Constructivist scholars have systematically neglected the mechanisms of diffusion of religiously based non-Western norms in liberal settings. In recent decades the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has become an increasingly influential international actor through which Muslim-majority states channel their normative concerns in international society. In particular the OIC has become actively engaged in promoting international norms that challenge, often from an Islamic perspective, hegemonic secular liberal values embedded within the institutions of international society. The paper focuses on two bundles of norms that the OIC has attempted to promote within the United Nations (UN) since the 1990s. The first are “dialogue of civilizations” norms. These were successfully institutionalized in 2005, after gathering substantial backing from Western states, within a major UN initiative, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. The second are “religious defamation” norms. These, instead, were relentlessly opposed by Western states and led only to a minor and vague initiative largely outside the UN’s purview in 2011, the Istanbul Process. What explains these diverging results? The paper contends that religiously based non-Western norms have the greatest chances of being fully institutionalized within the UN, an international organization deeply embedded in and constitutive of the liberal international order, only when they can be effectively “translated” into secular liberal norms. [submission system not working well, paper is with co-author Filippo Dionigi, LSE: f.dionigi1@lse.ac.uk]
