Religion and Post-Conflict Statebuilding

Roman Catholic and Sunni Islamic Perspectives

Denis Dragovic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137455147
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137455154
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book draws upon theory and theology to consider how religious institutions engage with post-conflict statebuilding and why they would choose to lend their resources to the endeavour. Drawing from the theologies of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam, Dragovic explores their possible motivations to engage alongside the international community.

1

Religion and Post-Conflict Statebuilding

In considering the role of religious institutions in post-conflict statebuilding it is not unreasonable to ask whether this line of enquiry remains relevant. The prescriptive nature of Western foreign policy towards developing countries and its recurring liberal agenda suggests that it isn’t. Built upon the foundations of modernization theory from the 1950s and 1960s international development and statebuilding policies are largely efforts aimed at replicating Western modes of progress in which there was no formal role for religion. Lant Pritchett et al. refer to this phenomenon in the development context as ‘isomorphic mimicry’, in that aid agencies replicate Western institutions without allowing unique indigenous systems to develop organically.¹ Religion, as understood through modernization theory or isomorphic mimicry, is seen as unnecessary or even an inhibitor to progress.

Yet countries that have been variably labelled as fragile or failing states seem to suggest otherwise. By cross tabulating the World Bank’s list of fragile and failed states to data available in the Gallup World View database (2006–2010) on average 91 per cent of populations within fragile states consider religion to be important in their daily lives compared to 12 per cent in Sweden, 30 per cent in the United Kingdom or 64 per cent in the United States. Religion is not only important to people in fragile states, but the institutions of religion are also highly trusted—80 per cent of people in the World Bank’s list of fragile states have confidence in religious institutions compared with only 48 per cent having confidence in their government.

These religiosity figures can be explained theoretically. The work of Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart reinforces the somewhat axiomatic view that declining levels of existential security increase religiosity.² While religious market theory argues that with a liberalization of the supply of religion demand should increase.³ In failed or failing states one or the other of these theoretical conceptualizations is present. In post-conflict statebuilding environments in which violence is ever present and the religious market has been liberalized (proactively or inadvertently) both conceptualizations are present. In such situations, theoretically at least, we should see a substantial uptick in religious beliefs, values and activities which the limited data available seem to support. In post-conflict Iraq religiosity increased following the 2003 invasion during which the United States allowed religious freedom previously constrained by the secular Ba’ath party and existential insecurity concurrently increased as a result of the deterioration of the security situation.⁴ Similarly for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which saw an upsurge in religious activity since the fall of communism that has included a period of increased existential insecurity and liberalized religious markets.⁵

Despite these empirical and theoretical indications suggesting the importance of religion in post-conflict environments, academics, policy planners and practitioners haven’t sought to find a place for religious institutions in post-conflict statebuilding. In this section I begin to respond by considering the mechanisms through which religious institutions can lend support to critical aspects of post-conflict statebuilding.

How states fail

There are two mechanisms by which states are suspected of failing— institutional failure and legitimacy failure. Institutional failure in which the offices of the state cease to deliver services is popular in policy journals. Helman and Ratner wrote in Foreign Policy that failed states are those ‘whose governmental structures are overwhelmed by circumstances’.⁶ Rotberg’s article in Washington Quarterly begins with, ‘Nation-states fail because they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people.’⁷ Early indicators of potential state failure through an institutional failure model would include Afghanistan post 2003 when the Kabul government could not effectively enforce its authority beyond the capital city, and Columbia at the peak of the drug wars when the state controlled only portions of its territory.

