Ontologies, Cosmologies, Worldviews, Truths: Exploring alternatives to the secular/religious framework in approaches to global justice

Recent scholarship in religious studies and International Relations has raised numerous questions about the utility and applicability of the secular/religious binary as a framework for analysis in global politics. This scholarship has argued not only that the secular/religious binary is a critical structuring element in dominant modes of identity, power and exclusion in global politics, but also that it prescribes a particular understanding of what ‘religion’ is, ignoring alternatives. Building on recent global justice critiques that dominant modes of politics, public reasoning and academic scholarship contribute to a form of epistemological or cognitive injustice (De Sousa Santos 2005; 2014), this paper argues that if we are to pursue a truly just global community, we must also address ontological injustices, where certain belief systems and worldviews, ways of being in the world, are devalued and subordinated to Euro-American Enlightenment approaches that privilege secular immanent frameworks. The paper argues that we must at least consider moving away from the secular/religious binary as one of the dominant ordering frames in contemporary global justice approaches and develop alternatives that take seriously the spiritualities, cosmologies and ontologies of diverse ‘others’. After outlining some of the key reasons for the increasing disenchantment with the secular/religious framework, the article explores four possible alternatives that currently exist in anthropology and global justice literature that deal with inequalities in knowledge in general, before developing a preliminary alternative framework that seeks to overcome the limitations of the secular/religious binary in contemporary global justice theory and practice.