Jaclyn Neo Delivers Public Lecture at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

Associate Professor Jaclyn Neo ’03 delivered a public lecture on “Managing Religious Diversity: The Law of ‘Religious Harmony'” during her visiting appointment at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in December 2019. Her visit was jointly hosted by the Institute’s Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics and the Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism.

The Department of Ethics, Law and Politics is directed by Professor Ayelet Shachar and focuses on the study of citizenship, migration and diversity from the perspectives of law and political theory. The Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism is chaired by Professor Ran Hirschl and explores the interrelations between the constitutional arena (texts, institutions, jurisprudence) and the political sphere within which it operates, in particular as it pertains to the governance of collective identity, religion, urbanization, and economic inequality across time and place.

In her public lecture, Jaclyn examined laws and jurisprudence surrounding religious harmony in various Asian countries to identify distinctive conceptions of religious harmony. She points to the horizontalization of religious harmony claims, as well as the reversal of state-group claims whereby religious harmony is used to obligate states to protect religious interests. She further highlights some of the potential ways in which religious harmony may be exploited to advance majoritarian interests, to the detriment of the rights of religious minorities.