In this chapter, I argue that there are specific costs involved in recognizing religion in global politics that are neither sufficiently understood nor appropriately evaluated. These stem, among other things, from the fact that recognition processes presuppose the prior identification of entities and subjects ready to be recognized.Footnote ¹ Acts of recognition build upon an assumed ‘fact’ of recognizability and so, in order to become recognized, a subject must be or become recognizable to the current regime of knowledge. Arguments that we should recognize religion in global politics conceive of religion as intelligible prior to recognition and frame it as something that can be included or excluded, governed, managed, and engaged with. They ignore, therefore, its conceptual, epistemological, and historiographical politics.Footnote ²

Building on this argument, I also ask if the troubles associated with recognizing religion in the study of International Relations (IR) reflect more basic qualities of recognition. To address this query, I study recent critical debates about recognition in relation to individuals and groups, minorities, nations, empires, and states. Building on the work of Jens Bartelson, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, James Tully, and Jacques Rancière, I argue that recognition has two faces and that, along with the frequently acknowledged empowering and emancipatory aspect of recognition, the conditions for its possibility are also bound up with distinct costs. One of these conditions is that arguments for recognition both presuppose and reproduce a differentiated social logic, that is to say, a logic which assumes an identifiable and differentiated subject. This subject acts as a benchmark for understanding whether or not a process of recognition has been successful. It depends on a prior establishment of the criteria of recognizability that one can either successfully meet or fail to meet. Thus, among the many forms of recognition – political, legal, moral – I argue that they share a prior assumption of epistemic recognition. By studying the processes by which a subject becomes recognizable, we can start understanding the costs and consequences that accompany recognition.

In Chapters 1 and 2, I looked at arguments for the recognition of religion in global politics as illustrated through narratives of its exclusion and arguments for its rehabilitation. I pointed out that these arguments for recognizing religion have inherent costs, as they simultaneously depend on and reproduce an intelligible subject of religion to recognize. This is significant because scholars and policymakers alike use the conceptual apparatus of religion to make sense of the dynamics of global political order, including violent conflicts and peacebuilding, state-building processes, minority protection claims and violations, and the development of democratic institutions and aid programmes. In this chapter, I suggest that this is not exclusively a problem of religion in IR but is part of the grammar of recognition in a broader sense. This applies, as I show in this chapter, not only to multicultural accounts of religion such as those outlined in the previous chapters but, even more importantly, to performative accounts of non-essentialist recognition. Here, we see how that very performativity still remains limited to the available categories of intelligibility, such as religion.

In advancing the argument about the ambiguity of recognition, I draw on critical accounts in international scholarship. Here, Jens Bartelson argues that ‘international relations are mute when it comes to the conditions of epistemic recognition’, suggesting that the criteria for recognizing an entity as an actor of a certain kind already are given or at least sufficiently unproblematic.Footnote ³ Similarly, Janis Grzybowski observes that recognition reinforces the ontology of the state and the state system, overlooking ‘the prior question of what states actually are and how they can be identified as such’.Footnote ⁴ Ayse Zarakol, along with Charlotte Epstein, Ole Jacob Sending, and Thomas Lindemann, shifts the focus from recognition to misrecognition, arguing that global political subjects continuously strive for sovereign agency but can never fully achieve it.Footnote ⁵ Building on these accounts, I argue that available categories of intelligibility – such as religion – set the conditions for subjectivity, even when subjectivity itself is performatively constituted.Footnote ⁶

The Two Faces of Recognition

Recognition has two faces. It can both enable agency and limit it. In Bound by Recognition, Patchen Markell illustrates this double nature by drawing on an analysis of the emancipation of European Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Jewish emancipation had aspired for Jewish subjects to be included in the ‘civic’ nation, which meant access to citizenship rights, education, and the removal of discriminatory laws. However, the assimilation of Jews into the broader structures of European political communities did not imply that Jewishness was deemed irrelevant to political membership. Emancipation was, instead, both an effort to remove restrictions on ‘Jewish life’ and ‘an active effort to reshape Jewish … identity’.Footnote ⁷ While emancipation had provided recognition and empowerment to the Jewish population, it had also conditioned that empowerment by means of integration into a certain form of structure that encompassed political institutions, an educational system, and legal norms. As a recognized minority, European Jews suddenly became vulnerable in novel ways. As Aamir Mufti puts it, they became identifiable, quantifiable, and, in a word, governable, as the contours of their communities were made more easily known and detectable.Footnote ⁸ By showing how the distribution of resources and the institutionalization of rights became ‘dependent upon one’s recognizability as the bearer of an identity’, Markell illuminated how the politics of recognition ‘risks subjecting the very people whose agency it strived to enhance to powerful forces of normalization’.Footnote ⁹

