Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (BIM)

Socio-legal Contexts in the Middle East and Europe

Conflicts between religion and secularity (i.e., secular and religious discourses, norms, actors, and institutions) are shaped differently in differing socio-legal contexts in the Middle East and Europe.
 

Bodily Politics

While current scholarship has often studied this tension by focusing on religious rituals (head-scarf, minarets, animal slaughter, etc.), we claim that new light can be shed on the religion/secularity tension by exploring a broader set of examples concerning bodily politics, that is legal contestations over images of the body and authority over the body.

To explore the way secularity and religion shape and are shaped by the legal regulation of body politics we focus on three recent controversies: male circumcision, brain-dead organ donation, and abortion in three different countries Germany, Israel, and Turkey.
 

The Shaping of State Regulation

Our aim is to analyze how in each of these cases and in each of the three countries social actors have struggled to shape state regulation differently. In each of the countries, we will examine state legislation and regulation both on the books and in action.

In the focal case studies (circumcision in Germany, organ donation in Israel, abortion in Turkey) we will conduct interviews with the parties involved in shaping the regulation, while in the other cases we will rely on published documents and secondary literature.

We will show how contrary to common belief, contestations of authority over the body do not neatly divide between divine and secular authority. Rather, the tension involves different ways of deciding on human authority – individual v. family, mother v. fetus, parents v. child.

They take root in different understanding of the body, which cannot be captured by a simple distinction between »scientific« and »transcendental«, in any of the examples to be studied.
 

Project manager

• Prof. Dr. Gökce Yurdakul (BIM)

• Shai Lavi, Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
 

Project team

• Özgür Özvatan

• Gala Rexer
 

Financial partner

Grant funding agency: German-Israeli Foundation (GIF)
 

Links

Shai Lavi (website:
https://minervaeol.tau.ac.il/shai_lavi

Gala Rexer
https://www.sowi.hu-berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/diversity/mitarbeiter-innen/rexer