ACCIONES PREVENTIVAS Y PROTECCIONES

Kofi Anan’s (1998: 129) key understanding of the relation of the idea of glo-balisation to the ‘transnational network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)’ provides a unique framework for theoretical and empirical analy-sis. It raises critical questions about the role of religion in social-state power relationships. In particular, the example of religious NGOs in the UN, as exemplified by Quakers, enables us to tease out the issues of religion and globalisation by locating the question in the context of international institu-tions. It allows us to see the nature of how groups compete and exchange to gain influence inside the systems of global governance. When we contex-tualise globalisation and cease to reify it, that is, make it into a thing that autonomously happens to the world, we return it to the social processes that create the new global order. We return globalisation to the specific social struggles of groups and institutions that structure human life, albeit within a new horizon. As Justin Rosenberg’s (1994: 172) critique of realist theory in international relations makes clear, if we want to understand international relations we must understand the ‘distinctive configuration of social rela-tions [. . .] and see its object for what it is: a set of social relarela-tions between people’. Indeed, Niebuhr ([1932] 1960: 11) much earlier held the same sus-picion of ‘the creeds and institutions of democracy’, which he believed can never be ‘fully divorced from the special interests of the commercial classes who conceived and developed them’. We do not, however, have to embrace entirely Rosenberg’s Marxist analysis to accept how specific social forces, and the values behind such orders, shape global processes through very spe-cific institutional systems.

The problem of the category of globalisation is to understand the com-plexity of the networks and interactions inside the new geography of rela-tions. The global domain makes systems complex, but the complexity should not hide the specific logic masked by technology, connections and reduced distance. Reading the new global logic is central to how we understand the myriad relations that shape the world. These relations inevitably produce paradoxes because of a clash of different registers, a return to industrial and colonial models and a resistance to complexity theory. However, as I have tried to show, it is precisely within the tensions and paradoxes that we see something vital about religion in the new conditions of a global world.

When the category of religion moves from a colonial to a state-global context, knowledge and norms enter the space of social catallaxy, leading to unpredictable and competing exchanges creating ever more complex networks. The complexity of this situation results in NGOs seek-ing to negotiate multilayered structures. In response, as we have seen with Quakers, they form new alliances with each other, they become embroiled in multiple side meetings and draft UN statements together to be heard for one minute on the General Assembly floor, or even become relegated to

written statements with no public enactment.¹⁸ The plurality is evident, but so indeed is the hegemony of a state-led system. As a result, NGOs deploy ever-new tactics and forms of representation.¹⁹ Inside this new economy of relations, religion as a category becomes part of the confusing game of being heard and represented. In this atmosphere, religion becomes a strategic cat-egory; it will appear and disappear according to its effectiveness to bring about exchanges. Religion, like globalisation, is not a thing but a category, manifesting and disappearing according to its usefulness to the sociopoliti-cal context.²⁰

The reason religion exists in the paradox of the idea of globalisation is because it is no longer what it used to be, or rather, it is redefined in the new forms of relation that emerge out of social catallaxy—the market men-tality of our political world. Religion is thus reshaped in the complexity of networks, exchanges and systems of representation that create so many paradoxes: it is local and global, it is abstract and embodied, it is bounded by states and linked to the international institutions, it is embedded and disembedded. Religion as a social order now exists across and within these domains and in consequence is transformed by them.

If we understand the globalisation of religion as the intensification of social relations in a new neoliberal catallaxy, as I have sought to argue, then religion will play all sorts of new roles inside international institutions, of which the emergence of religious NGOs at the UN are but one new manifes-tation. This chapter has sought to demonstrate one key reality of the impact of global processes on religious groups through the UN context. It shows how religious groups respond to the challenges of operating at the highest levels of global civil society. The catallatic exchanges will, however, mean that the boundaries and borders between religion and other forms of social relation will become increasingly difficult to ascertain. In the end we may not even recognise religion as a distinct social actor. It will, however, always continue to exist in the paradoxes of a new global configuration of power, located and dislocated between the forces of plurality and hegemony.

NOTES

The research for this paper forms part of a three-year project at the University of Kent, UK, on ‘Religious NGOs at the UN’ funded by the ‘Religion and Society’

programme of the AHRC/ESRC funding councils in the UK and directed by Linda Woodhead. I wish to thank my research team of colleagues, Hugh Miall, Evelyn Bush, Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud and Verena Beittinger-Lee for discussions on many aspects of religious NGOs at the UN. The ideas of this paper are part of my wider theoretical reflections for the research project, based on initial findings from the fieldwork.