Processes of recognition may give shape to the existing political order, but they are also making it governable. The conditions of empowerment are thereby also the conditions of control. Another example is the case of British Indian Muslims, to whom I will return in Chapters 4 and 5. They gained political influence as colonial subjects of the British Empire to the degree that they were accountable and enumerable through, among other instruments, the colonial census and the governmental logics that structured it. Recognizing ‘religious difference’ and the subjectivities tied to it empowered those who were identifiable within the logics of the census. The recognition of religious difference was, in this way, productive of the subjects that it named while also binding them to existing systems and structures of power – extending rights, legitimacy, and authority at the same time as it implicated those subjects in its hierarchical structure.Footnote ¹⁰

A deeper understanding of these two sides of recognition – empowering and subjecting – allows us to account for the costs that accompany it. Focusing on recognition or misrecognition as a ‘fact of rightly or wrongly cognizing and respecting an already-existing identity’ distracts from the fact that this form of acknowledgement partakes in the constitution and government of the subjects in place.Footnote ¹¹ In this section, I look at recognition theories in IR to demonstrate how several approaches incorporate and reflect this assumption regarding the nature of the subject being recognized. I contrast these accounts of recognition with an alternative which echoes the shift from a struggle for recognition to a struggle over recognition gestured to by James Tully in his later work. This means that instead of arguing for the recognition of certain subjects – individuals, communities, or states – my focus is on the struggle over recognition’s conditions of possibility. I then proceed to illustrate what that looks like in practice, linking it back to the question of religion.

The Productive, Performative, and Looping Power of International Recognition

During the 1990s, questions of recognition increasingly came into focus in political and international political discourse in the wake of a flourishing discussion of multiculturalism and identity politics at international and domestic levels.Footnote ¹² In international political scholarship, this took the form of analyses of identity-based conflicts, which were used to explain why actors sometimes seemed to act against their material interests in pursuit of an identity-based goal.Footnote ¹³ In contrast to prevailing realist and liberalist approaches in IR, the focus on recognition emphasized the importance of identities and subjectivities alongside the more traditional quest for power or wealth and modes of coordination and cooperation beyond the state.Footnote ¹⁴ Recognition, however, was not simply considered to be one goal among others but a basic need.Footnote ¹⁵ And unlike other basic needs, such as shelter or food, that must be met to ensure the survival of the individual or collective subjects, the need for recognition was considered different – its very fulfilment served to constitute the individual or collective as a particular kind of actor. Recognition mattered in IR because it described the process through which actors came to exist as actors within the international system and to take on a particular role and place within that system.Footnote ¹⁶ This constitutive theory added the productive, relational, and social power of recognition to declaratory or cognitive theories that relied much more heavily on an objective set of criteria necessary to obtain the sought-for recognition. In this sense, recognition was not only cognitive of existing actors; it elevated into actorhood those international entities that were recognized by others.Footnote ¹⁷

This kind of international political scholarship considered recognition to be part of the process constituting the (collective) identities of international actors but also an intrinsic part of the dynamics of international politics and conflicts. It was seen as a motor of change.Footnote ¹⁸ By struggling for recognition, actors were understood as challenging prevailing political structures to establish a new order that better met their needs. In turn, this changing order would be continuously challenged by others to include an ever-growing community of recognized actors, perpetually developing towards an ever-increasing space of inclusion. One example of this interpretation comes from IR scholar Christian Reus-Smit’s book Individual Rights and the Making of the International System. He draws on Axel Honneth’s Hegelian study of struggles for recognition and argues that the relational striving for, and realization of, individual rights has repeatedly driven large-scale change in the international system.Footnote ¹⁹ Reus-Smit’s argument reflects a longer tradition in IR of tracing international dynamics back to the realization of a potential, imagined reality, or an as-yet unrealized subjectivity that is made realizable through struggles for recognition.Footnote ²⁰

