Religion,demography, and politics in Lebanon

A devastating earthquake hit Istanbul and its environs shortly after noon on 10 July 1894. Although seismic disturbances were quite frequent in the long history of the Ottoman capital, the imperial city had not witnessed such violent tremors in more than a century. Hundreds of people died and thousands more were injured as a result of the complete or partial collapse of private dwellings, mosques, churches, synagogues and other public buildings. The earthquake of July 1894 hit the seat of the Ottoman government during a period of rapid socio-cultural change and shortly before the empire faced one of its worst crises in the late nineteenth century. As may be expected, many people in the Ottoman lands sought an explanation to the calamity that befell the inhabitants of the capital and neighbouring regions. Some could draw on long-standing interpretive traditions that were primarily either theological in nature or based on classical naturalist theories. However, the Ottoman intelligentsia rejected such explanations out of hand. The Ottoman response to the earthquake mirrored the similar embrace of science's authority and adoption of scientific methods and tools in many other contemporary societies. The process of the expansion and globalization of scientific knowledge expanded beyond the boundaries of Europe and its colonies. Science and technology were widely perceived to be the measure of civilization and modernity. The Ottoman intelligentsia and political elite were therefore invested in helping the Ottoman Empire meet standards that were set in Europe and North America but also achieved quite successfully in Japan. They seized upon the earthquake of 1894 to disseminate knowledge of modern earth sciences and implement new methods of scientific study of seismic events in the Ottoman lands.     

Religion,the churches,and the German ‘revolution’ of November 1989

The state election of 2006 in Rheinland-Pfalz resulted in a (bare) majority of seats for the SPD, which allows the party to govern alone for the first time in the history of the state. The CDU, on the other hand, received slightly less than one-third of the vote, an all-time low in its former stronghold. This result was by and large determined by factors at the state level. Yet it had a considerable impact at the federal level: it signalled the end of a string of devastating losses for the SPD, enhanced the standing of minister president Kurt Beck (now the SPD's chairman), and brought to an end the last coalition between the SPD and the FDP. These repercussions notwithstanding, there is no evidence of a durable voter realignment benefiting the SPD, since the party's victory was apparently due to short- and mid-term factors. Therefore, the outcome of the next election (scheduled for 2011) is by no means a foregone conclusion.     

Religion,Secularization and Democracy in the Mediterranean Region: Problems and Prospects

Political debates in many Mediterranean countries today are increasingly framed in dichotomous terms, highlighting divisions between religious and secular worldviews. In some countries, for example Israel, the issue is so contentious that it is described as a ‘culture war’. While Israel struggles to balance its commitment to a Jewish state and a democracy, it does not seem to matter if the countries in question are democracies or non-democracies, or what their majority religious faith is. Instead, the role of religion in public life or, put another way, the ‘public return of religion’, is a pertinent and controversial political question everywhere in the Mediterranean region. How do we explain this phenomenon? On the one hand, we can point to both economic and demographic changes, while, on the other, we can trace the impact of continuing secularisation. Together these two sets of developments produce new challenges to existing political arrangements.     

Hamas in Politics: Democracy,Religion, Violence

Ahmed Midhat Efendi, a nineteenth century Turkish author, maintained that it was necessary to establish customs duties and other barriers against foreign sellers in order to convince them to produce locally in the Ottoman Empire. This would be a way to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to a country in need of capital and technology. However, today, liberals around the world as well as in Turkey see a free trade environment as a prerequisite for FDI. This study tries to find out whether a relationship existed between free trade and FDI inflows in Turkey during a period when the Turkish foreign trade and financial markets were almost completely liberalized.     

试析宗教对韩国总统选举的影响

韩国宪法虽然确立了"政教分离"的原则,但现实中宗教因素渗透到了政治中,并对总统选举造成了明显的影响。总统候选人的宗教信仰、选民的宗教信仰以及宗教团体在选举过程中的宣传游说,都影响到总统选举的最终投票结果。目前,宗教因素在韩国总统选举中已经由一个"独立变量",发展为一个"非独立变量",但其影响将长期存在。     

Religion and political allegiance

What are the religious differences between Australians who prefer the Australian Labor party, the Democratic Labor party, or the Liberal/Country parties? Before we answer this question from the data of the ‘religion in Australia’ survey¹ it may be useful for at least some readers to give a short summary of the relationship between denominations and voting patterns. I apologise to those readers for whom all this is old ground.     

Gesellschaft und Religion

In Habermas’ well-known speech Faith and knowledge (given on the occasion of accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, 2001) the term “post-secular society” is of key importance. The present article examines the term from the perspective of the sociology of religion, outlining the gradual changes in Habermas’ conception of the importance of religion and its place in society. The value of the term “post-secular” proves to be of very limited value in characterising the present time. Nor is there any improvement to be found in Höhn’s suggested linking the terms of “post-secular” and “post-religious”. Still, using the term “post-secular society” helps to go beyond some of the intensely narrow views of being secular as favoured by modern societies.     

Religion und Sozialintegration

This paper examines the role of religion as a source of social capital in Germany. In addition to networks of civic engagement and informal social connections with family and friends, the identity- and status-bridging nature of these networks are also considered. Results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) suggest that both, subjective religiosity and public religious practice, have a positive impact on social integration in Germany. But religious traditions – Catholicism, Protestantism, other Christians and Islam – differ in this regard. While attending religious services leads to larger friendship networks and increased sociability in all religions, civic engagement is only fostered by Christian religiosity and in particular Protestantism. However, none of the religious traditions encourages identity- or status-bridging social capital.     

Religion,ethnicity and citizenship: demands for territorial self-determination in southern Kaduna,Nigeria

This article analyses the ‘politics of scale’ of how identity is linked to territory in the quest for self-determination by actors on the Christian side of the ethno-religious conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Ethnic and political relations are framed with reference to scale, such as ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’, in ways that support claims for territorial control on an ethnic and religious basis. The experience of lack of access to the state is seen to be grounded in community identities. Furthermore, the state relates to citizens through religious and neo-customary authorities as a way to localise authority. This is connected to an idea that neo-customary institutions represent ‘the local’. It is argued in this article that these institutions are just as entangled in various constructions of scale as the state.     

Religion and inter-ethnic violence in Indonesia

Commentators have long struggled to understand state-society relations in Asia within the framework of the dominant liberal-democratic conceptualisation of civil society. This article examines the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's theory of civil society for understanding contemporary Cambodia and Vietnam, with reference to both legal and social frameworks. Such an analysis illuminates important aspects of state-society relations in Southeast Asia that tend to be overlooked by dominant liberal and Marxist perspectives. This article argues, however, that the utility of Gramsci's conception of civil society for understanding state-society relations in Cambodia and Vietnam, by retaining the notion of civil society as a realm associatively separate from the state, is limited.