Introduction Excerpt for Faith in Rights
Introduction
ON JANUARY 24, 2017, Dominicans for Justice and Peace, a religious nongovernmental organization (RNGO), co-organized a conference at the Palais des Nations, the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, with a number of permanent missions. The event was entitled “Francisco de Vitoria and the Inception of the Principles of the United Nations: His Legacy Today.”1 It commemorated the contribution of de Vitoria (1486–1546), a member of the Dominican Order, “to the principles that eventually became embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (Peschken 2017). De Vitoria is quite present in the fabric of the UN. The Geneva Council Chamber, or Salle du Conseil, built for the League of Nations (1920–46), is known as the Francisco de Vitoria Hall and features a plaque commemorating de Vitoria’s work in international law. A statue of de Vitoria is also present in the UN gardens in New York, where a plaque presents him as the fundador del derecho de gentes (founder of people’s rights).
Yet, despite these commemorations, de Vitoria’s influence at the UN is not well known.2 Perhaps most notably, the plaques commemorating him do not mention he was a theologian and a Dominican friar. While this may seem surprising, the omission fits within a broader narrative, whereby scholars, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) construct and imagine the UN in general and the Human Rights Council (HRC) in particular as “secular” spaces where the influence of religion remains invisible or marginal at best.
One objective of this book is to think about how secular binaries have affected the construction and study of “religion” at the UN. More specifically, the book considers the impact these binaries have on how self-identified Christian-inspired NGOs represent themselves at the HRC and the areas they choose to work on. A second objective is to think beyond these secular binaries and make a case for the importance of documenting the complexity and consequences of a Christian presence at the UN. To this end, I invite readers to interrogate the idea that the secular and the religious are distinct entities and that, by correlation, human rights, understood as secular, can be neatly distinguished from religion. Faith in Rights argues that Christianity, with all its complexities and tensions, is entangled in the texture of the UN and shapes its human rights work in multiple ways. Indeed, not only are aspects of Christianity embedded in the physical structure of UN headquarters, but they also penetrate the crafting of human rights conventions (Glendon 2013; Moyn 2015), resolutions, discussions, and implementation. Christianity also influences the methods and areas of work of Christian-inspired NGOs. To be able to capture this multifaceted presence of Christianity, scholars must move beyond analysis influenced by secular binaries that associate religion with beliefs and examine the work these RNGOs do. That is, instead of starting with an analysis of how the beliefs of these RNGOs inform their human rights advocacy, scholars should explore the everyday work of these NGOs: the issues they choose to work on, how they approach them, what human rights mechanisms they use, and who they interact with. I argue that this point of departure has the potential to mitigate some biases attached to how we (as scholars) construct religion—in this case, Christianity—whereby we assume that the normative beliefs of RNGOs lead them to work on particular issues (Agensky 2013, 460). This approach carries the potential to expand our understanding of the diverse ways religion can inform the work of RNGOs and human rights work more generally.
As I started this project, my first instinct was to “look” for religion at the HRC by exploring areas where I thought the beliefs of RNGOs would influence their advocacy. I looked at what NGOs that self-identified as Christian had to say about questions of religious freedom or about gender and sexuality, in particular the right to life and definitions of the family, which have become important areas of contention at the UN (Dondoli 2020). My initial hypothesis was that their position on these issues would reflect their broader beliefs and give me a sense of the impact of their advocacy. I was not alone in this approach, as a number of scholars and policymakers have used this starting point to categorize RNGOs on a liberal-conservative spectrum (NORAD 2013; Samuel 2007; Bob 2010). There is comfort in thinking about religion in terms of beliefs that are clearly visible through “expected” normative positions and through discursive interventions that refer to those beliefs. Religion in that framework is easy to locate, delimit, and separate from the “secular.” For example, how an NGO or member state understands family in terms of the “right to family” enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, Article 23) can be used as a proxy to indicate where they are located on the liberal-conservative and secular-religious spectrums. If they lobby for family to be understood as a unit formed by a heterosexual married couple, this could be seen to indicate that their position is informed by conservative and religious beliefs. In contrast, if they advocate to protect multiple forms of families, this could indicate liberal and secular values. Likewise, a pro-life position puts them squarely in the conservative and religious camp, and a pro-choice position locates them on the other end of that spectrum. While some RNGOs at the UN have a clear position on these issues mirrored in these dichotomies, for other organizations these questions are more complicated. And for many RNGOs, these issues remain marginal to their everyday work at the UN, especially their work with the HRC.
My initial approach thus did not help me make sense of the HRC scene, as I quickly realized that few self-identified Christian NGOs based in Geneva were engaged in active lobbying on these polarizing questions. This lack of evidence led me to revisit my research premises and to reflect on the biases that informed how I constructed religion. With this empirical reality in mind, and with the help of scholars who are providing novel and critical ways of approaching religion (e.g., Wilson 2013, 2022; Schwarz 2018; McGuire 2008; Agensky 2013; and Oliphant 2021), I take the everyday work of self-identified Christian NGOs as a starting point for my analysis. This focus reveals that Christian-inspired NGOs work on a wide range of issues—many related to socioeconomic rights and climate justice questions—that do not fit neatly into religious and secular categories. It also reveals that their work on these issues and their methods of work are often influenced by their religious standpoint. To put it differently, analysis that focuses solely on assumed beliefs carries the risk of capturing only the work of the most conservative RNGOs and reproducing secular and religious dichotomies. As a consequence, it renders invisible the work of RNGOs on a range of other rights, as well as limits our ability to ask why several RNGOs remain silent on particular questions. This approach hides the complex and diverse ways that Christianity is involved in crafting human rights—an effect that is especially significant given that the great majority of RNGOs at the UN are Christian (Carrette and Miall 2017; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019b).
Religious Nongovernmental Organizations at the Human Rights Council
This book focuses on the work of self-identified Christian NGOs that are active at the Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva.3 The HRC, the organ that succeeded the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in 2006,4 is an ideal space to study NGO engagement in the crafting of human rights norms. The commission, composed of forty-seven UN member states elected by the General Assembly, is the central UN body responsible for addressing human rights concerns.5 This includes reviewing the human rights records of all member states and making recommendations to the General Assembly to further the development of international law in the field of human rights. To this end, the HRC meets in Geneva at least three times a year to review UN experts’ reports on human rights issues, as well as to discuss and adopt resolutions to address concerns raised by experts or member states. The HRC is the UN body with the most developed framework for NGO participation. NGOs can receive consultative status that allows them to attend and observe all HRC proceedings, to make oral and written interventions to the HRC, to organize events in parallel to meetings of the HRC, and to lobby member states. This framework is part of broader efforts by international organizations since the end of the Cold War to develop formalized policies for collaboration with NGOs (Berger 2003). Since the 1990s, international organizations have made increasing efforts to develop policies enhancing collaboration with NGOs in multilateral settings like the UN.