Some scholars have lamented the influence of institutionalism at the expense of legitimacy, as a key component of successful post-conflict statebuilding.⁸ Bruce Gilley defines legitimacy failure, as opposed to institutional failure, as the receding endorsement of the state by citizens at a moral or normative level.⁹ The response by political elites in a legitimacy failure scenario is to expend more resources on maintaining power rather than governing, leading to a reduced effectiveness of the state apparatus, which in turn further decreases legitimacy and eventually may lead to an attempted overthrow. By this process the state will still witness a deteriorating failure of institutional capacity, but the difference between legitimacy failure and institutional failure is that the primary driver pulling the state downwards is illegitimacy as opposed to what could otherwise independently weaken institutions such as reduced financing or inaccessibility to certain areas. State legitimacy should be distinguished from its corollary associated with the process of nation building, without which, the justification for the state’s very existence, as opposed to its institutional structures, is questioned. A very clear example of legitimacy failure is the collapse of Ghaddafi’s Libya in 2011 (and similarly Tunisia). Despite the provision of services and human development indicators showing consistent upward trends, with some indicators leading the rest of Africa, Ghaddafi’s regime suffered from a crisis in legitimacy that eventually led to his overthrow.

Alternatively there are those who see them both as two sides of one coin, in effect intertwined with one another, sometimes acting separately and sometimes together. For example, legitimacy may be popularly endowed through democracy, but if a political stalemate emerges then the delivery of services slows, weakening both the functionality of institutions and the legitimacy of an otherwise effective and legitimate state apparatus. Bosnia and Herzegovina after the 2010 elections is an example of this where the inability for the legitimately elected representatives to reach a critical political compromise contributed to economic stagnation and slowed the delivery of critical state functions. The breaking of the political stalemate prevented a continuing weakening of the state.

One critical shortcoming of these approaches is that they place the relationship between the government and the governed in a closed circuit in which the state and the people are the only actors, suggesting a dialectically negotiated social contract alone ensures a stable state. The implication is that a democratically elected (legitimacy) government and/or one that is able to provide for its people (institutional) would lead to a stable state. Yet there are examples such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip that show that even with a legitimating process (democratic victory in 2006) and a relatively functional institutional structure (the main reason for the rejection of Fatah) the government and the governed are not the only actors who influence stability. In the case of Hamas, elements of the international community dismissed the election results which led to an inhibitive isolation. Similarly, were Somaliland within a closed circuit relationship it would be in a far different situation from where it currently is. The neighbouring instability and unwillingness among foreign countries to recognize its independence continues to dramatically weaken the territory. This suggests that external actors, those outside of the government-governed relationship, also play roles in strengthening or de-stabilizing states. These can include foreign states and non-state actors such as the less widely considered religious institutions. This book builds upon the position that both effective institutions and legitimacy are required for successful statebuilding but diverts from traditional discourse by emphasizing the potential of non-state actors that can contribute by focusing on one such group, religious institutions.

Religion and post-conflict statebuilding

Religion remains a much neglected actor in the study of international relations despite the past decade seeing new research emerge that has seen a ‘resurgence’ of religion and its ‘return from exile’.¹⁰ Four reasons appear prominently for why religion has for the past several decades been left out of the study of international affairs.¹¹ Firstly, that it is due to the origins of social science and specifically in its rejection of religion and other primordial societal constructs. Secondly, the study of international relations is heavily biased to view the world through Western perspectives, which do not see a place for religion in modern states. Thirdly, the field of international relations is heavily influenced by the use of quantitative methodologies that make it difficult to consider things that may not be easily measured such as religion. Lastly, the dominant paradigm within international relations theory, realism, does not see a place for religion other than as an instrument through which power is gained and wielded. Similarly, in a field related to post-conflict statebuilding, international development, Alan ver Beek found that any discussion of spirituality appeared to be a taboo.¹² This sentiment appears to be similarly present among practitioners. The head of the NGO (non-governmental organization) Division within the Swiss Agency for International Cooperation described it as a ‘mental taboo’ after organizing a conference on the topic in which participants ‘consistently evaded questions about the significance of religion’.¹³ In addition to these findings my own experience as a practitioner has been that there is a fear among the international community of engaging with religious leaders. Whether this is based upon a perception of responsibility for the preceding conflict or a reluctance to challenge the status quo thinking, either way both positions are unjustified.

