The Costs of Recognition

This project argues that there are costs of recognizing religion in global politics and that these have been largely understudied. It suggests that these reflect more basic qualities in the logic of recognition itself. By studying recent critical debates regarding recognition in relation to minorities, nations, empires, and states, the project points out that recognition has two faces: along with the frequently acknowledged empowering and emancipatory aspect of recognition, it also comes with costs.

Building on the work by Jens Bartelson, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jacques Rancière, the project shows that these costs are bound up with the conditions of possibility of recognition. In this sense, recognition both presuppose and reproduce a differentiated social logic, meaning a logic that assumes an identifiable and differentiated subject that acts as a benchmark for understanding if the process of recognition was successful or not.

Returning to the question of religion in global politics, I show that the arguments in favor of recognizing religion build on an assumed ‘fact’ of recognisability. In other words, religious objects or subjects must be or become recognizable to a particular regime of knowledge in place in order to be recognized. Arguments that we should recognize religion in global politics thereby ignore its conceptual, epistemological, and historiographical politics, instead conceiving of religion as something that can be included or excluded, governed, managed, and engaged with. I argue that such approaches to the recognition of religion – and the narratives of exclusion that accompany them – are part of a larger diversity regime that assumes and reproduces religious difference and the conflicts associated with it, doing more to sediment social and political division than to overcome it.

  • Organized
    [2015] Panel at the Annual Conference of the International Studies Association: Difference and Differentiation in International Politics, New Orleans, February 18-21


    Contribution
    [2020] Diversity and Order: The Conditions of Multiplicity and the Costs of Recognizing Religion, Paper presented at the Workshop Prepared for the EWIS workshop on

    [2018] Multiplicity in International Relations, June 30, 2020, online
    Recognizing Religious Difference, Paper presented at the annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), April 3-7, 2018

    – International Relations and History: Themes, Methods, and Exchanges, Roundtable at the annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), April 3-7, 2018.

    – Qualitatively Different? Problems and Approaches in Non-Positivist Research, Roundtable at the annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), San Francisco, April 3-7, 2018.

    [2017] Reification, Roundtable at the annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), Baltimore, February 22-25, 2017


    [2015] Ambiguous Recognition: Pakistan, Israel and the Fault Line of Religion, Paper presented at the European Conference on International Relations (EISA), Giardini Naxos, Sicily, 23-26 September 2015

    [2015] Beyond Critique: Transnational processes of differentiation in the independence movements of Pakistan and Israel, Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans

    [2014] The Medusa Effect: Problematic Features of the International Politics of Recognition, Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), Toronto

  • [2021] The Costs of Recognition, CRASSH, Cambridge University, UK, Dec.14

    – Costs of Recognition: Religion in Global Politics, University of Basel, May 7


    [2019] Recognizing Diversity, POLIS, Cambridge University, UK, May 16.


    [2016] Recognition, Reification and colonial Religion, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), January 11.