In his discussion on the UN as a space for NGO engagement, Hugh Miall (2017) notes that the layout of UN buildings plays an important role in enabling or limiting NGO lobbying work. In many ways, the space in Geneva is ideal for facilitating interactions between NGOs, diplomats, and experts. The Palais des Nations (see figure 0.1), where the HRC meetings take place, is centrally located, being only a fifteen-to-twenty-minute tram ride from both Geneva’s train station and airport. It was built between 1929 and 1936 with the objective of being a “‘palace’ dedicated to cooperation between nations.”6 The sprawling art deco building, which overlooks Lake Geneva and the Alps, has thirty-four conference rooms and around 2,800 offices. The palace layout is conducive to discussions: the main hallways leading to conference rooms are large, with windows and benches (see figure 0.2), and the forty-five-hectare park on which the Palace is built provides opportunities for walks and informal talks (see figure 0.4). NGOs with consultative status7 also have access to the Serpentine Bar8 (see figure 0.3) located outside the conference rooms, the Press Bar, the Salle des Pas Perdus,9 and the cafeteria, which are all spaces where lobbying and strategizing take place.10 Scholars point out the distinct experience of NGOs in this unique layout compared to the UN scene in New York, where “NGO access is tightly regulated and less open than in Geneva” and where “the café is small and windowless, and the constrained layout of the building physically restricts informal opportunities to mingle with diplomats” (Miall 2017, 28).
FIGURE 0.1 Palais des Nations, building. Photo by Torbjörn Jörgensen, 2019. Reproduced with permission. Although policies to enhance collaboration with NGOs have targeted all types of NGOs, researchers have underscored the recent interest of international organizations, including the UN, in developing partnerships with RNGOs (Hurd 2012; Haynes 2014). The World Bank, for instance, has put a unit in place that focuses on fostering relations with RNGOs. RNGOs have also been identified as key partners by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).11 Likewise, several governments have pursued work with RNGOs, including by opening offices and units that facilitate collaborations with them. Some scholars and policymakers explain this collaborative shift by pointing to RNGOs’ privileged access to locally rooted constituencies due to their ties with religious institutions (e.g., churches and mosques) (Boehle 2010; Taithe 2012; Benthall 2012). Another popular assumption is that working with and empowering RNGOs in a post-9/11 world is an efficient way to counter “fundamentalism” (Hurd 2012) and to ensure better protection for sexual and reproductive health and rights (e.g., NORAD 2013).
FIGURE 0.2 Palais des Nations, hallway. Photo by Kris Terauds, 2012. Reproduced with permission. 
FIGURE 0.3 Serpentine Bar. Photo by Kris Terauds, 2012. Reproduced with permission. 
FIGURE 0.4 Palais des Nations, park. Photo by Kris Terauds, 2017. Reproduced with permission. These growing engagements with and opportunities for RNGOs could explain the recent rise in their contributions to UN proceedings (e.g., lobbying, drafting of resolutions) (Haynes 2014; Bob 2012). According to Clifford Bob (2012), a number of RNGOs initially showed reluctance to participate in UN forums, seeing the UN as a “secular/liberal” entity, but then decided to invest in these processes because of the UN’s international influence. Several of the RNGOs I discuss in this book formalized engagement with the UN in the past two decades, while others, like the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO), have been in Geneva since the UN’s infancy.
In terms of numbers, Berger in 2003 noted that 263 out of 2,000 NGOs were identified as religious. A current study on NGOs and religion at the UN by Jeremy Carrette and Hugh Miall (2017) provides updated numbers of active RNGOs at the UN, identifying 239 out of 3,275 NGOs registered with consultative status as using religious language on their website. Out of these NGOs, 70 percent are Christian, of which a majority (47.62 percent) are Catholic (or 26.7 percent of all accredited NGOs) (Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 31). In fact, the dominance of Christian NGOs is visible not only in terms of quantity (number of NGOs) but also in terms of quality, whereby many of these NGOs, in particular Catholic ones, have a permanent office in Geneva or New York, or both. It is possible that the UN structure and the ways it creates space for NGOs favor the presence of Christian, especially Catholic, groups over other RNGOs. Indeed, effective engagement in lobbying at the UN requires being present throughout the year, and not only during HRC sessions, as advocacy happens well before the council session starts. Facilitating this presence is easier for religious organizations in which a hierarchical figure can make the decision to allocate resources for a particular project (which a number of congregational leaders have done; see Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 33; see also chapter 1). This presence has direct consequences on how rights are constructed and shaped as well as on which issues are protected and which are overlooked.
Given this relative increase in presence, the dominance of self-identified Christian NGOs, and the diverse opportunities available to NGOs to interact with the HRC, mapping out how self-identified Christian NGOs participate in human rights crafting becomes particularly important. Doing this provides insights into why these NGOs decide to work with the HRC even though its decisions are not legally binding (Keck and Sikkink 1998). For example, organizations view participation in shaping HRC resolutions, recommendations, and expert reports as valuable because these documents can pressure states and the international community and can significantly influence how international norms are prioritized (Brett 1995; Barras 2014). Equally interesting is that many of these organizations approach this lobbying as being an essential part of how they live and enact their religious practice, and this practice takes different shapes according to their religious traditions. Faith in Rights acknowledges and sheds light on this diversity of practices and the range of work of Christian NGOs. At the same time, building on the work of others (e.g., Carrette and Miall 2017; Baumgart-Osche and Wolf 2019b), this book also seeks to ask broader questions related to the consequences of this specific Christian presence on the human rights system, including how this presence is rendered invisible or becomes entangled in what has been understood as “secular” or “outside the scope of religion.”
Intersection of Two Bodies of Literature
This book’s discussion takes as its starting point two bodies of literature: research on RNGOs mainly in the fields of international relations and religious studies and research on human rights in the field of socio-legal studies.
