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Contemporary Conflicts, the State, and Religion in Africa

Contemporary African societies and polities are sites of profound paradoxes and contradictions: described as both “postcolonial” and “neocolonial,” both “inescapably modern” and as bastions of “anti-modern tradition,” both “deeply religious” and “exceeding or challenging definitions of ‘religious’,” both profoundly “democratic” and “anti-democratic.” The papers in this panel all demonstrate how thinking from African contexts and with African concepts, categories, and case studies can provide a rethinking of political and intellectual possibilities that illuminate, critique, and even resolve current paradoxes, conflicts, and aporia within Western ideals, practices, and institutions.

Part of the virtual conference Religion and Democracy on the African Continent: Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Possibilities, co-sponsored by the University of Virginia Democracy Initiative's Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, the Page-Barbour Funds, the Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture, the Carter G. Woodson Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion.

May 8, 2022 10:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)