Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between human rights and social analysis within the main historical and theoretical perspectives adopted by social sciences. In particular, religious freedom will be analysed as one of the central issues in the recent engagement of the social sciences with human rights. After examining current narratives and mainstream approaches of the social sciences towards the right to religious freedom, this article will then underline the importance of a social epistemology which goes beyond a normative and legal perspective, bridging the gap between the framework of human rights and the social roles of religion in context. Within this framework, religious freedom represents a social construct, whose perception, definition and implementation dynamically evolves according to its influence, at different levels, in the lived dimension of social relations. The second part of the article proposes a context-grounded analysis of religious freedom in the Republic of Moldova. This case study is characterised by the impressive growth of Orthodoxy after the demise of the Soviet Union and by a complex and contradictory political approach towards religious freedom, both as a legal standard and as a concept. Emerging through the analysis of local political narratives and some preliminary ethnographical observations, the social importance of religion will be investigated both as a governmental instrument and as an embodied means of dealing with widespread socio-economic insecurity, creating tensions between religious rootedness and religious freedom. The local debate on religious freedom will then be related to the influence of geopolitical borders, the topic of traditional identity and the religious form of adaptation to the ineffectiveness of the new secular local policies, with orthodox institutions and parishes having new socio-political roles at both a global and local scale.
Highlights
This paper explores the relationship between human rights and social analysis within the main historical and theoretical perspectives adopted by social sciences
Heir of the political history of Western institutions, and grounded in a legal and philosophical discourse mostly influenced by the liberal tradition, the conceptualisation of human rights shared this normative cultural assessment, which has usually been distanced from the social, political and economic history associated with its concrete creation and evolution
Selecting, ratifying, adopting and universalising the legal entitlements claimed during a century of civic and social struggles, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was seeking to indicate the path towards building a common ethical regime founded on the innate values and dignity of every human being in all human societies
Summary
This paper explores the relationship between human rights and social analysis within the main historical and theoretical perspectives adopted by social sciences. No longer only limited to procedural issues or governance monitoring, these studies can move human rights toward the hermeneutical effort to overcome an institutionalist approach and address both laws and religions as processual and dynamic cultural systems, represented by different institutions and actors, and producers of meaningful and plural attitudes, beliefs and social practices.
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