Literature on RNGOs
Until recently, social scientists, like policymakers, paid little attention to RNGOs or to the importance of religion in the work of international organizations. This is partly a result of the secularization thesis, whereby religion’s role is understood to be limited to the private realm or at least to have little if any impact in international politics and law (Hurd 2012; Haynes 2007). Yet, over the last decades, these positions have shifted (Hurd 2012; Wilson 2012, 2022). International relations scholars have started to incorporate religious or faith-based NGOs into their analyses. This is seen, for instance, in works on humanitarianism and peace-building (e.g., Barnett and Stein 2012; Schwarz 2018; Agensky 2013; Paras 2019), on development (e.g., Le Blanc, Audet-Gosselin, and Gomez-Perez 2013; Paras 2012; Paras 2019; Freeman 2019; Fountain 2015; Lunn 2009), on the European Union (Foret 2015), and on the UN (Haynes 2014; Berger 2003; Carrette and Miall 2017; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019b; Lehmann 2016).
More specifically, scholars working on the UN provide two broad types of studies on RNGOs. The first type starts by discussing the conceptual challenges of defining what a faith-based organization or RNGO is at the UN (Berger 2003; Petersen 2010; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019a, 2019b) and offering a rationale for why they opt for a particular definition. Providing a definition is helpful to be able to inventory the total number of these organizations and their religious traditions (Berger 2003; Carrette and Miall 2017; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019b), as well as to get a sense of how these organizations have increased over time in numbers and influence. The second area of study explores the discursive position of RNGOs on policy debates in UN forums (which sometimes includes the HRC). A number of these studies have challenged the presumed dichotomy between faith-based or religious actors and secular actors (e.g., Lehmann 2016), arguing, among other things, that RNGOs are a complex group where “‘faith’ per se is not a fixed or obvious category or value, implying a consistent worldview” (Haynes 2014, 4). Some scholars have tried to classify RNGOs using a moderate/liberal versus fundamentalist/conservative typology to show that those in the liberal camp often have positions close to those of secular NGOs. To do so, they analyze the range of positions of RNGOs on particular issues that facilitate locating these NGOs in this typology, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights (NORAD 2013; Samuel 2007; Bob 2010) or the defamation of religion (Haynes 2014; Carrette and Trigeaud 2013). While exploring these issues acts as an entry point to highlight the diverse positions of RNGOs, the main intention of these studies remains to evaluate the degree and type of religiosity of these organizations. This typology, even if only inadvertently, tends to also be evocative of “good” (= liberal) and “bad” (= conservative) religion, which fails, as some scholars have noted, to “convey the extent and breadth of roles and normative positions adopted by RNGOs with the UN” (Baumgart-Ochse 2019, 2).
With these challenges in mind, other scholars have recently attempted to open up this typology, arguing, for instance, that positions on sexual and reproductive health and rights are complex and vary among issues covered by those rights (Clarke 2019, 84), and that RNGOs’ positions can evolve with time spent at the UN (Haynes 2014, 3; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019b, 192; Lehmann 2016). This focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights nonetheless does not capture the diversity and range of the work of these organizations, which extends well beyond their positions on questions related to these polarizing issues. In fact, to address some of those concerns, Claudia Baumgart-Ochse (2019) proposes to categorize RNGOs along a mediator-polarizer typology, which aims to emphasize the political process RNGOs are involved in rather than to evaluate their religious leaning (see also Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 27). This categorization allows for a broader analysis of RNGO engagement by not limiting it to activities that can be neatly placed on a liberal-conservative spectrum (e.g., on climate change, see Glaab, Fuchs, and Friederich 2019; on business and human rights, see Coni-Zimmer and Perov 2018). Faith in Rights builds on these different studies and seeks to broaden and complexify the approach to understanding the work of RNGOs at the UN. Like Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf (2019b), I am interested in moving beyond the liberal-conservative prism to study RNGOs. While this book does document some of the political processes Christian RNGOs are involved in at the UN, it also pays attention to the different ways their religious positionality shapes their human rights practices. Doing so is especially important given the scarcity of research on Christian NGOs at the HRC.12
Scholars working on RNGOs have also revealed and critically assessed the dominance of Christian NGOs at the UN (see Haynes 2014; Carrette and Miall 2017; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019a, 2019b). They have noted the multiple reasons for this overrepresentation, including Christian involvement in the formation of the UN (Knox 2002; Berger 2003; Haynes 2014; Beinlich and Braungart 2019), the high level of internal organization of Christian traditions that facilitate their ability to organize themselves in NGOs and allocate resources to projects (Marshall 2013; Beinlich and Braungart 2019), and the “generous funding which many organizations enjoy and which places them among the top-ranking RNGOs in terms of wealth” (Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 33). While this Christian dominance is recognized and while researchers acknowledge the diversity within Christianity (e.g., Lehmann 2016) and even within particular denominations (e.g., on Catholicism, see Beittinger-Lee 2017), very few studies capture the subtleties of what that diversity looks like or, more specifically, how belonging to a specific religious tradition within Christianity informs their approach to advocacy and methods of work at the UN. Faith in Rights seeks to provide more insights into this diversity.
Finally, research on RNGOs at the UN acknowledges that these NGOs, like many groups intervening at the UN, work on a multiscale perspective and “exist in transnational networks, affected by national, regional and global decision-making bodies, international trade and political dynamics” (Wilson 2014, 350). At the same time, little research has been done documenting the impact of these transnational dimensions on the work of RNGOs. By being attentive to the practices of human rights work, including methods of work of Christian-inspired NGOs, this book maps how these transnational networks and multiscale perspectives have deeply informed and shaped this work for a number of these groups. As Erin Wilson (2014) elegantly notes, their work often takes a multiscale dimension not only in terms of geography but also in terms of the “metaphysical/transcendental realities to which many self-identif[y]” (350).
Literature on Human Rights
At this juncture, it is helpful to bring research on RNGOs at the UN into discussion with a second body of literature on human rights in the field of socio-legal studies. This is relevant particularly because of the attention this latter body of work pays to the multiscale dimension of human rights advocacy. In contrast to legal positivists (Brisk 2002), these scholars approach human rights as a discourse that is not fixed but that changes in relation to the positionality, lived reality, and work practices of rights-based activists, including the forums they are engaged in (local, national, or transnational), their activities, and the actors they work with (Goodale and Merry 2007; Goodale 2007, 202213). These scholars are interested in human rights practice that sheds light on how the concerns of a particular group or community make their way into international spaces, the methods they use (e.g., lobbying of states), and how these concerns are transformed or “translated” in this process (Merry 2005; Merry 2006; Clarke 2009). In fact, being attentive to processes of translation is a direct result of thinking of human rights advocacy using a multiscale lens. As Sally Engle Merry explains in her pioneering work (2005), the language NGOs use to promote human rights protection is often not the same at the local level as at the international level. To converse with UN experts, NGOs must translate what they see and how problems are formulated on the ground into a rights-based language.
