Governing the Sacred; A Contextual-Normative Exploration of the Models of Governance of Contested Sacred Sites

Contested sacred sites pose an especially difficult challenge in the field of religion-state relations. Holy sites sacred to more than one religious group, either in an inter or intra-religious context, are often the focus of bitter disputes between religious groups with regard to ownership, usage rights, management, permissible religious conduct, and many other aspects. As such, they are often the source of immense levels of violence, and intractable conflicts. How then should democratic countries govern, or ‘manage’ a given contested sacred site present within their borders? This evaluative question has gained very little attention in the normative literature on religion-state relations and its close neighbor - religious toleration. This research aims to fill this gap in the literature. Of special interest is the different ways such sites are governed or ‘managed’ (‘non-interference’, ‘status quo’, ‘separate and divide’, ‘relative preference’, ‘closure’ etc), to gradually create, via an inductive or casuistic manner a typology of such management methods. Note that such governance methods correspond to wider theoretical models of religion-state relations. For example ‘non-interference’ is connected to libertarianism, ‘separate and divide’ to evenhandedness etc. Following the analysis of the ways such sites are governed, recommendations towards their management will be suggested. In this normative part of our project, we expect to move back and forth, between the empirical data and the normative considerations of religious toleration and ‘just endings’, until a careful balance is reached. As the empirical data, in its suggested aggregative ‘shape’, is novel, we expect that this back and forth will be helpful beyond an application of normative concepts to empirical scenarios, and will constitute, a ‘theory improving mechanism’ as well. This step will therefore follow the recent contextual or casuistic school in political theory, which insists on empirically informed style of political theory.