Poll to bring G-Bissau stability

One party wins a clear parliamentary majority in Guinea-Bissau, which observers hope will save it from drug barons.

Source:Poll to bring G-Bissau stability

Should you invest in a pension?

Experts say pension schemes in sub-Saharan Africa only cover 5% of the labour force. Got any plans for retirement?

Source:Should you invest in a pension?

Who should protect children?

Most African countries have signed up to treaties to protect children rights, how do they score?

Source:Who should protect children?

UN reports on fighting in Darfur

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls on Sudan’s government and Darfur rebels to refrain from attacking each other after reports of fighting.

Source:UN reports on fighting in Darfur

DR Congo warlord will face trial

The ICC says former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga will be tried in January - ending months of procedural delays.

Source:DR Congo warlord will face trial

Harare diary

New beatings and abductions, as US dollar takes over

Source:Harare diary

Mugabe to name ministers 'soon'

Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe is forming a government, a minister says, after talks failed.

Source:Mugabe to name ministers 'soon'

Commentary: Global Politics and Religion (Conclusion)

<Continued>
The Third World
Surveys indicate that most people in nearly all Third World countries are religious believers (Duke and Johnson 1989). Some argue that there is widespread growth of   religious movements with political goals in the Third World which emerged in the 1980s (Thomas 1995; Casanova 1994). Many are grassroots movements led or coordinated by middle- or low-ranking religious professionals. Sometimes, as in Guatemala, the perceived secularization of the Catholic Church ‘seems to bear a direct and inverse correlation to the strength of popular religious movements and organizations, especially in indigenous sectors’ (Garrard-Burnett 1996 98).

Why should there be an increase in numbers of Third World religious groups with political goals?  Sahliyeh (1990 15) maintains that   social upheaval and economic dislocation connected to the processes of modernization have sent people back to religion in the Third World.  Miles (1996 525) argues that in the 1990s, a period of social, economic and political transition in many countries, ‘populations throughout the developing world … are rediscovering the religious dimension to group identity and statistic politics’ (emphasis added in both).  Sahliyeh and Miles are claiming  that there has been a  ‘return’  to religion  in the Third World, the consequence of   inconclusive or unsatisfactory modernization,  disillusionment  with secular nationalism, problems of state legitimacy, political oppression and incomplete national identity, widespread socioeconomic grievances, and the perceived erosion of traditional morality and values. The simultaneity of these crises is said to provide a fertile milieu for the growth of political religion.

I do not doubt that such factors provide an enabling environment   for religion’s political prominence in the Third World. I am equally sure that unwelcome developments prod many people to look to religion to provide   answers to existential angst. But religion has always fulfilled such a role; it is highly unlikely that there is ‘more’   religion now than in the past in the Third World. Why then do religious groups with political goals seem more common? It is possible  that they  are  simply  more visible due  to the global communications revolution; there are not more of them, just that we can see them - and their consequences - more easily.  Smith (1990 34) claims that ‘what has changed in the present situation… is mainly the growing awareness of’ manifestations of political religion in the Third World ‘by the Western world, and the perception that they might be related to our interests’. 

It is important to understand   there are numerous historical examples of political religion in the Third World, especially during   Western colonization and after it.  In the colonial era, Western powers sought to introduce secularism in many cases resulting in a religious backlash.  ‘Non-western’ religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam had periods of intense political activity (Smith 1990 34; Haynes 1993, 1995, 1996). In the years immediately after  World War I,  religion was widely employed in the service of  anti-colonial nationalism  in Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Engels & Marks 1994; Furedi 1994; Haynes 1993, 1995, 1996). After World War II, in 1947, Pakistan was founded as a Muslim   state, religiously and culturally distinct from Hindu-dominated India, while Buddhism was of great political importance in Burma and Vietnam in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule. During the 1960s in Latin America,   Christian democracy and liberation theology were of widespread political significance. In the 1970s and 1980s, political religion was of great importance in the varying contexts of Iran and Nicaragua. What this all points to is that political religion in the Third World has a long history of opposition to unacceptably secular regimes; it is not ab initio in the contemporary period,   but rather  should be see as a series of historical responses to  attempts by the state to reduce religion’s political influence.

In the immediate aftermath of independence after World War II, Third World modernizing politicians, influenced by  Western ideologies, often Western-educated, and impressed by  Western countries’ order and progress,  filled the void left by colonial administrators. However, the secularization  process promoted by  nationalist leaders  did not, for the most part, bring development. Instead, secularization resulted in the attempted  transplantation of alien Western institutions, laws, and procedures which aimed to erode, undermine and eventually displace  traditional and holistic religio-political systems. The putative modernizers   saw their  countries as politically, socially and economically  backward what was needed was to  emulate the secular model  of progress pursued so successfully by  Western countries. Consequently, political modernizers sought to enforce policies and programmers of modernization - which also, to them, meant secularization. However, within a few  years,  the  credibility and legitimacy of ‘secular socialism, secular capitalism, or a mixture of both’ (Husain 1995 161) was often  seriously undermined, as they widely failed  to deliver on  promises of economic development and national integration. 

Poorly implemented modernization programmers also proved incompatible with traditional religious practices, as growing numbers of people left the rural areas for urban locales because of land and employment shortages. While the social, political and economic  impact  of  displacement and urban migration is extensive and complex, it seems highly likely that  dislocations of large numbers of people  from local communities, and the reforging of personal relations in urban areas, ‘opened the way to renegotiation of allegiances to traditional institutions’ (Garrard-Burnett 1996 102). Where modernization was particularly aggressively pursued - in, for example, India, Thailand, Egypt, Algeria, Brazil - religious backlashes occurred, in protest at unpopular state policies.

