Secular Power Europe and Islam: insights on decentring international relations

Abstract

Speaker: Sarah Wolff, Professor Leiden University Discussant: Katarina Delacoura, Professor, LSE Based on her award-winning book (European Union Studies Association Best Book award 2023) Secular Power Europe and Islam and through an exploration of Europe’s secular identity, an identity that is seen erroneously as normative, Professor Wolff will explain how Islam confronts the EU’s existential anxieties about its security and its secular identity. Islam disrupts Eurocentric assumptions about democracy and revolution and human rights. She will document how EU’s diplomats are trying to address that issue and to conduct some ‘religious engagement’. She will also discuss the avenues provided by the decentring agenda, which involves provincialising Europe, engaging with the perspective of the others and reconstructing EU’s agency as a global actor.