Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is "ground zero" in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be weaponized and securitized to advance political agendas in Ukraine and beyond. These practices, Catherine Wanner argues, enable religiosity to be increasingly present in public spaces, public institutions, and wartime politics in a pluralist society that claims to be secular. Based on ethnographic data and interviews conducted since before the Revolution of Dignity and the outbreak of armed combat in 2014, Wanner investigates the conditions that catapulted religiosity, religious institutions, and religious leaders to the forefront of politics and geopolitics.

When Politics Meets Religion presents a fresh exploration of the relationship between religion and politics worldwide. The volume includes topics covering Europe, such as the European far right, the contours of "European identity", and how religious cleavages affect value orientation of Europeans. It also covers country-focused issues and events, such as the influence of Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Christian nationalism in the United States, the influence of religion on Turkish foreign policy, the political role of the Catholic Church in the Philippines, Chinese attitudes towards religious deprivatization, and how liberation theology found its way from Latin America to the Holy Land. The volume is supplemented with several analyses on the intersection between law, society, and religion. It deals with religious mediation and political conflicts, how the current religious governance in France affects the Orthodox Jewish community, as well as how taxing the church’s economic activities can be a contributor to the common good, and why Muslims should treat Sharia law as only a moral code in the context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Through rigorous research, case studies, and critical analysis, this volume explains how religion and politics mix in different settings, and why it is important for us to study this complex relationship. The volume will appeal to scholars and graduate students of political science and religious studies, as well as interested professionals working for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or governments.

Fully revised and updated, this book explores the long-term dynamics of international conflict between Ukraine, Russia and the West, revealing the historic background to the invasion of Ukraine.

In February 2022, Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian cities, and tanks rolled towards Kyiv to end Ukrainian independent statehood. President Zelensky declined a Western evacuation offer and Ukrainians rallied to defend their country. What are the roots of this war, which has upended the international legal order and brought back the spectre of nuclear escalation? How did these supposedly “brotherly peoples” become each other’s worst nightmare? In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States, Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel explain how since 1991 Russia and Ukraine diverged politically, ending up on a collision course. Russia slid back into authoritarianism and imperialism, while Ukraine consolidated a competitive political system and pro-European identity. As Ukraine built a democratic nation-state, Russia refused to accept it and came to see it as an “anti-Russia” project. After political and economic pressure proved ineffective, and even counterproductive, Putin went to war to force Ukraine back into the fold of the “Russian world.” Ukraine resisted, determined to pursue European integration as a sovereign state. These irreconcilable goals, rather than geopolitical wrangling between Russia and the West over NATO expansion, are – the authors argue – essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

This volume examines Russia’s war on Ukraine. Scholars who have lived through the Russian invasion or who have conducted ethnographic research in the region for decades provide timely analysis of a war that will leave a lasting mark on the twenty-first century. Using the concept of dispossession, this volume showcases some of the novel ways violence operates in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the multiple means by which civilians, within the conflict zone and beyond, have become active participants in the war effort. Anthropological perspectives on war provide on-the-ground insight, historically informed analysis, and theoretical engagement to depict the experiences of dispossession by war and the motivations that drive the responses of the dispossessed. Such perspectives humanize the victims even as they depict the very inhumanity of war. Dispossession is geared towards upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and the general reader who seeks to have a deeper understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian war as it continues to impact geopolitics more broadly.

This collection focuses on Ukraine’s ethno-cultural minorities who in recent years have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour. The book examines the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas in 2014. It shows what happens to the cultural identities of minority groups and considers the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and coping strategies, mobilisation and humanitarianism, forced displacement, and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this book seeks to mainstream the issue of ethno-cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Law, Political Science, Anthropology, Human Geography, Religious Studies and War and Peace Studies.

This volume presents a comparative study on the pivotal role of religion in social transformation of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) over the past three decades. Organized into four thematic sections, it examines divergent patterns of religiosity and non-religious worldviews, secularization, religious presence in public life, and processes of identity formation. Comparison across the countries in the CEE reveals the absence of uniform and synchronic dynamics in the region. The geopolitical and cultural heterogeneity, the need to understand post-1989 social processes in the context of a much longer historical development of the region, and the importance of incorporating religious factors — are central to all contributions in this volume. Contributors are: Mikhail Antonov, Olga Breskaya, Zsuzsanna Demeter-Karászi, Jan Kaňák, Alar Kilp, Zsófia Kocsis, Tobias Koellner, Valéria Markos, András Máté-Tóth, Jerry G. Pankhurst, Gabriella Pusztai, Ringo Ringvee, Ariane Sadjed, Marjan Smrke, Miroslav Tížik, David Václavík, Jan Váně, Marko Veković, and Siniša Zrinščak.

Did religion disappear with modernization and the secularization reforms that changed the relation between religion and state throughout the European empires and nation states from late nineteenth century onwards? Or was religion rather transformed becoming a part of the new social and national imaginaries on the road from European empires to African, Middle Eastern, European Union- and Post-Soviet nation states? What are the historical roots behind the divisions of state, church and education that characterized the late nineteenth and during the twentieth century? What has been the role of education in this context, both with regard to political reforms targeting the education systems and with regard to broader public enlightenment efforts and modernization of the state? Connecting scholars across the fields of history and historical sociology of education, church history and historical religion research and political history, and covering the time span from the early modern period and up until the present, this volume explores how education reform has functioned as an arena for the political project of secularization and in which way this contributed to transforming and revitalizing religion.

Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.

The process of globalization means that borders between societies are becoming less important, and socio-cultural developments in certain societies are increasingly influenced by events from other parts of the world. This creates two opposing social effects. On the one hand, there is a risk of clashes between different religions, which are present within a social community. On the other hand, these close contacts among different religions may diminish differences among them, and thus reduce tensions and conflicts. This book explores the conflict between particularism and universalism. Particularism emphasizes the importance of the characteristics of particular social groups; ethnic, cultural, religious, and regional. Unlike particularism, universalism emphasizes the importance of similarities among people and systems of values in individual societies. The authors in this collection address some of the important issues at the interface of particularism and universalism, including the role of religion as a mitigator of the influence of global processes; fundamentalism as a form of collective identity; and the idea of ecumenism and neo-ecumenism as myth or reality. An important collection for scholars and researchers in religion and faith, politics, and globalization.