The right to religion and the control of public space

Although to date theories of recognition have not pay a great deal of attention to religion, in practice states have both positive and negative attitudes of recognition to it. Religion is recognized positively when individuals' religious identities and the religious groups of which they are members are granted a certain standing in the state. Religion has been recognized negatively in some notable circumstances in which states have attempted to destroy religions or at least radically reduce their significance in the life of the state. In either case, the state puts in place a certain scheme of regulation with which it aims to control and shape where religion may be exercised and how it may be practiced. In this paper, my aim is to focus on how these recognitive and regulative practices seek to control where religion is practiced. In particular, I want to investigate how states deploy distinctions between public and private in order to determine the location of legitimate religious practices. In order to conduct this investigation, I shall focus in particular on the case of the Swiss minaret ban of 2009. In that year, a clause was added to the Swiss constitution declaring simply that 'the building of minarets is forbidden'. In this case, a change to regulative scheme implies significant changes to how one particular religion is recognized. Many aspects of recognition and relations of recognition have already been thoroughly investigated, including the character of the agents of recognition, and the nature of acts of recognition they perform. But the place in which recognition happens, its location in physical space, has largely overlooked. Thus, by investigating how religion is recognized and regulated, and in particular how these practices control its location in space, my hope is to cast light not just on the 'who' and the 'how' of recognition, but also on the 'where'.