Conviviality in the Superdiverse City: Researching the Governance of Religion Beyond the Nation-State

Studies on religion and democracy discuss the relation of religious and state actors in constitutional terms, concerning policy traditions and as institutional legacies. In all of these aspects, the democratic governance of religious diversity is very much discussed as a matter of the nation state and its degree of secularization. Traditionally a field of interest for legal scholars, state-religion relations and the institutional accommodation of religious minorities is increasingly relevant to other fields that are concerned with transforming religious landscapes and processes of pluralization. In fact, it is migration related diversification that currently brings religion and state-religion relations to the political agenda. The increasing overlap of the governance of religion with migration/integration regarding actors, discourses and policies poses a new and specific challenge for religious actors and policy makers alike. Accross Europe, we also observe an increase of illiberal developments in the public and political addressing of religious diversity. While the governance of religion on the national level is often stuck between (illiberal) symbolic gestures and complex (liberal) constitutional settings, local pragmatism and particularities of urban settings show a different picture, which scholars widely ignore. The paper therefore approaches the interaction of religion and public institutions from a multi-level politics perspective. Presenting the findings from a comparative case study on three Austrian cities that builds on the analysis of policy documents, as well as interviews with local policy makers and a topic specific media analysis, I aim to show the potential gains in a local approach to studies on governance of religious diversity. First, the paper investigates specifics in the local governance of religious diversity by contrasting it with the national model of religion-state relations. In a second step, I compare the specific conducts of public institutions on the different levels of state. To develop a multi-level concept to analyze the governance of religious diversity, I discuss the differing understandings of the secular state in relation to religions against the backdrop of the politicization and polarization of issues in this field.