Religious NGOs in the United Nations: Mediators or Polarizers?

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Transnational NGOs are generally regarded in the literature as principled actors who help to set and implement universal global norms (such as human rights, democracy or sustainable development) and thereby make desirable contributions to global governance. The proposed research project scrutinizes this expectation by focusing on a group of NGOs who insert religion-based normative orientations into the formulation and negotiation of policy goals in the context of global governance. We want to explore, first, whether the participation of religious NGOs (RNGOs) in the UN system hampers or facilitates the agreement on policy goals and strategies. Second, we ask why RNGOs choose to act either in a cooperative or in a confrontational manner. In order to answer the first question, we will analyze the relationships between RNGOs and UN-agencies in four policy fields which on the one hand reflect central programmatic goals of the UN-agenda and in which on the other hand RNGOs are actively engaged: Freedom of religion, international criminal justice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and reproduction rights. The relationships between RNGOs and UN-agencies will be categorized as co-operation, complementarity, co-optation, or confrontation in order to identify patterns or clusters in the distribution of these different types. From the emerging matrix, we will choose RNGOs which reflect the variance of relationships in order to conduct in-depth heuristic case studies that allow us to generate hypotheses why RNGOs co-operate or choose confrontational behavior. Such an inductive approach to answering the second question is necessary given the scarcity of research on RNGOs in global governance to date. The general literature on religion and politics only provides a broad direction for research by focusing on religious norms, principles and schemata for interpretation which serve as tool kits for the formulation of policy goals and strategies. In the case of religious NGOs, their actions are predominantly guided by religious ethics and conceptions of justice. We seek to hypothesize which patterns or configurations of religious ethics typically result in the pursuit of specific political goals and strategies.