Description
This panel explores how religious traditions have imagined forms of authority, community, and resistance that exceed or unsettle the modern state. Drawing on debates in international political theory, political theology, and decolonial thought, it foregrounds figures and traditions that unsettle familiar categories such as sovereignty, territory, hierarchy, and universality.
By treating revelation, exile, prophecy, mysticism and messianism as conceptual resources rather than anomalies, the session asks how these repertoires illuminate the theological and moral architectures necessary for resistance at the limits of state-centric assumptions. In this way it seeks to articulate alternatives to the state-based international order that could offer pathways for relationality and reconciliation.
The panel brings together people working at the intersection of post-/decoloniality and political theology with the aim of rendering visible the plurality of grammars through which political order has been imagined and enacted beyond the state, and to consider what this plurality means for the methods and scope of resisting coloniality today.
