact the opposite.” In a similar vein, Zhong Yijiang (2014) argues that ‘religious freedom’ has historically been deployed in some parts of Asia as a tool of imperialist influence. Yet, ‘religious freedom’ is not enshrined in the policy and regulatory frameworks of many governments in contemporary Asia. Indeed, the idea of religious freedom remains deeply contested across the region. This is apparent, for example, in attempts to pass laws restricting religious conversion in Sri Lanka and in Bhutan’s constitutional ban on the public observance of ‘foreign’ religions, as well as the proliferation of high-profile legal cases over allegations of blasphemy in Indonesia and apostasy in Malaysia.

Given the complexity of this terrain, it is all the more regrettable that so little research has been done on how religious actors in Asia approach the issue of ‘religious freedom’. In order to better understand the role of religion and religious NGOs in contemporary Asia and to inform related policy, some crucial questions need to be explored. For instance, how, if at all, is ‘religious freedom’ an advocacy priority in particular Asian contexts? What are the regulatory constraints or incentives enacted by states or international actors with regard to religious freedom? What are the global networks that religious NGOs engage with around issues of religious freedom? How do policies regulating religious freedom impact the activities of religious NGOs? Such questions can help to open new windows onto the ways in which policy frameworks affect the every-day activities of religious NGOs in fields including poverty alleviation, social development, and public health.

Beyond ‘religious freedom’ – both as an ideologically constructed ideal and as a matter of regulation and policy – we need to better understand the political dimensions of religious NGO operations within particular legislative and policy frameworks. In some cases the service provision activities of religious NGOs complement and enhance systems of low state capacity, in others they compete with state services and in still others service delivery by religious NGOs is associated with political parties and forms part of their electoral strategies. In Kerala, for example, palliative care provided by Salafist Islamic groups has not only filled an unmet need and further enhanced the success of the well-known “Kerala model of development”, but has also successfully pressured the state to include an item for palliative care in its public budget. In Indonesia, some observers have credited the relative success of the Islamist Justice and Welfare Party (PKS) in the legislative elections in part to its service delivery activities. These kinds of political dynamics are often speculated upon, but there is still precious little scholarship critically exploring causes and effects, or even providing rigorous empirical data on such developments.

The work of international religious NGOs is also influenced by a humanitarian code that precludes differentiation among races, religions, etc., as described by ICRC and the UN system. This ‘neutrality’ complicates the work of organizations, such as Islamic Relief, who claim that “cultural proximity” gives them advantages over ‘secular’ aid providers, because their religious identity gives them access to communities that for security or other reasons are difficult for non-Islamic groups to access, and accords them with a high level of trust from these communities (Benthall 2012). World Vision similarly treads a delicate balance on these issues – asserting that its Christian faith substantively informs its programming, but also saying that it provides services according to the humanitarian code. Further complicating questions concerning the definition of ‘neutrality’ is the issue proselytization and the ways in which discourse around it are diversely configured in relation to both the legal provisions and demographic realities of diverse nations in contemporary Asia (Finucane & Feener 2013). Indeed, as Philip Fountain (2015) argues, exactly what constitutes ‘proselytizing’ is not always as clear as it at first seems. The ‘problem’ that mainstream development has with proselytizing is revealing for the ways in which religious groups are marked out as peculiarly dangerous vis-à-vis their secular counterparts. The imperative among many Western donors to clearly differentiate between ‘proselytizing’ and ‘development’ is problematic because in practice the distinction between the two is often blurred, as interventions into debates over religious freedom and the regulation of Faith-Based Organizations are coming to both inform and reflect reconfigurations of working conceptions of both ‘religion’ and ‘development’ work.

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the legal and policy frameworks that inform the work of NGOs, how these organizations engage with religion in diverse Asian contexts, and the ways in which particular NGOs navigate these diverse and complex policy frameworks. Papers will approach the issue from a variety of perspectives and scales of analysis – organizational, local, national, and international. The conference will include critical, ethnographic and policy perspectives, while the regional mandate will be broad ranging, as we will seek a particular concentration of papers on East Asia and South East Asia.

REGISTRATION

Participation in the closed-door workshop is limited.
Please register by May 1 deadline with Valerie at valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg

CONVENORS

R. Michael Feener
Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies/ Faculty of History, University of Oxford, UK
E | michael.feener@history.ox.ac.uk

Catherine Scheer
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E | aricls@nus.edu.sg

Giuseppe Bolotta
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E | arigb@nus.edu.sg

Philip Fountain
Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
E | philip.fountain@vuw.ac.nz