Similarly, NGOs are also often required to translate rights-based concepts developed in international forums into a language that resonates with their local constituency. While these human rights scholars have yet to study RNGOs in international human rights spaces, their emphasis on documenting the practices that constitute human rights work and their suggestion to approach rights as a discursive construction that varies by constituency and scale of intervention are highly valuable for this book. Indeed, it will make clear to the reader that one of the main concerns for many Christian RNGOs’ representatives interviewed for this project relates to their ability to show the importance of a human rights lens to their constituencies spread across the world—that is, to make human rights palatable to their members (see chapters 1 and 4). They are similarly concerned with thinking about how they can link their understanding of religious doctrine with their human rights advocacy (see chapters 2 and 4). Thus, this second body of literature invites us to broaden our gaze and to understand NGOs and RNGOs as actors located in a web of scales. This peculiar location influences in multiple ways their everyday practices, including the areas they choose to work on and those they choose not to.
Theoretical Framing
Approaching the Secular
This project is influenced by recent scholarly works inviting us to critically interrogate secular tropes structured around interlocking binaries that are used to define religion in policy and scholarly contexts. These binaries include the following: conservative versus liberal, fundamentalist versus moderate, secular versus religious, human rights norms versus religious doctrine, belief versus practice, and private versus public (Hurd 2012; Hurd 2015; Knott 2005; Wilson 2022). These works posit that rather than locating the secular and the religious as opposed, essentialized, and fixed categories, it is more productive to approach them as being intimately related. Thus, these scholars are not interested in providing a stable definition of “the religious” or “the secular” since they understand these concepts as shifting discursive constructions. Rather, they are keen on exploring the importance of how boundaries between the religious and the secular are “constructed, negotiated and policed” (Knott 2005, 217) in certain contexts. This leads them to ask questions about the power dynamics around the definitions of “religion” and the “secular” and the implications and effects of these definitions.
This perspective has multiple implications for this book. First, it is an invitation to think about the power of the claim that identifies the UN as a secular institution.14 A number of scholars (Carrette and Miall 2017; Haynes 2014, 24; Knox 2002, 12l), policymakers, member states, and NGOs approach the UN as a secular institution “that implicitly upholds the distinction between the religious and the secular” (Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 28). Likewise, human rights are often framed as secular norms different in form and content from religious ones (e.g., Haynes 2014, 171). The legacy of the Treaty of Westphalia certainly plays a role here, identifying religion as located outside politics, including international politics (Carrette and Miall 2017, 22; Haynes 2014, 38–39). The presence of religion in international affairs is thus frequently perceived as problematic. The objective of this book is not to prove that the UN is or is not a secular institution, especially given that the definition of the secular is fleeting. Rather, I am interested in thinking about the consequences of understanding the UN as a secular space, especially for the construction of the religious and religious identity, as well as for the conditions that make moments of post-secular advocacy possible (the post-secular is discussed in the next section). In fact, understanding the secular as different from the religious implies efforts to separate and locate the religious in a distinct realm (Hurd 2012). More generally, if the secular is about regulating the place of religion, this sheds light on attempts to delimit the boundaries of “good” religion (often understood as a personal belief located in one’s conscience), which does not threaten a rights-based approach, and “problematic” religion (often understood as an outward and visible manifestation of religion), which has more potential to come into conflict with rights.
To be more precise, the trope constructing the UN as secular carries serious implications for how scholars and policymakers approach religion.15 It affects how RNGOs present themselves at the HRC (see, e.g., Carrette and Trigeaud 2013), and more generally it influences the ways in which religion is made visible or invisible. For example, this trope can shed light on the invisibility of de Vitoria’s religious identity because rendering his identity visible would quite explicitly disturb the idea that the secular is separated from the religious. It also helps us understand other positions. For instance, during an online training session organized by a RNGO that I observed, rules of engagement with the UN were clearly laid out for participants, who were members of religious communities. One of these rules was to avoid speaking about religion. Fr. Gabriel explains: “We don’t talk about religion at the UN, because religion is thought to be a divisive topic at the UN” (author’s fieldwork notes). Likewise, this trope can provide some explanations as to why religion and the activities of RNGOs have been imagined as being principally related to the definition of the family and gender relations, which are in the secular imaginary associated with the private realm where religion is located (Miall and Carrette 2017, 220).
Indeed, this public-private distinction explains, at least partly, why scholars and policy experts tend to locate and scrutinize the work of RNGOs on issues associated with the private sphere, including issues related to gender and religion. As a result, and as discussed earlier, this has substantially narrowed our ability to capture how religion and human rights might be deeply interlinked and, more specifically, to comprehend the breadth of work of RNGOs and the multiple ways Christianity is embedded in the texture of the UN. The idea that religion tends to be incompatible with human rights and UN affairs also informs the scrutiny and the labelling of their work on issues associated with the private realm along liberal (= good) and conservative (= bad). As my interviewees discuss (in chapters 1 and 4), this labelling process can carry real consequences for their ability to build relationships on a range of human rights questions beyond gender and religious freedom issues. In other words, being attentive to the power of secular framing is also a way to think critically about how scholarly literature and policy work have chosen to engage with religion and RNGOs and how in doing this, they may participate, even inadvertently, in reproducing the binaries embedded in secularism.
Secular binaries also influence the construction of the category of RNGOs itself. This category is in many ways a product of the idea that religion ought to be separated from the secular. It creates two distinct groups of NGOs—religious and secular—and locates the religious in the RNGO group. Doing this has multiple consequences. One is the risk of muffling the overlaps and similarities between these two groups as well as the ways that “secular” groups can be informed by religious perspectives and vice versa. Another consequence is rendering invisible the “interplay of religious ideas, beliefs and practices at different levels of the UN system” (Miall and Carrette 2017, 233), given that it participates in locating religion in a specific and contained space (i.e., the space of RNGOs). Many scholars are fully cognizant of the challenges created by these conceptualizations. Miall and Carrette (2017) note, “There will need to be deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the complexity of ‘religion’ as a category in global governance, recognition that the idea of ‘religious’ NGOs is as much an invention of scholars as practice” (213). Indeed, a few researchers have recently started critically assessing and complicating these categories (e.g., Hopgood 2006; Haynes 2014; Lehmann 2016; Schwarz 2018; Baumgart-Ochse and Wolf 2019b; Paras 2019).
