Athanasia Safitri
Dr Zainal Abidin Bagir, Director of Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies UGM, shared his thoughts about the dynamic of religious harmony and freedom of religion and belief (FORB) in his Keynote Speech at the Association of Asian Studies conference in UGM on 10 July 2024. Bagir started his talk by stating that the notion of harmony, while it sounds noble, is ambivalent. Religious harmony can restrict certain rights or freedoms, prioritizing the majority which can often lead to discrimination.
Starting with a focus on Southeast Asia, from the notion of Asian Values in the 1990s to recent attempts to create harmony laws in some countries in the region, he then linked the notion of harmony as restriction of freedom with the ongoing global dynamics in Europe and the United Nations. But then, looking at the history of religious freedom in the US, he argued that freedom too is ambivalent.
Decolonizing Human Rights
Bagir argued that the main tension is not freedom versus harmony; nor the universal versus particular; or the West’s point of view versus the East’s, but rather hegemonic versus counter-hegemonic standpoint. Asian values and the new discourse of decolonization of human rights may be seen as forms of resistance to the international human rights order, because there have indeed been grievances about the order. Asian Values, proposed by states, was a different face of hegemony, and state-centric. Can the discourse be people-centric and counter-hegemonic?
In line with the recent discourse of decolonization of human rights, he suggested that human rights should be people-centric rather than legal or state-centric. There should be dialogue between human rights and other particular or local ideologies in order to create universality as universalization. For scholars, studies of human rights should also look at everyday practices, not limited to law, nor the occurrence of violations of rights.
The polarization which appeared along with the 2023 UN Human Rights Council Resolution and the emergence of new laws restricting freedom in Europe create a new opportunity to dissolve the “East and West” and shape the discourse of freedom on new terms, without lessening the tension between freedom and harmony. For this, again, a better knowledge of human rights in practice is needed, in addition to understanding norms, laws, and state practices. This should positively contribute to the global conversation, accommodating the experiences of the Global South.
Decolonization and dialogue
In the last part of his speech, Bagir moved to decolonization and dialogue. For him, decolonization is not only about resistance, but also building dialogues. A counterhegemonic human rights opens the space of dialogue between human rights and other particular or local ideologies, including theologies. Such dialogue promises more effective emancipatory practices.
Referring to the Muslim scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im, Bagir emphasizes the need to pay more attention to human rights, local communities practices, and the process of cultural transformation and political mobilization. The scholars who speak of decolonization of human rights see that critique toward the existing order or the hegemony is the first step. At some point it needs to be accompanied by dialogue between different ideologies or movements, which use different languages.
Decolonization of human rights does not have to be understood as rejecting universalism per se. Instead, it prepares a better ground for more equal conversations, reflecting the diverse experiences of the conversation participants, East and West, North and South.
Bagir argues that this does not necessarily undermine the claim of universality of human rights, but requires a different understanding of what universality is. Scholars as diverse as Heiner Bielefeldt, who was a Special Rapporteur on FORB, the feminist Judith Butler and the historian of human rights Susan Waltz, have suggested to re-conceive the notion of universalism as a work in progress, or as a continuing process of universalization.
In that understanding, the norms themselves are not finished products, but always open to be shaped by different cultures or ideologies. Bagir’s main concluding point was about the importance of always opening a space of conversation, which may be understood as attempts at universalization of human rights.