Call for papers: Religion and Innovation beyond the public/private divide

Trento, 19-21 November 2018
Center for Religious Studies, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Leaving their traditional confinement to the private sphere behind, religious practices are reacquiring a central role in the life of individuals and collectives. At the same time, international migration calls for increased reflection on the political and juridical accommodation of conflicting normativities. These dynamics deeply challenge consolidated understandings of democracy, the public sphere, individual and group rights, common/private goods, etc.
This workshop aims to discuss the innovative potentials of ideas that respond to the ongoing weakening of the modern foundational binary public law vs. private law. States are increasingly no longer the only legitimate sources of legal normativity. Many social collectives become the bearers of a “private autonomy” that makes them the producers of bodies of public law, more or less independent from state law. The hypothesis this conference section takes up is that the conventional conceptual grids are not well-equipped to account for this phenomenon, as most of them tend to reduce it to normativity “in the shadow of law”. On the contrary, groups of various types (such as religious, cultural, labour-based, community-based ones) are autonomous sources of a “law of the private subjects” that does away with the traditional chain of law-making and legitimation. This key transition calls for a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of how a nei ther-pri vate-nor-public law opens up to the rearticulation of the existing forms of political organization along the lines of multiple, coexisting forms of mediation.

Organised by: Institute of State and Law (Czech Academy of Sciences), Centre for Law and Public Affairs (CeLAPA) and Center for Religious Studies, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

To apply for participation, scholars are invited to submit an abstract of their take on the core concerns of the conference (250words). Deadline for applications: October 20th 2018, by email to: petr.agha@centrum.cz.