Reus-Smit is not alone in this interpretation. Shannon Brincat also draws on Honneth’s story of the subject’s journey towards a progressively more successful ‘self-actualization’, reshaping it as a quest for the cultivation of cosmopolitan social relations and an ethical life that ‘increases possibilities for social freedom’.Footnote ²¹ A decade earlier, Alexander Wendt told a similar story about self-realization and the historical evolution of the international state system from one of differentiated entities into a single overarching Self in the form of the World State.Footnote ²² Transcending the particular and developing into a universal entity, as Wendt envisioned, however, assumes a starting point of clearly distinguishable, bounded subjects – states in this case – that insist on being recognized in their particularity or difference. In other words, his is a teleology that depends upon a pre-existing logic of differentiation. The central point here is that, for these authors, there is – and needs to be – a difference that can be recognized and, subsequently, transcended for the process to move forward. There needs to be a recognizable difference between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ before one can insist on the recognition thereof as a step towards reconciliation at the higher level of ‘We’. Without such difference, there would be no intersubjectivity. Instead, there would just be a form of radical fusion.Footnote ²³

While the teleological aspect of the approach adopted by Wendt and others can be viewed as problematic in its own right, that is not my focus here. The important point for my argument, rather, is that such approaches require and presuppose a pre-existing, latent subject, without which the struggle for recognition would not be possible. They require a differentiated logic, a differentiated social ontology, in order for the mechanisms of recognition to gain foothold. With respect to scholarship positing recognition as a source of change and a means through which to actualize a potential self, the question remains: from where does the potential subject emerge on behalf of which recognition can be claimed (or denied)? How does that which has potential differentiate itself from that which does not? How does one traverse the threshold of recognizability? There is a crucial step missing in the recognition-based arguments considered so far – namely an explanation for how the subject on behalf of which recognition is claimed, granted, or denied can be assumed.

In much of the scholarship on recognition in international politics, the game of recognition – demanding, extending, or receiving it – is conceived of as part of the constant political activity through which agency is acquired and identities formed. However, this process is achieved via a vision, as Markell put it, of ‘identity as the always already settled criterion of proper intersubjective relations’.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, an identity is asserted and assumed that grounds and guides its carrier’s actions. Here, I agree with Jens Bartelson: such theories of recognition ‘assume that the entities to be … recognized already are given, be they national communities or cultures’.Footnote ²⁵ That is, in order to extend recognition to the multiple varieties of different states, communities, or cultures that demand and deserve it, these entities need to be distinguishable and ready to be recognized. To put it succinctly, they need to be recognizable. As Bartelson warns us, it is tempting, therefore, to argue that such subjects need to have been politically recognized – making them legible and intelligible – before they can be morally recognized as part of a larger diverse order.Footnote ²⁶

While theories of international political recognition view acts of mutual political recognition as constitutive – of, for example, the status of statehood seen in Honneth’s reference to the ‘potential’ becoming ‘actual’ – they nonetheless assume an actor that can enter into these games of recognition. That is, political recognition presumes the ‘existence of pre-constituted actors as a baseline for [its] explanatory endeavour’.Footnote ²⁷ Or, as Oliver Kessler and Benjamin Herborth put it, to ‘frame politics in terms of recognition is to presuppose a world a priori divided into a multiplicity of distinct and separated collectivities’.Footnote ²⁸ The differentiable and intelligible subject is therefore not only an outcome of the productive power of recognition but a foundational part of its condition of possibility.

The Benchmark of Misrecognition and the Assumption of the Subject

Recognition can also fail, according to the scholars who follow its dynamics in the global realm.Footnote ²⁹ The need for recognition is universal, and so are the consequences of it failing.Footnote ³⁰ For Taylor, Honneth, Brincat, Reus-Smit, Wendt, and the large majority of political and international political scholarship, misrecognition reads as the failure of recognition.Footnote ³¹ The conventional idea of misrecognition as a failure to adequately recognize others is reflected in Axel Honneth’s argument, considered in the section ‘The Possibility of Epistemic Change’, about how recognition indicates the transition from a ‘potential’ to an ‘actual’ identity.Footnote ³² The pre-existence of a ‘potential’ identity in this case is necessary as a criterion for judging the adequacy of the act of recognition, which would, in turn, lead into an ‘actualized’ identity.Footnote ³³ That is, in the interdependency of the development of a ‘Self’ vis-à-vis an ‘Other’, this constructive theory of recognition still depends on the intelligibility of a ‘potential’ entity, identity, or subjectivity.

