'Traditional Values' and the Transnational Networks of Moral Conservative Norm Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Conflicts over moral and religious issues such as gender equality, bioethics, and the role and place of religion in the public sphere have shown a disruptive potential across many societies, even in highly secularized Western European societies. They have also become the subject of political and legal debates between liberal and moral conservative political and religious actors in international institutions such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and forums of inter-religious dialogue like the World Council of Churches. The Postsecular Conflicts Project, which we will present in this panel for the first time since the start of the project in 2016, looks – from a normative theoretical and from an empirical perspective – at conflicts over religious-moral issues in these institutional arenas while focusing on the actors from the conservative spectrum and investigating their role as transnational moral conservative norm entrepreneurs. The focus of the project lies on Russian actors, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian actors are newcomers to these debates and the project aims at clarifying their role in transnational moral conservative alliances. The Postsecular Conflicts cuts across two of the areas outlined in the description of this section, the comparative study of religious actors and political theories of democracy, political liberalism and religion.