MA Religion, Politics and Society

SOAS University of London

Religion remains a force to be reckoned with in the contemporary global geopolitical landscape.As a result, there is a pressing need to reassess predominant understandings of secularisation, as well as the meanings of, and tensions inherent within, secular assumptions and secularist positions. The so-called 'resurgence' of religion in the public sphere in recent decades is now a significant area of interdisciplinary scholarship eliciting a complex array of responses, ranging from vehement opposition to the very idea that religious concepts and commitments have a right to expression in political debates, to a reassessment of the origins and implications of divisions between the secular and the religious and their relationship to the nation state.The notion that there is no singular secularism, but rather a plurality of secularisms, and of ‘religion’ as an invention of European modernity and colonial interests are two of many emerging efforts to re-conceptualise the meanings of religion and the secular and the entangled relationship between them.

Department of Religions & Philosophies, School of History, Religions & Philosophies