Absent the potential subject, there are no grounds on which to know if recognition has succeeded or failed. Misrecognition assumes an existing identity as a benchmark for failed recognition. When Honneth argues that the ‘path for civilizing international relations primarily lies in sustained efforts at conveying respect and esteem for the collective identities of other countries’,Footnote ³⁴ he is referring to the actualization of the potential collective identities of these other countries. Or, as he argued against Patchen Markell a few years earlier, ‘the struggle for recognition represents a struggle for the social articulation of pre-existent knowledge’.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘pre-existing knowledge’ of a ‘potential’ subject carries the assumption of a pre-differentiated entity awaiting recognition. And this entity is one that would be harmed should recognition fail.

It is, in this sense, on the basis of identity that the failure of recognition is measured. Misrecognition is only intelligible if recognition itself is a matter of the cognition of an identity that is in some sense independent of the uncertainties of human interaction. Because if identities were not independent in this way, ‘they could not serve as reliable benchmarks by which to judge the adequacy of particular recognitive act of structures’.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, despite their attempt to avoid essentializing the recognized identities, these scholars remain dependent on identity as a benchmark by which to judge the various available recognitive structures.Footnote ³⁷

I have argued that attempts to analyse international dynamics through the lens of recognition assumes a differentiated and recognizable subject. However, one might suggest that IR’s constructive arguments of recognition – building on Hegel as well as Honneth’s reading of him – do not assume a sovereign subject at all. However, as I will show in the coming sections, my point is not to say that IR scholars assume a sovereign subject but that they assume that sovereignty in knowledge about the subject is possible and necessary in order to assess whether or not recognition had succeeded or failed. They must assume an intelligible, recognizable subject in order to proceed in their analysis of the dynamics of recognition struggles. That does not mean that the grammar of recognition is stuck with fixed or reified subjectivities but rather that it is dependent on an assumption that sovereignty in knowledge is possible. If this were not to be the case, again, there would be no way of knowing whether the suggested recognition of a known subject – substantive or enacted – would be successful or not.

Non-sovereign Knowledge and Non-essential Recognition: Patchen Markell and James Tully

The pursuit of recognition in IR scholarship functions in a framework where knowable and differentiable subjects are the conditions of possibility for intersubjective relations. But through its aspiration and desire for epistemic sovereignty, the politics of recognition misses the constitutive vulnerability of subjectivity.Footnote ³⁸ Hegelian-inspired scholarship on recognition in IR often assumes the possibility of knowing who we and others are; it assumes sovereignty in knowledge of identity and the recognition of this knowledge by others.Footnote ³⁹ It assumes that this identity will guide and ground our actions and, moreover, that knowing others’ identities brings knowledge of their actions. Thus, if we could know who an actor is, it would be possible to know what the actor would do. This perspective elides the fact that identity does not simply ground action but is constituted by it, including performative claims to recognition themselves. Further, since human action can never rid itself of its non-sovereign character, neither can the identity and agency that is formed by such action ever be fully sovereign. There is a limit to what we can expect our knowledge of ourselves and of others to do for us.

International Relations scholarship on recognition often remains blind to the possibility of the ‘non-sovereign’ character of human action and knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁰ Since action will always be partly unpredictable, the knowledge and subjectivities that emerge from it will remain non-sovereign. In this sense, the subject is not lacking sovereignty due to its dependency on an ‘Other’ but because it is performatively enacted and action will inevitably remain partly unpredictable.Footnote ⁴¹ Acknowledging the contingency and chance of human action means acknowledging the vulnerability and practical limits ‘imposed upon us by the openness and unpredictability of the future’.Footnote ⁴² Politics, Markell writes, ‘is in part a response to the experience of vulnerability’ – to the fact that our identities are shaped in part through the unpredictable responses of other people.Footnote ⁴³ This is ‘what makes being recognized by others seem so acutely important in the first place’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is in reaction to the troubling unpredictability of the responses of others that the politics of recognition demands ‘that others recognize us as who we already really are’, be it an individual, a community, or a state.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is because subjectivities are vulnerable and unstable that the recognition of them appears critical. Recognition depends upon the impossible assumption of sovereignty in knowledge over that which already is.Footnote ⁴⁶ The desire for sovereignty performs the function of making the ever-ongoing project of subjectivity seem to be a stable and steady ground for action.