As a result religious institutions, when included in theoretical conceptualizations, have been de-spiritualized leading them to being largely modelled as a civil society or lobby group, a concern that was reinforced by Pope Francis in his first mass when he warned of the Roman Catholic Church becoming a ‘compassionate NGO’.¹⁴ To give just one example, a religion’s transcendental nature and its concomitant ability to enshrine higher order values and shape societal mores through its institutions are critically overlooked. Instead, its representative institutions such as the Catholic Church or the great Islamic seats of learning are placed within academic constructs alongside Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and K Street lobbyists or, in the terminology of international relations, as being no different to other non-state actors.

The scholarly field of post-conflict statebuilding, much like that of international relations and its practitioners, has also ignored religious institutions. Writing in the Third World Quarterly, Alina Menocal rightly highlights the importance of ‘[o]ther [non-state] institutions, actors and alternative sources of authority’¹⁵ in her study on post-conflict statebuilding as does the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011, which notes ‘Governments that have restored confidence of stakeholders and citizens have typically mobilized non-state actors to deliver results rather than doing everything themselves.’¹⁶ What I found to be typical in post-conflict statebuilding literature is that it ignores religious actors. In the sentences following Menocal’s reference to the importance of other institutions she goes on to define them as ‘tribal authorities, the private sector, civil society and supranational institutions like the UN and the EU’. The World Bank report includes ‘communities and community organizations, traditional institutions of justice, the domestic private sector, NGOs, regional organizations, international donors, the international private sector’. Religious institutions are presumably either ignored or to be found within one of these categories, either of which would be a problematic conceptualization. In an effort to overcome this shortcoming I will be considering how religion as it is represented through its institutions can be brought into post-conflict statebuilding theory. For this purpose, throughout this book, agency is placed within religious institutions (group agency) as opposed to other religious actors such as God, individual clerics, believers or independent preachers.¹⁷ In particular I focus upon institutions that are significant and spiritually authoritative within a territory and primarily engage with the spiritual needs of a local community of believers within a national or transnational faith, denomination or sect. This limitation intentionally omits local minority religions that may not have sufficient standing and resources to act alongside state builders at a national level. It also separates political groups from social groups such as most religious charities. It would include religious institutions such as Al Azhar University (in its capacity as a seat of Islamic learning), religious orders such as the Jesuits and Shia Islam’s seminaries (hawza) and religious movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

Despite in most cases being local these religious institutions act within a context of failed or failing states that increasingly engage international actors, actors such as other states, international organizations and culturally or ethnically bonded social groupings. This internationalization of the failed state environment within which a local religious institution operates makes the recent revival of the study of religion in international relations pertinent to this book.¹⁸ In this regard the interaction between local religious institutions and the international arena operates in two directions. Local religious institutional involvement (as opposed to religion more broadly) within a particular post-conflict statebuilding context can feed back into the international order at the inter-state and global level by influencing transnational actors and states in a bottom-up manner, which may be of particular interest to scholars of international relations and religion.

Alternatively, in the reverse direction and relevant to this book, international actors can influence the actions of local religious institutions. In this direction, influence can take many forms ranging from a state blocking the transfer of resources (i.e. terrorist designation) to transnational religious bodies influencing a local religious institution’s decision making. In recent times within international relations theory such linkages between religion and international actors have been variously problematized with outcomes that are shaped by the adopted paradigm and in particular whether states are the critical units in international relations or not.¹⁹ This approach would suggest that within those paradigms that emphasize the predominance of states (realist, neo-realist) and those that add alongside the dominance of states international institutions (liberalism, pluralism or liberal institutionalism) such authorities would be in a position to limit the resources available to local religious institutions. This could be by controlling financial transfers between religious congregations, limiting the movement of clergy and even the transmission of ideas as and when deemed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Note on Transliteration
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Religion and Post-Conflict Statebuilding
• 2. Roman Catholic View of the State
• 3. Salvation as the Catholic Post-Conflict Statebuilding Imperative
• 4. Sunni Islam and the State
• 5. Justice as the Sunni Post-Conflict Statebuilding Imperative
• 6. Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index