Religious Actors, Party Politics and Contestation

Abstract

The last decades of the Twentieth Century witnessed a global resurgence of religion, within all world regions and all major religious traditions, labelled as “revenge of God” by French scholar Gilles Kepel (1991). According to Jose Casanova (1994), it implied a process of de-privatization (or re-publicization) of religions, that started to claim a renewed role in politics, at the domestic and the international level, both in terms of values, and in terms of the role played by religious actors. This latter point will be developed by this panel, which will include contributions about religiously oriented political parties, movements and groups. Particularly, the panel will focus on their influence on party politics and their role in contesting political order, both in democracies and in non democratic regimes.