The past decade has seen an increased scholarly attention on religion and its relationship with the state. This project engages with existing scholarship and hopes to advance it by focusing on this question: What are the social, political, constitutional/legal, and religious norms that regulate and shape religion in the modern nation state? The project thus seeks to connect legal theory to state practice on the regulation of religion. Furthermore, in seeking out non-conventional theorizing on the regulation of religion, the project will give priority to perspectives beyond Anglo-American/European approaches. Consequently, the project seeks to provide a platform to explore non-conventional (i.e. not purely Western) conceptualizations of the relationship between state, society, politics, and religion.

The theme of the workshop – Regulating Religion – derives directly from the Law and Religion scoping workshop sponsored by CALS last year. At the workshop, the idea of focusing on the regulation of religion (and its different facets) was raised as an appropriate focal point for law and religion scholarship. From this basis, in conceiving the project, we have adopted a broad interpretation of regulation, which includes socio-political and legal varieties of regulation and embraces ‘externally imposed’ as well as ‘internally imposed’ (or self-imposed) varieties of regulation. We believe that regulation is an apt theme because law is regularly called upon to define the terms of religion in is private but even more so public roles, and there is also considerable discussion in socio-political theory about the role of religion in the public square, which, at least implicitly, talks about the regulation of religion.