I began this chapter by claiming that recognizing religion in global politics has costs. This follows from the fact that recognition has costs, both ontological – in the misrepresentation of the non-sovereign nature of human knowledge and subjectivity – and epistemic – by obscuring those subjects and forms of knowledge that fall outside of the currently recognizable (a point I will return to in Chapters 4 and 5). One might contend that international political scholars arguing for the importance of recognition do not assume this kind of sovereignty in a subject at all. In fact, a point might be made saying that the very grounds for political claims to recognition are anchored in the fact that a subject is not (yet) recognized. If there were a recognized subject, there would be nothing to struggle for. As we saw throughout this chapter, recognition, in such arguments, is the force of change both for agents and for epistemic systems.Footnote ⁴⁷ My argument is, however, not about whether a new political order is realized as a result of subjects’ struggles for recognition. My argument is that, even absent its recognition, the subject is assumed to be there – the process of recognition assumes and asserts a subject that can be known and differentiated from that which it is not prior to the process of recognition. Such an approach begs the question: if claims or struggles for recognition are fuelled by the fact that the subject is as yet unrealized, on behalf of what or whom are these claims made? How did they become recognizable in the first place?

To return to the empirical example of Jews in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, if recognition realized and constituted a European Jewish political subject through the emancipation of Jewish minorities into citizens, how could a political subject be successfully recognized which did not yet exist in this manner?Footnote ⁴⁸ The obvious answer to that question seems to be the performative enactment of Jewish subjectivities by individuals and groups claiming rights in the name of a Jewish community – the Honnethian ‘potential’ subject, as it were. Similarly, British Indian Muslims were vibrant communities prior to the allocation of rights and forms of representation by the British colonial regime. Does the argument of the costs of recognition break down once the subjectivities are not assumed as reified identities but rather conceptualized as contingent and changing? In other words, what about non-essentialist recognition? In proceeding to the second part of my argument, which leads us to the building blocks for thinking differently about recognition in international scholarship, I turn to the Canadian political theorist James Tully. By identifying a shift in his work from what I see as an analysis of struggles for recognition to struggles over recognition I illuminate how I suggest the conversation on recognition in IR moves forward.

James Tully has increasingly featured in IR scholarship throughout the last decade, mainly in reference to his agonistic approach to social and political theory but also, prior to that, as a proponent for a post-imperial cultural diversity defined by mutual recognition.Footnote ⁴⁹ I will not be able to treat Tully’s work with the detail it deserves.Footnote ⁵⁰ What I will do, however, is use a shift in his scholarship to show how an approach to recognition that does not depend on reified identities – and instead emphasizes non-essential subjectivities – still remains subject to the costs of recognition. What Tully helps me to do, then, is move from a framework focusing on the struggles for recognition – where non-essentialist recognition still assumes a differentiable subject tied to the existing categories of legibility where costs are entailed – to a framework focusing on the struggles over recognition, that is, the struggles in defining the conditions of possibility for recognition and its epistemic frameworks of legibility. First, two words on Tully’s initial position.

Published in 1995 back-to-back with Charles Taylor’s work on the politics of recognition, James Tully’s book Strange Multiplicity takes a different approach. Here, the politics of recognition are described as an ongoing process that values not the end state of recognized subjects but the shared political activity of subjects that are both the authors of and constituted by the engagement.Footnote ⁵¹ However, when reframing the question of recognition as dealing with performatively enacted subjects, as Tully does in his examples from North American Indigenous peoples, he is still aiming at a more just form of successful recognition of subjectivities as they are.Footnote ⁵² While Tully remains sensitive to the risks of domination and effects of various power hierarchies on the course of negotiations, he also slips back into a cognitive understanding of recognition, that is, a position where the constitution of the subject is performative but where that performativity is still limited to the available categories of intelligibility.Footnote ⁵³ Non-essentialist recognition in Tully’s earlier account echoes the dependency on an intelligible subject – even if it is ‘multiple, overlapping and contested’Footnote ⁵⁴ – and the reproductive power entailed therein. If recognition is tied to the currently recognizable – reproducing the epistemic structures that enable it – what are the prospects for change?

