Lost in Translation? Religion at five UN treaty bodies

The purpose of my Ph.D.-project, preliminary titled "Lost in Translation?", is to analyze how five United Nations treaty bodies apply the term "religion" in their monitoring of state compliance with international human rights treaties. The analysis is mot ivated by the long lasting scepticism within religious studies and affiliated disciplines towards substantially defining religion, a scepticism that seems to be completely disregarded in most legal systems all over the world, in which substantial definiti ons of religion on the basis of theological notions, personal preferences of judges and dictionary definitions are continuously delivered. Nowhere is this clash more obvious, nor more potentially damaging, than in the United Nations treaty body system, wh ere selected officials develop and apply universalist ideas of religion in their considerations of the legal systems of more than 160 states all over the world, representing the sum total of most societies on earth. Reviewing how states apply religion in their reports and how treaty bodies respond to these applications, the analysis sets out to test whether religion can be coherently defined for legal purposes. Simultaneously, a key motivation for the project is to decide whether the constant refusal and denial towards defining religion within the academy may benefit from legal reasoning and clear cut methods of definition. Informing this latter motivation is the conviction that unlike the view of many academics within the field, I do not consider the cat egory of religion to be a uniquely problematic term. Rather, my position is that every discipline struggles to pin down its constitutive terms, and that scholars studying religion have a role-specific duty to do so in a manageable, stipulative fashion.