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CALL FOR PAPERS ISA 2013 The Power of Ambiguity: The International Diffusion of Religion Whereas religion has long been a contested category of analysis in the humanities, the recent turn in the social sciences to view religion as a force to be reckoned with in international law and politics tends to construe religion as a monolithic concept with universal applicability. Religion is attributed the responsibility for a broad range of issues from genocidal warfare to social cohesion, from a foundation for democratic sentiments and human rights to the source of their subversion. Further it is frequently contrasted with the pure insights offered by disembedded Enlightenment-style rationality. Religion, according to this line of inquiry, has moved from a position of prominence in the pre-modern period, to a de-legitimation during modernity during the rise of scientific rationality, but now seems to be 'resurging' in a variety of localities across the globe. Scholars from International Relations and related disciplines have tended to look for changes in the salience of religion in other, related factors, such as shifts in global distributions of political power and the altered social makeup of complex societies. This panel seeks to address the renewed relevance attributed to religion by taking an alternative approach, investigating how the international diffusion of the eminently Western category of religion has been shaped by scholars, politicians, legal professionals and societal actors at large. Does, in fact, much of religion's contemporary power reside in its definitional ambiguity? Where does religion appear as an analytical concept and how has the meaning of religion been shaped by the fields in which it has been deployed? In order to address this question, the panel invites papers that investigate the ways in which religion is shaped in the nexus between international and domestic domains – what Dressler and Mandair has called ‚religion-making’ – how the diffusion of a contested concept like religion opens up possibilities to analyze the politics that lie behind the boundary-drawing around the concept, the differentiation from other concepts such as ethnicity, culture or race and an analysis of the politics that order religion’s acceptable manifestations in international politics, law and the academia. Deadline for paper proposals: 28th May 2012. Please send your paper proposal of max. 250 words including your institutional affiliation as well as contact details to both panel chairs below: Helge Årsheim [log in to unmask] University of Oslo, Norway Maria Birnbaum [log in to unmask] European University Institute, Florence, Italy