Governance of the Multi-Religious

Legible Religion: The Consequences of State Interventions

Ryszard Bobrowicz, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

The reality of state governance requires constant simplifications. State interventions require making decisions about how to 'read' the governed reality by selecting salient marks, among others, to determine what data to collect, how to process that data, and which areas and subjects to intervene in. With limited resources, this by necessity leads to, as late James C. Scott put it, 'abridged maps' of reality. Thus, states work on 'legible' versions of reality, which often miss significant parts of the phenomena they consider—the ones that were deemed inessential by the administrative eye. While practical for the purposes at hand, such a limited perspective significantly shapes the reality being governed. With enough force, it can reshape the phenomena in question, depriving them of the value missed by the administrative perspective—and yet vital in some other way. The effect is even more pronounced in the context of socially constructed categories—and 'religion' is a good example of this dynamic. In my paper, I will take apart the notion of the 'governance of multi-religious' as a typically European state problem, both produced and problematized by the European states as a result of creating 'legible religions' with their frameworks.

Democratic Conditionality in Belgian and Swedish Governance of Faith Communities 2015-2025

Martin Stenfors Eidrup, University of Gothenburg.

This paper examines the emergence, development, and use of “democracy criteria” in the legal regulation of Muslim communities in Sweden and Belgium. Drawing on a comparative analysis of legislative documents in the timespan 2015-2025, the article analyses this legislative history through the lens of juridification, arguing that contemporary regulation increasingly relies on criteria such as transparency, participation, gender equality, and the absence of foreign influence. Although formally applicable to all religious groups, these standards have largely evolved in response to concerns that Muslim organizations embody undemocratic values or external loyalties. The article situates the rise of democracy criteria as a relatively recent development in the secular regulation of religion. While Sweden and Belgium are countries with distinct histories of religious governance, this comparison reveals shared European assumptions about the proper role of religion in a democratic society and illuminates how democratic ideals are translated into legal norms that define legitimate religion in contemporary Europe.

From Inclusion to Exclusion: Governance of Muslim Civil Society in Sweden

Linnea Lundgren, Uppsala University.

This paper examines an ongoing shift in the governance logic shaping Muslim civil society in Sweden. The governance of religious diversity, and of Muslim civil society in particular, has long been marked by a paradox. Religious actors are increasingly seen as resources for crisis preparedness and trust-building, and are therefore invited into collaboration. At the same time, they are approached as potential risks that need to be regulated, assessed and managed. This tension has often been handled through a model of conditional inclusion, where Muslim organisations are included as legitimate partners through demands for transparency, representation and demonstrated democratic values, a pattern also seen in other European contexts. In recent years, however, this model appears to be shifting toward a governance through suspicion and precaution, where risk increasingly becomes the organising framework. Drawing on an ongoing study of local Muslim civil society, the concept of de-risking is used to analyse how this governance logic travels into municipal arenas, institutional settings such as schools, and commercial infrastructures such as banking. These processes are often dispersed and uncoordinated, but clearly shaped by a national turn toward governance through suspicion. The final part discusses what this means for Muslim organisations’ capacity to maintain infrastructure, participate in public life and be heard, and situates the Swedish case in relation to broader European developments in the field.

State-Manufactured Religion and the Danish Quran Law

Kareem McDonald, University of Copenhagen.

This paper argues that, when conceptualising the relationship between the state and religion, we need to move beyond the familiar paradigms of regulation, governance, and management. These frameworks obscure a more significant dynamic: modern states not only regulate religion but also play a significant role in producing it. I refer to this as “state-manufactured religion”: the process by which courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies transform complex and contentious religious issues into what counts as “religion” in law.

This argument is developed through a case study of Denmark’s 2023 “Quran law,” which criminalises the desecration of texts deemed to have ‘significant religious importance’ and requires courts to determine which texts may have such significance. During the first prosecution and subsequent trial under this legislation, a Danish court effectively resolved an internal theological dispute regarding the status of Quranic translations by ruling that such texts could be considered to have religious significance under the law. A contested intra-religious question was thus converted into a binding legal determination.

The Danish case highlights a general feature of modern law with wider significance across Europe: when states regulate religion, particularly in contexts involving offence, they inevitably produce what religion is in legal terms. This paper demonstrates how this manufacturing process creates specific legal versions of religion and why this challenges the concept of secular neutrality.

The University Seen from the Perspective of the Far-Right

Jesper Petersen, University of Copenhagen.