Thinking about the Post-secular
The concept of post-secular has been one way to theorize the power of religious/secular binaries and to think of ways to move beyond them. While the concept is much debated, thinking about it as both a “descriptor of contemporary society and a theoretical framework of critique” (Wilson 2014, 348) may be helpful.16 It invites us to empirically consider the place of religion in areas that were not considered until recently (e.g., politics, human rights). Theoretically, the post-secular also acts as a framework to think critically about the dualist structure of secular politics. For Dillon (2018), for example, the concept is an invitation to appreciate the “mutual relevance and intertwined pull of the religious and the secular” (7). In many ways, it encourages us to consider the possibility that secular and religious binaries can be intimately related. It also conveys the idea that secular/religious binaries are not necessarily relevant to capture realities and can sometimes even hinder our ability to see other dynamics at play. As Luca Mavelli and Erin Wilson (2016, 251) note, the postsecular is “prompted by the idea that values as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework” (see also Baumgart-Ochse 2019, 2–3). Thus, this framework is helpful because it does not exclude the possibility that religious actors can be involved in human rights advocacy on a wide range of issues or that their human rights practice might be working to blur existing binaries. A secular/religious framework would, as discussed, not be conducive to appreciating the nuances of this empirical possibility.
Post-secularism has been subject to several criticisms. For example, Erin Wilson (2014) notes that while the term provides a good starting point to critique the secular, there is nonetheless a “need to explore alternative modes of theorizing that do not rely on any connection to secularism at all, in order to truly move away from the restrictions of dualistic secular thinking” (348). This is an important limit given that it speaks directly to the scarcity of concepts available to describe and theorize practices that are located beyond the “dualistic secular thinking” (Wilson 2014: 348). Along those lines, I introduce, in the next section, a series of concepts to describe the work of RNGOs, which I hope might help us move in some ways beyond this dualistic thinking or at least to capture what it means for binaries to be muddied and the multiple shapes this muddying can take. However, I argue that some value exists in the ability of the post-secular to remind us of the power of the secular. Wilson notes that the post-secular carries the implication of a “progression beyond the secular, yet somehow also remaining connected to such ways of thinking” (348; see also Agensky 2014; Wilkinson 2018). I suggest that in the context of the UN and the HRC in particular, this connection sheds light on the conditions that allow for the emergence of post-secular moments of advocacy.17 Indeed, while this book captures instances where RNGOs initiate post-secular moments in their advocacy, where traditional binaries are blurred (e.g., belief versus practices, human rights versus religion), it also points to the fact that the ability to do so continues to be deeply circumscribed by secular politics. For instance, some actors find it more difficult to initiate these blurring moments on questions that tend to activate religious/secular cleavages (e.g., sexual politics) than on questions that appear not to do so (e.g., the environment).
The other important limit of post-secularism comes from Jürgen Habermas’s (2011) use of it, whereby the philosopher, while cognizant of the role of religious actors in the public sphere, notes that these actors must translate their arguments into a universal language. Citizens, he explains, “have to accept that the potential truth contents of religious utterances must be translated into a generally accessible language” (Habermas 2011, 25–26; see also Wilkinson 2018 on Habermas’s understanding of post-secular). While this general language is not necessarily identified as a secular one, this approach is still driven by an impulse to identify the religious as different from “generally accessible language.” In other words, this distinction continues to do the work of secularism in that it delimits and distinguishes the religious from other fields. As I will discuss in this book, Christian-inspired NGOs do in fact sometimes explain that they need to translate religious principles into human rights principles to render their concerns legible to the UN audience. However, it remains unclear how a rights-based language used at the UN could be understood as generally accessible, given its technicality and specificity. In fact, as others have argued, this language is often characterized by its lack of accessibility beyond experts and human rights advocates (Merry 2005). In other cases, Christian-inspired NGOs explain that the use of a human rights discourse becomes part and parcel of their religious outlook and framework. In this context, human rights are not identified as a “secular” or “other” language, but rather as a language that is imbued with religious meaning. RNGO representatives in these cases encourage their networks to frame their claims in a human rights language to make them accessible to UN experts (Haynes 2014, 171). Yet, they often also do that because they think embracing a rights-based framework will facilitate a rereading of religious teachings and scriptures (see chapters 1 and 4). RNGOs often describe this rereading as requiring a transformation of religious practice, whereby being a human rights activist becomes understood as inherent to how one should practice religion. Here, the work of RNGO representatives goes beyond simple translation; it is often about facilitating a dialectical relationship between religious teachings and human rights. The question of whether human rights is a secular (or universal) discourse is irrelevant here. As Schwarz (2018) puts it, framing human rights “as an inherently secular matter neglects [and I would argue renders invisible] the ways that religious organizations and communities often conceptualize and approach human rights issues” (45).
In sum, the post-secular conveys the idea that boundaries between religion and the secular are not fixed and that the religious and the secular can be deeply interrelated, which is an important thread in this book. Most importantly, the fact that the post-secular remains normatively linked to secularism acts as a reminder to better understand the political conditions that enable the blurring of some binaries and not others—that is, the conditions that allow post-secular moments to emerge. Yet, although navigating secular/religious binaries are very much part of the reality of RNGOs representatives at the UN, focusing only on this navigation is not helpful to understanding the complexity of their posture and work as human rights activists, including why it is essential for them to be at the UN in the first place. Thus, it is important to find concepts that can help capture aspects of this complexity. I introduce some concepts below.
Approaching the Work of RNGOs
The Category of RNGO and Its Complexity
Beyond inviting us to approach the concept of RNGOs as a product of secular binaries, scholars have also criticized the use of the descriptor religious as being “insufficient to encompass traditions and worldviews of non-Western origin—apart from those of Abrahamic lineage” (Beinlich and Braungart 2019, 28; see also Fitzgerald 2011; Haynes 2014, 8–9; Carrette and Trigeaud 2013). In other words, they argue that the term cannot capture the multitude of worldviews and spiritual traditions.18 Like Ann-Kristin Beinlich and Clara Braungart (2019, 28), I am aware of and acknowledge these conceptual limits. Yet, I use this term on some occasions in the book because it is a category that is used in the literature and is common in UN parlance (Beinlich and Braungart 2019).19 Religious groups also frequently use this term themselves. In fact, Karsten Lehmann (2016) notes that religious organizations involved in multilateral politics choose not to call themselves orders, congregations, or churches but to identify themselves as RNGOs. For Lehmann, this is a way to “emphasize their established place within the UN context” that they are accredited organizations at the UN;20 he further notes that for a number of these groups, being able to use the label NGO is an identifier of cultural and social capital, whereby “cooperation with the UN seems to stand for worldwide impact and significance” (Lehmann 2016, 72).
