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151. The State and Religious Actors in South Asia and Southeast Asia: Differing Motivations and Implications

Fri, March 17, 5:15 to 7:15pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Mackenzie

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the interactions between the representatives of state institutions, religious actors and related external forces in Muslim-majority countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as regional countries with significant Muslim minority communities; it elucidates each actors’ differing motivations, strategies and forms of interactions; and considers the resultant societal and policy implications. In this regard, religious actors, which include both state-affiliated and unaffiliated theologians, religion-based civil society organizations, religious-oriented political parties and foreign religious actors, play a crucial role in mediating the relationship between the state and citizens of differing religious faiths. This role is particularly important given that faith adherents often turn to the religious actors, who are perceived to hold religious legitimacy, for guidance on contentious socio-religious issues that are expressed in the public sphere. Taking into account the wide array of religious actors with differing ideological orientations (even within the same faith) and the concomitant effect of transnational religious influences, the panel examines the factors that can lead to instances of either cooperative or antagonistic interactions between the state and the different religious actors. Through the empirical examples provided in the papers of this panel, we seek to answer fundamental questions on how these particular forms of interactions can influence the positive or negative ways in which local and foreign religious actors function in the public and political spheres; the ways in which these interactions affect different segments of society from the religious to the areligious; and the similarities and dissimilarities across the regions studied.

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