1. Religion, NGOs and the UN edited by Jeremy Carrette, together with Verena Beittinger-Lee, Evelyn Bush, Hugh Miall and Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud, forth-coming (AHRC/ESRC Research Project).

2. As we have underlined in our own research this committee is not a formal UN group, but an external support group informally linked to the UN in New York and not all its members have ECOSOC status. I am grateful to Verena Beittinger-Lee for this finding, drawn from her fieldwork at the UN in New York.

3. The University of Kent AHRC/ESRC project on religious NGOs at the UN has responded to this issue by dividing the category of ‘religion’ in a more complex set of subdivisions for a questionnaire sent to NGOs with ECOSOC status, the results of which are forthcoming.

4. The University of Kent AHRC/ESRC findings in 2010 reflect similar overall proportions, but with a spectrum model of ‘religious’ identity.

5. Quasi-nongovernmental organisations.

6. See Timothy Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (London: Continuum, 2011). He develops a critique of the category of religion within various texts from international relations, includ-ing the work of Scott Thomas.

7. I am grateful to Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud for her fieldwork research for our University of Kent AHRC/ESRC project on religious NGOs at the UN in Geneva. She discovered many examples of the problems of NGO groups seeking to know the complex system and processes of the UN, something specifically supported by the NGO Mandat International.

8. Samuel Barkin’s study (2006) of international organisations draws out Hedley Bull’s three traditions of the international order from his 1977 The Anarchical Society. The first, the ‘realist’ tradition, holding to a strong state model; the second position is the ‘internationalist’, where strong states are held within international rules; and, finally, the ‘universalist’ tradition, which is a non-state global structure.

9. Niebuhr responded to this Quaker document in 1955, ‘Is There Another Way’, in The Progressive (October 1955); cited in Byrd (1960: 197).

10. Civil society is known as the ‘third sector’ alongside the state and market sectors.

11. The French ethnologist Marc Augé picks up the idea of paradox in the wider political landscape in a recent article in Le Monde, ‘Les incertitudes du monde contemporain’, Saturday 10 July 2010, p. 19.

12. In a different way, Beeson & Bell (2009) draw out the same problematic of hegemony and collectivism in relation to the G-20.

13. Catallatics (the science of exchanges) was first discussed by English theologian Richard Whately in his 1831 Oxford lectures Introduction to the Science of Political Economy (at a time when political economy was still part of theology) and picked up in Hayek (1973, 1976, 1979). For Hayek, catallaxy was the ‘the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market’; see Levy (1999). I seek to deploy the word to show how wider social exchanges within complex networks are shaped by a market logic.

14. I am grateful to Rachel Brett (Quaker UN Office, Geneva) for some initial reflections on this matter in 2010 and 2011.

15. See her forthcoming work on religious NGOs and international law for the University of Kent AHRC/ESRC project on Religious NGOs and Civil Soci-ety, edited by Jeremy Carrette and Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud, with Verena Beittinger-Lee (forthcoming).

16. I am grateful to Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud for her fieldwork in Geneva on the Convention on the Rights of the Child as part of the University of Kent AHRC/ESRC project on Religious NGOs and the UN.

17. This is supported by my earlier examination of Quakers in international rela-tions and their commitment to institutional building (see Waugh 2001). The

importance of ‘process’ has been confirmed in our University of Kent’s Reli-gious NGOs research project (see note 1).

18. I am grateful to Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud’s research for the University of Kent project on religious NGOs at the UN in Geneva for making this point clear to me from her fieldwork, which will be forthcoming in the Religious NGOs and UN project materials for the Religion and Society programme.

19. Initial findings from the Religious NGOs and the UN project at the University of Kent, UK, has established that classification of religious NGOs is under-mined by complex forces that lead to a rejection of the classification ‘religion’

and bridge religious groups and none in order to fight for specific political issues.

20. Religion is now one of many classificatory terms that allow for different networks in the social catallaxy of NGO relations, standing alongside other classificatory terms such as faith-based, spiritual and ethnic-cultural. The University of Kent’s Religious NGOs and the UN project is presently gather-ing information on ECOSOC-registered NGOs to assess the classification and influence of groups in the UN.

ORTHODOXY AND ASPECTS OF MODERNITY