I found a few definitions of RNGO to be helpful in locating and identifying Christian-inspired NGOs at the HRC, especially since these definitions emphasize that NGOs have to self-identify as religious to be considered as such. Marie Petersen’s (2010) understanding of RNGOs is useful in that respect. She notes that RNGOs “describe and understand themselves as religious, referring in their name, activities, mission statements or elsewhere to religious traditions, values and ideas” (Petersen 2010, 5). Likewise, Julia Berger (2003), one of the first scholars to define RNGO, provides us with complementary insights. She notes that RNGOs are “formal [non-state] organizations whose identity and mission are self-consciously derived from the teaching of one or more religious or spiritual traditions and which operate on a non-profit, independent, voluntary basis to promote and realize collectively articulated ideas about the public good at the national or international level” (16).21 While I am aware that not all RNGOs will identify as such, especially given the power of secular politics, my decision to focus on these groups is partly pragmatic and partly empirical. Pragmatically, it lets me narrow my research focus. Empirically, given that these actors self-identify as such and given that some of them are quite active at the HRC, this focus participates in providing a better sense of who they are, why they self-identify as RNGOs, and how much this religious etiquette shapes and informs their work.
More specifically, the book focuses on a number of Christian-inspired NGOs, the majority of which have offices in Geneva. I made this decision to narrow the scope of my research and to help clarify the complex relationships between Christianity and human rights crafting at the UN. Because of this choice, I use the terms Christian self-identified NGO or Catholic self-identified NGO more frequently than RNGO. The definitions provided by Petersen (2010) and Berger (2003) remain, nonetheless, helpful guideposts, as these are groups that self-identify either in their names or mission statement with a particular strand of Christianity. One element worth flagging and that seems to shape the experiences of RNGOs is the question of who they are accountable to. This affects NGOs affiliated with a particular Christian institution22 in a somewhat different way than nonreligious NGOs. As it will become clear in the book, self-identified Christian NGOs often locate themselves as part of wider religious networks or communities and are accountable to these networks, often including in terms of funding. This comes with benefits because they are not as vulnerable as their nonreligious counterparts to the pressure from donors to show immediate results (see chapters 1 and 3). Nonetheless, for a number of these NGOs, demonstrating the relevance of human rights advocacy to their congregations or networks is a real necessity for their raison d’être and part and parcel of their work. Connecting with their network, often spread across the globe, also means they must constantly think and configure human rights priorities in terms of multiple geographical scales (e.g., regional, national, and international). Evelyn Bush (2017) summarizes these specific pressures: “While secular NGOs and unaffiliated RNGOs are subject to the logic of the NGO market, where NGOs compete for various forms of support and are therefore subject to the forms of influence that such competition implies, NGOs affiliated with religious institutions are somewhat shielded from those pressures, but at the same time more dependent upon the members and directors of their own institutions” (72).
Concepts to Document the Work of RNGOs
Given that the categories of religious and secular are used at the UN to, among other things, describe actors and the space of the UN itself, it is important to explore how they inform RNGOs’ presentation and areas of focus. In particular, the question of the visibility and invisibility of religious identity pushes us to examine which discursive, embodied, and lived behaviors UN actors and NGOs identify as religious. In fact, as noted by Carrette and Miall (2017), RNGOs can choose to downplay their visible religious identity by not using religious language in their lobbying, referring only sporadically to doctrine, or avoiding religious dress. Some examples of this interplay between visibility and invisibility will be discussed throughout the book. Yet, their efforts to limit the visibility of their religiosity does not mean that RNGOs’ practice of work is devoid of religious meaning. On the contrary, many actors interviewed in this book describe their practice as being an essential part of their lived religion. Being attentive to how these actors use religion as a performative category that can be made visible or invisible tells a great deal about the power of secular binaries, their impact on the framing of religion, and when they are comfortable openly blurring these binaries in their advocacy (see Carrette and Trigeaud 2013). But it is less helpful to capture how human rights work can be understood as a lived and embodied religious practice.
To capture these interrelations more fully, this book draws on interconnected concepts in religious studies and political theory. A lived religion approach is one of them. The lived religion literature contends that the study of the religious should not be limited to institutions or dogmas (e.g., Ammerman 2006; McGuire 2008; Orsi 2010; Orsi 2006; Becci and Knobel 2013). Although it might seem counterintuitive to use a lived religion approach given that members of RNGOs often belong to religious institutions, this approach remains relevant because it invites us to be aware of how religious practices, including the ways religion is embodied and performed, is shaped by lived experiences. This framework allows us to consider the possibility that for some of my interlocutors, human rights advocacy can be experienced in their everyday life as essential to their religious practice. Religion is not located solely in a person’s conscience, nor is religion’s only shape that of belief. For many, it can be an experience that permeates everyday life and in our case, advocacy work (Harris and Lam 2019). This lived religion approach is also attentive to how perspectives on religion can shift and adapt according to a person’s life experiences and history.
Although it is important to pay attention to the ways in which the everyday experiences of working as human rights advocates inform how religion is lived and practiced, I am not suggesting that beliefs and doctrine do not play a role in informing these practices. But our gaze should not focus solely on doctrine, as many of my interlocutors describe practicing human rights as an essential part of their religious experience. In other words, while beliefs, including the teachings of religions, certainly shape human rights work, practicing human rights tends to be experienced as what makes these beliefs meaningful.
Along with a lived religion approach, two other concepts are helpful to capture these dynamics. The first is orthopraxy. This is a concept used by Anita Harris and Kim Lam (2019) in their work on the civic and political engagement of young Buddhists and Muslims in Australia to capture their participants’ prioritizing of correct religious conduct and action over belief. They note that “‘doing’ rather than ‘believing’ becomes paramount, and for [their participants,] religious practice and acts for shaping society cannot be easily split” (643). While RNGO representatives do not explicitly express a hierarchy between belief and practice, for many interviewees in this book, “doing” is essential; at the HRC, this is translated into being active in human rights advocacy. In Faith in Rights, as in Harris and Lam’s study, advocacy work at the HRC often appears to be “an element of orthopraxy, or correct religious conduct and practice within the context of everyday civic life” (Harris and Lam 2019, 629). In fact, one of the interesting elements of this concept is the emphasis it puts on “correct’” practice. I would argue that for several of my interlocutors, this idea of practicing religion correctly informs their choice of advocacy methods (see chapters 2, 3, and 4).
