Book Series: Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South

Book editor: Nicolás Panotto nicolaspanotto@gmail.com

Series editors: Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, Marinella Machado Araujo, Angus McDonald, James Martel

Discussions around secularization have gained an increasingly relevant place in contemporary socio-political debate, although not with the same intensity in all disciplines and spaces of relevance. However, the reconfiguration of the public place of religion as a type of agency and discourse in contemporary scenarios has led to a rethinking of the traditional modes of reflection on secularization. These theories, at least in their original development during the first half of the twentieth century, have failed in many of their diagnoses regarding the supposed confinement that religion would undergo during modernity. However, we can see that the religious has not only not diminished as a phenomenon, but has even pluralized in its manifestations, and with it, in the ways of influencing the public and political space.

The theory of encryption of power helps us to approach these new gears of the religion-politics relationship from a critical point of view, through the complexification of the notion of power. Although this link has been analyzed from different disciplines, it has often been done from a rather traditional and institutionalist notion of conceiving both the forms of building power and defining what is properly religious (i.e., from the relationship between leadership and the spaces of political administration). The theory of encryption of power allows us to analyze this link in a more complex way, where the religious does not act only as a legitimizing framework for hegemonic political practices and narratives, but as a much more rhizomatic mechanism, establishing processes of differentiation, of tension between hegemonic and resistance, of channeling and at the same time re-signifying colonial/decolonial practices, among others. In this sense, this proposal goes hand in hand with the post/de-colonial critique of secularization as a framework of meaning linked to the development of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being.

This book proposes the following working questions: 

• What are the current characteristics of the public presence of the religious? 
• What are the characteristics of the contemporary dynamics of the religion-power link? 
• To what extent does the category of secularization act as a mechanism of identity and power differentiation? 
• How does the religious operate as a paradoxical factor between legitimizing hegemonic powers and, at the same time, of resistance? 
• How -politically, sociologically, and legally- are the normativities of the secular constructed? 
• What kind of displacements can we identify in relation to the religious and its place within the emergence of libertarian and far-right political models? 
• What examples exist of religious identifications that act as agents of both political and religious resistance?

The abstracts will be evaluated by the book editor, who will decide whether to ask for a complete article or not. Once the abstract is accepted by the book editor, it will pass to the series editors for the final endorsement. After that process, the authors will be asked to present an article of a book chapter that will be submitted to blind peer review. The book as a whole will also be submitted for approval by the publisher and to blind peer review.

Send abstracts to: nicolaspanotto@gmail.com

Timetable 

Deadline for submission of abstracts – 1^st April 2024

Feedback to authors regarding acceptance of abstracts – 30^th April 2024

Contributors’ deadline to submit first draft of MS – 28^th October 2024

Review and feedback on received chapters by editors – 28^th January 2025 
Submission of the Book to the publisher – 28^th April 2025