In later work, Tully enacts a useful shift in perspective from struggles for recognition, as in the case of peoples or nations, to the struggle over recognition. This implies a new focus on challenging the norms underpinning recognition practices as well as the pathways to arriving at a place of legibility in order to become recognizable. His two-volume Public Philosophy in a New Key picks up where he left off in Strange Multiplicity but highlights the contingent nature of the norms underpinning the processes, practices, and claims for recognition within and between nations and states. This contingency and the struggle to define the norms, subjectivities, and epistemic frameworks is not, however, inherently a problem. Rather, the struggles over intersubjective norms of mutual recognition are necessary not only for the development of just social and political relations but also for the prevailing legitimacy of social and political order at large.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is, for Tully, therefore not enough for an existing legislation, set of minority rights, or international covenants to recognize minorities or nations. Instead, he points out, these social, political, and legal institutions need to contain the conditions of possibility for change in the norms underpinning that legislation, the minority rights, or covenants.Footnote ⁵⁶ The question then becomes: if we carry this idea of the centrality of the struggle over recognition with us, emphasizing the importance of the possibility for change both in the norms and subjectivities and in the epistemic framework that holds them, how is that different from the approach to recognition in IR outlined throughout the chapter? To address this query, I turn to Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth.

The Possibility of Epistemic Change: Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière

Throughout the chapter, I have argued that the costs of recognition can be found, among other things, in the ontological misrepresentation of the non-sovereign nature of human knowledge and subjectivity. I have also gestured towards a second argument to which I now turn in earnest: that while recognition depends on a recognizable subject, the framework of knowledge within which the subject has become recognizable has also been reproduced through the recognition of the recognizable subject. In other words, I am suggesting the opposite of what international scholars have suggested in terms of seeing recognition as a motor of change and emancipation. I argue, rather, that recognition has a reifying and potentially repressive element.Footnote ⁵⁷

In order to forward this argument about the ambivalence of recognition, I turn to a notable debate between Axel Honneth, whose reading of Hegel informs a large part, if not most, of the work on recognition in IR, and the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The book Recognition or Disagreement (2016) captured a conversation between Honneth and Rancière at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt a few years earlier. In Honneth’s description of the struggle for recognition, he presented the theory that previously excluded subjects challenge the prevailing social and political order, including the knowledge system that underpins it. Such challenges undermine and change the epistemic range of who can be included in a particular social and political order and broaden its range of intelligibility – that is, they extend the range of what or who is available for recognition.Footnote ⁵⁸ The inclusion of a new type of nation, for example, changes the meaning of nationhood itself.

Rancière’s critique, by contrast, holds that the inclusion of new subjects will not change the range of the intelligible in any way, since it is only possible to include into the new order those who are recognizable as subjects to begin with.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rancière argues that the established framework of knowledge – what he calls the ‘common sense’ – will not change through the inclusion of that or those who were previously excluded from it. A change in the framework of knowledge, then, does not come through the acknowledgement of the previously excluded but rather through the enactment of a different reality altogether.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this sense, epistemic change – what Rancière calls a change in the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – stands in stark contrast to theories regarding the transformative power of recognition, which take place within a certain normative and cognitive framework.

It is epistemic change that holds the possibility for transforming the workings of such normative and discursive frameworks,Footnote ⁶¹ as it goes ‘beyond given systems’ and proposes a ‘new system of norms’.Footnote ⁶² A change to the distribution of the sensible is not a broadening to include that or those who were previously excluded, nor is it the self-realization of a group becoming ‘aware’ of itself, finding its voice, or imposing its weight on society.Footnote ⁶³ It is not the acknowledgement of the grievances or suffering of those on the wrong side of a hierarchical order that will change the range of the recognizable; the wrong by which politics occurs is not ‘some flaw calling for reparation’.Footnote ⁶⁴ A change in the foundations of knowledge comes, rather, through the interruption of the common sense by those and that which were invisible to it. The range of what or who can count as a subject, according to Rancière, does not change through the inclusion of those who are considered rightly worthy of a place but through the enactment of a different reality altogether: acting as if one were a subject.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such an action is an intervention into the conditions of knowledge regarding what a subject is and who is eligible to become one. A redistribution of the sensible thus means a change in the framework of the intelligible – it makes ‘what was unseen visible’.Footnote ⁶⁶ In short, the struggle for recognition in Honneth’s terms aims to change the range of the recognizable by convincing or pressuring the arbiters of the boundaries of that knowledge to expand them. By contrast, Rancière theorizes that a change in recognizability is about claimed space regardless of the arbiters or boundaries – it is the change of terms altogether.Footnote ⁶⁷