In summary, post-colonial governments in the Third World often followed policies of nation-building and expansion of state power, equating secularization with modernization.  However, by undermining traditional value systems, often allocating opportunities in highly unequal ways, modernization  produced in many ordinary people a deep sense of alienation, stimulating a search for an identity that would give life some purpose and meaning. Many  believed they might deal with the unwelcome  effects of modernization if they presented their claims for more of the ‘national cake’  as part of  a group. Often the sense of collectivity was rooted in the epitome of traditional community religion.  The result was a focus on religiosity, with far-reaching implications for social integration and political stability. This is not a ‘return’ to religion, but the utilization of religious belief to help pursue the pursuit of social, political and economic goals. 

Clearly,  for  religion to  be useful as a defence against secularization, it must  be able  to focus and coordinate popular  dissatisfaction. There must be what  Bellah (1965 194) calls a ‘creative tension between religious ideals and the world’  where ‘transcendent ideals, in tension with empirical reality, have a central place in the religious symbol system, while empirical reality itself is taken very seriously as at least potentially meaningful, valuable, and a valid sphere for religious action’.  This is a way of saying that when the secular world seeks to impose on religion’s space, at a certain somewhat variable stage it will  fight back, aiming  to reduce secular influence and to regain  its autonomy. 
 
Fighting back against encroaching secularization   explains the strong profile of political religion in the Third World. For example,  the radicalism of Catholic priests and liberation theology in Latin America, the growth of Islamism in the Middle East and  of Sikh separatism in India, are all explicable in this way.  Smith (1990 33) claims that overt links between such phenomena  are  ‘weak or nonexistent. Liberation theologians and revolutionary ayatollahs may be aware of each other’s existence but have not influenced each other very much’.  What he means by this, I take it, is that empirical evidence of direct, personal relationships are absent. But this is not the point  virtually all post-colonial Third World countries share  the historical desire of  political elites to  secularize, to  modernize, to ‘improve’ their ‘backward’ societies. In my view, we do not need to look further for   ‘causes’ of  political religion in the Third World it is a common response from those who  value their religious milieu and who do not wish to see it undermined by the advance of secularized ‘progress’. If people of different religious backgrounds employ broadly similar tactics it does not mean they have had to learn from each other, only that they collectively respond in similar  ways.

Third World states seek to prevent, or at the least make it very difficult for, political religion to organize. In most Muslim countries, for example, Islamist parties are either proscribed or, at least,   infiltrated by state security services. Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the Islamic Tendency Movement of Tunisia, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, the Islamic Party of Kenya, and Tanzania’s Balukta  were all banned  in the early 1990s. Others - including  the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan of Indonesia, the Parti Islam  Se Malaysia and Egypt’s Muslim Brothers - are  controlled or infiltrated by the state . On the rare occasions when Islamist parties are allowed openly  to  seek electoral support they are often   successful. Examples include the  FIS electoral victories in 1990/1 and   that of   Turkey’s  Welfare Party (Refah Partisi). The latter   won the largest share of the vote  (21 per cent) of any party in the 1995 election. Later, in 1996, Refah achieved power in coalition with a right-wing secular party, the True Path.  Parties like the FIS and Refah are electorally popular   because  offer the disaffected, the alienated and the poverty-stricken a vehicle to pursue beneficial change.

On the other hand, in India,  there is   strong electoral  support for  Hindu nationalist parties - and not only from  the poor and marginalized.  Shiv Sena jointly rules Bombay and Maharashtra state with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Nationally, the BJP has emerged as the largest political party in India, eclipsing the country’s traditionally dominant Congress (I) Party. In Buddhist Thailand, on the other hand, a Buddhist reformist party, Santi Asoke, had some electoral success in the early 1990s. The point is that parties like Shiv Sena, the BJP and Santi Asoke all have  a wide appeal  as  viable alternatives to ruling parties  often characterized as both corrupt and inefficient. In sum, when Third World people lose   faith in the transform Tory abilities of secular politicians, religion often appears a viable alternative for the pursuit of beneficial change. It has widely reemerged into  the public arena as a mobilizing   normative force.

CONCLUSION

My main argument is that the political impact of religion will fall into two main - not necessarily mutually exclusive - categories. First, if the mass of people are not especially religious organized religion will often seek a public role as a result of the belief that society has taken a wrong turn - and needs an injection of religious values to put it back on the straight and narrow. Religion will try to derivative itself, so that it has a voice in contemporary debates about social and political direction. The aim is to be a significant factor in political deliberations so that religion’s voice is taken into account. Religious leaders  seeks   support from ordinary people by   addressing certain crucial   issues, including not only the perceived decline in public and private morality but also the  insecurities of life in an undependable market where ‘greed and luck appear as effective as work and rational choice’  (Comaroff 1994 310). In sum, in the West religion’s return to the public sphere is molded by a range of factors, including the proportion of religious believers in society and the extent to which religious organizations perceive a decline in public standards of morality and compassion.

In   Third World societies, on the other hand, most people are already religious believers. Following widespread   disappointment at the outcomes of modernizing policies, however, religion  often focuses and coordinates opposition, especially  - but not exclusively  -   the poor and ethnic minorities.  Attempts by political leaders to pursue modernization lead   religious traditions to respond.  What this amounts to is that in the  Third World  in particular religion is often well placed to benefit from any strong societal backlash against  the perceived malign effects of modernization.

'Stigma kills'

Counsellor tells of struggle to change HIV attitudes

Source:'Stigma kills'

Mugabe wins out in talks

Africa’s leaders back Mugabe’s view of power-sharing

Source:Mugabe wins out in talks

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