Silent Borders

Another cross-post in the series that began with Helge Årsheim’s essay on bureaucracy and religion: Lourdes Peroni, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University’s Human Rights Center, suggests that administrative decisions are not always as “apolitical” as the administrators would seek to claim

Helge Årsheim importantly draws attention to the largely overlooked workings of the “machinery in between” that silently determines the borders of legal religion. I agree with him on the need for more scholarly attention to the bureaucratic apparatus that boringly – but crucially – determines “the shape and scope of religion.”

In my current research on migration and gender, I have been trying to draw international human rights law’s attention to the different kinds of borders that work domestically to limit migrant women’s enjoyment of human rights. Continue reading