As the political theorist Hanna Pitkin noted in her analysis of Niccolò Machiavelli, in order to communicate an alternative, one ‘wants not to convey new information to [one’s audience], but rather to change the conceptual framework through which they presently organize their information’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Referring this back to the discussion of recognition, the question is not ‘how does a subject become recognized?’ but ‘how does it become recognizable?’. In the cases of the Jewish or Muslim subjects previously referenced, how did those subjects become intelligible as distinct from their surroundings as something available for recognition? How was this subjectivity stabilized and made coherent? What were the consequences as to what or who could be included in the categories of ‘Muslim’ or ‘Jewish’ as these categories became linked to the minority, the nation, and the state?

In conversation with Rancière, we see that Honneth’s struggle for and achievement of recognition is trapped within its own referential bubble. Requiring the assumption of a subject or, in Hegelian terms, a consciousness for the relational process of recognition between a Self and an Other, Honneth is unable to account for forms of subjectivity other than those that are expected – that is, those that are intelligible as subjects from the start. Recognition might change the number of players in the recognition game, but it will not be able to change the game itself. Recognition will always reproduce the common sense, the established social and political order.

Turning back to the question of ‘religion’ and the recognition of ‘religious difference’, then, a process that follow’s Honneth’s logic will extend acknowledgement and empowerment to that or those who are already recognizable as religious, thereby confirming powerful actors’ claims to represent religion, religious groups, and religious truths. Such a process marginalizes those who are outside of the spectrum of the recognizably religious and writes out of the picture an entire range of possibilities, while those who remain unrecognized struggle to achieve a place on the public register of recognition. The requirement of an already recognizable subject strengthens the voices of conventional and established religion and further hardens the boundary between those who are included in that category and those who are not.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is, therefore, not merely that the recognitive structures of social and political orders assume and reproduce a knowable and differentiated subject; they are also risking reifying the structures and hierarchies of a given prevailing order.

If it is true that, as Axel Honneth put it, ‘the struggle for recognition represents a struggle for the social articulation of pre-existent knowledge’Footnote ⁷⁰ – that is, an articulation of that which is already known – the question emerges of how that knowledge came about. Returning to the example of the Jewish and Muslim subjects, how does one know what or who is Jewish or Muslim, and who is not? What are the processes that make the contours of a subject identifiable and how is it differentiated from other subjects? How does it change regarding that which is possible to recognize, and what are the social and historical forces affecting that change? What are the consequences? And who does it affect – who carries the costs? I suggest that by examining in detail the conditions of possibility for recognition, we gain a better grasp of the costs that come with it.

The British, Indian, Palestine, colonial, and postcolonial state-building projects were grounded in a shared assumption that a political and epistemic mastery of ‘religion’ was essential to the working of political and legal governance.Footnote ⁷¹ As I continue to study the road to recognizability when it comes to the concept of religion, I ask how the conceptual apparatus of religion developed to describe minorities, spaces of order, borders, and conflicts, as well as how that apparatus was used in negotiating claims for sovereignty, independence, and various visions of statehood. How did it structure the analysis of conflicts and expectations about how those conflicts would develop? How did it feature in struggles about authority, legitimacy, and political order? What were the consequences and costs of employing the vocabulary of religion and who carried them?

Before I go into detail of how ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ subjects shaped and were shaped by the entangled histories of South Asia and the Middle East (the subjects of the next two chapters, respectively), I take a few steps back to illustrate various ways of thinking about the costs of recognition for a Muslim subject in postcolonial Pakistan. Here, I suggest that we can learn more about the ambiguous logic of recognition by understanding the benefits from the privileges of being unintelligible as religion.

Privileges of the Unrecognizable: The Pakistani Ahmadiyya

A late nineteenth-century Punjab-based revivalist and reformist movement, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan always depicted themselves as Muslim. This stood in contrast to large segments of the Sunni population in British India and the later Pakistani state, which refused to acknowledge as Muslim those who recognized a prophet after Muhammad, in this case Ghulam Mirza Ahmad (d. 1908). The group’s marginalization throughout the period of British rule continued after partition and independence despite the fact that sections of the political elite such as the country’s first foreign minister, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, was Ahmadi. In fact, as Ali Usama Qasmi shows, marginalization of the Ahmadi intensified during the first decades of statehood up to the point where they became the object of legislation by the Pakistani Supreme Court.