Harris and Lam (2019) also note a cyclical relationship between religiosity and practice among their participants. While a person’s religious standpoint might initially inform the decision to participate in social justice initiatives, this participation then informs the ways that person approaches this standpoint. As I have already mentioned in my discussion of the limits of the term translation, a similar cyclical or dialectical relationship between religious teachings and human rights practice is in our case visible in the work of Christian-inspired NGOs at the HRC. Here, the concept of popular casuistry used by Cecelia Lynch (2009) speaks specifically to this navigation23 of religious practitioners between teachings and practices “reconcil[ing] religious guidelines with new situations,” in our case, human rights advocacy. The interesting element about this concept is that it explicitly highlights the dialectal connection between teachings and practice—that is, while practice is informed by moral principles (e.g., religious teachings), the shapes of these principles shift and adapt with sociopolitical experiences and practices. Lynch (2009) explains:
The purpose of employing the concept [popular casuistry] is to acknowledge first that religious traditions exist as living rituals as well as repositories of ethical guideposts, and second that religious actors link these rituals and guideposts to interpretive moments in daily life. Moreover, interpretations of the ethical requirements of a religious tradition are shaped by ongoing political and economic practices (producing different ideal-typical constructs) as well as communal debates about religious authority and legitimacy. . . . Religious adherents employ a form of moral reasoning that incorporates the teachings of religious elites but is not limited to them, relies on precedent and sacred texts but interprets them to suit given circumstances and “cases,” and uses these resources to fill the “gaps” in guides to action present in any concrete situation. Thus, the ethical content of the common good is continually negotiated by religious adherents who use informal casuistic methods to interpret doctrine in given socio-political (and spatial and temporal) circumstances. (400)
Lynch’s terminology acknowledges that religious traditions and doctrine serve as “ethical guideposts” while also attending to the lived dimension of practicing religion, whereby practitioners are required to interpret and adapt these guideposts to their particular “socio-political (and spatial and temporal) circumstances” (Lynch 2009, 400). This concept captures a number of dynamics explored in this book, including how Christian-inspired NGO representatives not only embark on their own internal navigation between religious teachings and human rights advocacy (chapter 1) but also encourage members of their network to go through this navigation when they are teaching them about human rights. This is necessary to convince them of the importance of being involved in multilateral advocacy in the first place (see chapter 4).
Thus, following Lynch (2009), this book is guided by the idea that “linking context, practice, and ethics . . . produces a richer conception of the importance of religion in international politics” (405). All three concepts of lived religion, orthopraxy, and popular casuistry allow us to appreciate the importance of thinking about the connections between everyday practices (e.g., advocacy) and religious practice. Lived religion is an invitation to think of religion not only as belief but also as a lived and embodied experience influenced by the everyday—and in our case, by everyday human rights advocacy work. Orthopraxy reminds us that religious practice can be as much (if not more, for some practitioners) about “correct” conduct as it is about “correct” beliefs. For RNGO representatives, this influences the shape advocacy can take and the human rights areas they will prioritize. Finally, while these first two concepts point implicitly to practitioners’ navigation between beliefs, teachings, and practice, popular casuistry explicitly captures this dialectal relationship. This relationship is most visible in the trainings organized by RNGOs for members of their networks (see chapter 4).
Notes
1. The 2017 event was organized in the context of the celebrations for the 800th Jubilee of the Dominican Order. As part of this jubilee, the Dominican Order first organized the Dominican Congress on Human Rights in Salamanca, Spain, in September 2016, which was meant to reflect on the Dominicans’ engagement with human rights in the past, present, and future (Deeb 2017; Koch 2016). One of the objectives of the 2017 event on de Vitoria was to invite UN member states to take part in this wider reflection (Peschken 2017).
2. For more on Francisco de Vitoria, see Lynch 2014. Lynch explains the different influences that informed de Vitoria’s understanding of the “common good” and how he tried to reconcile his interpretation of Catholicism and universal morality and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. She notes, “In sum, Vitoria’s understanding of the common good was shaped not only by an affirmation of the humanity of the Amerindian ‘other’ and the ‘right’ of the Church to evangelize, but also by his support of the Spanish monarchy and articulation of emergent cosmopolitanism, especially for economic benefit” (285).
3. These NGOs include but are not limited to the following: the Quaker United Nation Office (QUNO), the Dominicans for Justice and Peace, Franciscans International, Edmund Rice International, Istituto Internazionale Maria Ausiliatrice (IIMA) Human Rights Office, VIDES International, Associazione Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII (APG23), Lutheran World Federation, Caritas Internationalis, International Catholic Center of Geneva (ICCG), New Humanity, Vivat International, and International Catholic Child Bureau (BICE). My methods of research on these organizations varied, mainly in function of the rapport and access I was able to build with representatives. In some cases, it was limited to observing parallel events organized by organizations and analyzing publications or statements available online; in other cases, I conducted interviews with several representatives, observed week-long trainings, and analyzed archival material. Because of access limitation, I was unable to document the work of all the Christian NGOs located in Geneva. I also made strategic decisions based on existing literature. For instance, while I attended parallel events co-organized at the HRC by the Alliance Defending Freedom, I chose not to focus on their work, in part because of the existing research on conservative Christian groups working on questions of gender, sexuality, and religious freedom at the UN and beyond (e.g., Mos 2018; Harms 2021; Bob 2010).
4. The UNCHR was created in 1946 to respond to human rights problems and develop global human rights standards (for more information, see https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/chr/pages/commissiononhumanrights.aspx). Comprising fifty-three UN member states, the CHR was criticized because of its heavy politicization and for having countries with poor human rights records as members. To address some of these problems, the CHR was replaced by the HRC in 2006, which is a smaller body that is responsible for doing a peer-review of the human rights records of all UN member states (i.e., Universal Periodic Review (UPR); see chapter 2 of this book). For more on this shift, see Ghanea 2006.
5. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR) is the UN body that provides support (administrative and substantive) to the HRC and other human rights mechanisms. For more information, see OHCHR, n.d., “About UN Human Rights”, United Nations, https://www.ohchr.org/en/about-us.