This presentation examines the role of academic authority in shaping far-right political reasoning, drawing on interviews and counter-jihad literature. The central argument is that the university is not external to far-right ideology but constitutes one of its key resources: credentialed scholarship on demography, genetics, and Islam is routinely mobilised to lend authority to far-right claims. The presentation closes by considering what this means for universities' public role in current politics.

Multi-religious Rooms and the Governance of Religious Diversity in the Italian Institutional Public Space

Giuseppina Scala, Università Commerciale "Luigi Bocconi".

The emergence of multi-religious and shared spiritual rooms within Italian institutional public space – often presented as either neutral or inclusive sites of religious accommodation - challenges the consolidated Italian legal paradigm of “place of worship”. Rather than embodying genuine pluralism, these spaces function as laboratories through which the governance of religious diversity can be observed under conditions shaped by historical Catholic predominance and structural constitutional asymmetry, particularly affecting Islamic presence.

Drawing on selected case studies, the paper  argues that multi-religious rooms and shared spiritual spaces operate as sites where the principle of inclusion is negotiated, reframed, and often constrained. In the prison context, the Parma case shows how a community-driven initiative for a mosque was transformed into a “state-managed” multi-religious room through a formal protocol. In universities, institutional autonomy produces varying forms of “conditional inclusion,” as illustrated by the Muslim prayer room at the University of Bari compared to the explicitly labelled “mosque room” in Catanzaro. In healthcare settings, the coexistence of informal arrangements, as in the Meyer Pediatric Hospital in Florence, and institutionalised “Rooms of Silence,” as in Padua, highlights the discretionary nature of accommodation.

These different developments reflect a broader structural tension: multi-religious rooms emerge within an Italian model of a merely proclaimed laicità which therefore remains only partially implemented. As such, they offer a different framework both from the rigid neutrality of French laïcité and from the recognition-oriented logic of British multiculturalism. The Italian case thus reveals a hybrid and much unsettled governance approach, in which institutional responses to religious diversity remain fragmented, largely pragmatic, and deeply contingent.

Constitutional Intolerance: the fashioning of the Other in Europe's constitutional repertoires

SCALA “High Note” Lecture: Marietta van der Tol, University of Cambridge.

What does it mean to tolerate diversity in a post-Christian and post-secular state? In many European states, political conflicts over diversity express themselves in constitutional repertoires, such as politically one-sided interpretation of constitutional concepts, the use of constitutional amendments, and even the complete overhaul of a constitutional system. Based on case studies, anecdotes and research experience in Hungary, Poland, France and the Netherlands, this lecture articulates a concern over the rise of “constitutional intolerance”: the instrumentalization of constitutions for intolerant purposes by electoral majorities in Europe. The guiding argument is that intolerance is not only a potential undercurrent of illiberalism or indeed of liberalism – but fundamentally relies on the vulnerability of constitutional structures to political expressions of intolerance.

Public Participation, Regional Development and Religious Minority Status: An embedded socio-legal analysis of Western Thrace

Kyriaki Topidi, European Centre for Minority Issues.

Minority status in contemporary terms can be approached by multiple identity and socio-legal vectors. From a socio-legal perspective, this paper bases itself on elements of national constitutional arrangements and the Greek state’s approach to religious diversity governance but moves away from them to bring together the form of regionalized cultural autonomy applied to Muslim minorities in Western Thrace with patterns of regional socio-economic development. At the intersection of both of these angles, it asks the question as to how public participation of Muslim minorities in Western Thrace is conditioned by state-sponsored regional development within a border region. 

The introductory part of the paper situates historically and geopolitically Thrace as a cross-border region. Relying on the conceptual framework of human capital, the discussion then illustrates the applicability of the concept through minority educational arrangements in Western Thrace. Connecting public participation with socio-economic opportunities, it moves on to critically discuss the connection between human capital and minority socio-economic participation in light of recent legal and proposed regional development reforms in the region, including from a gendered perspective. The analysis concludes by highlighting the missed connections between forms of minority cultural autonomy and regional socio-economic development in its current state from both a state-centered perspective as well as from a minority group-based one.

By which book? Assessing the human rights implications of religious orthodoxy in a court of law

Helge Årsheim, University of Inland Norway.

This presentation examines the origins and consequences of the recent decision in the case between the Norwegian state and the Jehovah's Witnesses before the Supreme Court of Norway, assessing what the decision may mean to the official Norwegian policy of supporting religious communities financially, and the ideal of a society based on open secularism.