Prof. Dr. Jens Köhrsen

The project explores the negotiation of secularity in the field of development collaboration. Transnational partnerships between development agencies in the Global North and religious organizations in the Global South constitute contact zones for different secularities. The involved actors have to develop strategies to deal with the simultaneous presence of different secularities. These may include adaptation or concealing strategies, or open negotiation processes seeking to determine a middle ground. The project studies these strategies for the case of collaborations between German development agencies and religious organisations in Latin America/Sub-Saharan Africa. Traditionally, the world of international development tended to regard religion as problematic for socio-economic development. However, this discourse has shifted in the last decades, increasingly perceiving religious organisations as crucial partners in local civil societies and highlighting their grass-roots reach and credibility as decisive resources for development projects. This lead to a readjustment – but not a dissolution – of the boundaries between the “secular” world of development and religion. In this context, development agencies have not only started to recognize the development potentials of religion, but also launched manifold collaborations with religious organisations. These include also partnerships between national development agencies in the Global North and religious organisations in the Global South. The latter often differ in the way in which they draw boundaries between religion and society, seeking power in other social spheres (e.g. economy, politics) and thereby challenging the Northern concept of functional differentiation. The project will undertake case studies of these collaborations in order to determine contact zones between different secularities, analyses in what way discrepancies in the secularities become manifest, and how actors address these.