6. For more information on the building of the Palais des Nations, see “Chapter 5: The Palace of Nations: A Monument to Peace,” International Geneva, https://www.geneve-int.ch/node/4155.
7. To be able to participate in UN meetings, NGOs must be granted consultative status by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The three types of consultative status—general, special, and roster—affect the activities NGOs can engage in with the UN, including the length of statements they can deliver (see Trigeaud 2017b, 79–80). An estimated 3,275 NGOs have consultative status at the UN. As Trigeaud (2017b) and others explain, their status does not indicate their level of activity. Some NGOs are much more active than others in different forums. NGOs with the financial and organizational means to have an office in both Geneva and New York, for example, can be active in a more systematic and sustained way than NGOs that do not. The ability to access a visa also affects the ability of some NGOs to engage in UN meetings in those cities (Trigeaud 2017b, 81).
8. The Serpentine Bar and the Press Bar are coffee bars that sell non-alcoholic beverages and light snacks.
9. The Salle des Pas Perdus is a room with comfortable chairs and small tables adjacent to a small coffee shop, located between UN conference rooms. Diplomats and other stakeholders use it as a meeting spot.
10. Annual reports of RNGOs working with the UN give a sense of their operating expenses to conduct their activities. The budgets varies according to the scope of their activities and their size. The annual report of Franciscans International is particularly interesting because it provides a breakdown of the type of funding received, including funding given directly by Franciscan orders. For examples of annual reports, see Franciscans International (FI) 2020; Dominicans for Justice and Peace 2020.
11. A number of other initiatives have also been organized, such as the OHCHR’s Faith4Rights framework launched in 2017, which seeks to foster deeper reflection and connections between religion and human rights (for more information, see https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Press/Faith4Rights…). Another example is the UN Interagency Taskforce on Religion and Development, which was established in 2010 to provide guidance to UN staff on how to engage faith-based actors. Although these initiatives gesture to UN agencies’ interest in developing more formal connections and engagement with faith-based groups, they are outside the scope of this study.
12. Trigeaud (2017a; 2017b) is one of the only researchers who has worked on RNGOs at the HRC. Her overview of RNGOs at the HRC lays the ground for my research.
13. Mark Goodale elaborates on the importance of giving priority to the “practice of human rights” in his most recent book, Reinventing Human Rights (2022). He eloquently reiterates the power of such an approach in helping us see rights as concepts that are appropriated, lived, and experienced differently according to the positionality and histories of who is mobilizing them. He reminds us that focusing on the practice of human rights also reveals the translocality of rights that enables “the formation of enduring alliances beyond existing boundaries of class, nation, race, and political ideology” (92). In many ways, Faith in Rights is indebted to this approach, as embracing it has allowed me to see the ways in which the practice of human rights is lived as relational for my participants and how this practice allows them to make connections and potentially forge alliance beyond secular/religious binaries. It is in those moments that transcend boundaries that, as Goodale convincingly argues, human rights have the most potential to be reinvented.
14. No official document exists that establishes the UN as a secular institution, but the claim is pervasive in UN circles and among policymakers and a number of scholars.
15. Cady (2014), drawing on the work of Viswanathan, notes that one consequence of the “oppositional model of religious and secular formations” is that “religious currents that spill over the strictures of the binary containers of the religion and the secular” are overlooked. She explains, “More heterodox, eclectic and often populist forms of religion and spirituality remain off the radar screen” (301). In other words, religions are essentialized, and particular forms are emphasized over others (Cady 2014, 311).
16. For Parmaksiz (2018), “the postsecular has value for critical, social and political theory to the extent that it challenges the natural status ascribed to the secular, interrogating secular normativity in the social, political and cultural realms” (111).
17. By “post-secular moments of advocacy,” I am referring to moments when NGOs in their discursive advocacy deliberately blur secular/religious boundaries or juxtapose secular/religious discourses.
18. Some scholars and policymakers use the term faith-based NGO (FBN) rather than RNGO. For Haynes, the term faith-based is helpful because it appears to be somewhat more inclusive. Indeed, the term religion, including the concepts it is associated with (e.g., belief, one deity), privileges a monotheistic and Christian-centered reading of religion (Haynes 2014, 9; Fitzgerald 2011). Although the term might be more inclusive, I consider that FBN exhibits some of the same challenges as RNGO in that they both participate in locating and delimiting the place of religion in a particular area. Moreover, the designations faith-based and religious tend to be associated with “certain ontological assumptions” about religion (e.g., religion is associated with belief, the immanent, the private realm) that “are not clarified or investigated” (Schwarz 2018, 10).
19. Some scholars, like Haynes (2014, 13), choose to focus on faith-based organizations (FBOs) rather than on FBNs in order to include non-NGO religious actors, such as the Holy See and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which both have Permanent Observer status at the General Assembly. Given that this book’s focus is on NGOs, I do not use the term FBO to describe the organizations I am looking at. Of course, this does not mean that the politics of the Holy See does not influence the work of some of the Catholic-inspired NGOs I discuss (see chapter 1 for a lengthier discussion of the relationship between the Holy See and Catholic-inspired NGOs, as well as Coni-Zimmer and Perov 2018, 116).
20. Lehmann (2018) notes that the label RNGO “alludes only to the fact that a specific organization went through a particular process and achieved a formal status. Practically speaking, the RNGO status equips the respective organizations (or rather their representatives) with a number of specific privileges—formal as well as informal. On the level of formal procedures, all accredited NGOs have the right to participate in certain UN activities and to address formal statements to UN organs (which are distributed via the UN documentation services). Informally, the NGO status grants easier access to the premises of the UN to make contacts with state representatives as well as representatives of the UN and its specialized agencies” (71).
21. In fact, I would argue that relationships between local, regional, and international levels are very complex for most Christian-inspired NGOs because several of them are members of wide transnational networks. They are often expected to convey at the UN what members of these networks are witnessing at the local level, as well as to build the human rights capacity of members at the regional and local levels so that they can present local situations with a human rights language. In other words, the work of many Christian-inspired NGOs at the UN is linked intimately to the work of networks at the regional and local levels.
22. For more on the difference between affiliated and unaffiliated Christian groups, see Bush 2017.
23. Selby et al. (2018) use the term navigation in their work to capture the thought processes self-identified Muslims must go through to adapt their faith to their everyday public lives in Canada. In many ways, several RNGO representatives in Geneva describe a similar work of internal navigation.