In 1973, the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan declared Islam to be the state religion. A year later, the Pakistani Constitution was amended to define who was ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’, and again in 1985 to explicitly include mention of the ‘Quadiani Group or the Lahori Group (who call themselves “Ahmadis”)’ as non-Muslims.Footnote ⁷² Ahmadis were thereby prohibited from referring to themselves as ‘Muslim’ or to their faith as ‘Islam’. In short, the Ahmadis were not allowed to define themselves as Muslim because this would break the laws against blasphemy and also break international trademark law. In a wonderous case, the Supreme Court drew upon British and US trademark law to justify the punishment of any breach against it.Footnote ⁷³ In this sense, just as Coca-Cola possessed the trademark over its brand, the Pakistani state possessed the trademark of Islam within its borders. And the Ahmadis were in breach of it. According to the Supreme Court rulings, the group were to define themselves as non-Muslim or risk severe punishment, including the death penalty. Most of the group’s members rejected the ruling and refused to define themselves as non-Muslim on their identity card, which in Pakistan requires the indication of religious belonging. Refusing to accept the state’s definition of their religious identity, a large majority of the Pakistani Ahmadi has since not had access to this form of identification and has therefore lost access to the political and legal realm where it is required, such as voting, running for office, acquiring property, and so on.

The Pakistani state legislation had conditioned the political and legal agency of the Ahmadi on their acceptance of the state’s definition of them as non-Muslim.Footnote ⁷⁴ A majority refused, and they have remained not only socially marginalized but to a large extent politically unintelligible as they continue to lack the core resource of political agency as well as access to proof of identity and the rights that come with it in terms of voting and representation. Having been made unrecognizable in political terms through the rule of law, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan remains partly invisible to the state.Footnote ⁷⁵

These processes of minority discrimination are not unusual per se, but what remains interesting and what ties them back to our conversation regarding the costs of recognition is the response by certain Ahmadi groups. At the present, the community does not actively seek recognition from the state. As Qasmi argues, this stems, in part, from two sources. First, actively seeking recognition of their rights as a minority would entail accepting their status as non-Muslims as set by the state. Second, a significant source of anxiety and hostility towards Ahmadis from the Pakistani Sunni majority stems from their similarities to the larger Muslim community. Ahmadis share similar names, appearances, and practices, which prompts the majority to desire their legibility or recognition through other means.

‘Translucent citizenship’ is the term Faris A. Khan gives us for conceptualizing the state of citizens that are at once legally and culturally recognized and accepted but also only partially intelligible within social and political spheres. What in Khan’s case applies to the Pakistani gender-nonconforming population, I argue we can see in the case of nonconforming religion as well. The Ahmadi community aims to preserve space for self-government by remaining partly unrecognizable to the state.Footnote ⁷⁶ The costs of recognition and the conditions that need to be met in order to be granted political recognizability are simply too high. Moreover, remaining politically and legally unknown constitutes a different form of agency that allows for certain kinds of freedoms in day-to-day life for Muslims living without state recognition.

One might argue that this form of translucent citizenship is a particular survival mechanism for minority populations in authoritarian states, or at least in political orders where basic minority rights are missing. But I suggest that the framework of the costs of recognition and the privilege of unrecognizability can tell us something about liberal societies and the role of majority culture as well. One example is the way in which North American and European Protestant Christianity has increasingly come to be perceived as majority culture rather than as religion, and often moves seamlessly between the two.Footnote ⁷⁷ While Protestant Christianity has lost its privileged position as a majority religion within the said societies, its morphing into culture has also meant that it has been able to escape the regulations and limitations placed onto religious practices and symbols.Footnote ⁷⁸

I suggest considering the invisibilization of religion, among other things, as a sign of the costs of recognition. Remaining invisible and unrecognizable means remaining at an arm’s length from the grasp of state control. Becoming recognizable, for example by being named, such as the minority position of the British Indian Muslims and Palestine Jews in Chapters 4 and 5, also means becoming governable. Becoming recognizable as a religion, then, means being constrained to the place, position, and role of ‘religion’ in that particular society at that particular time. Remaining malleable and unrecognizable, either as an invisible minority or as a majority default position too ubiquitous to register, unlocks those restraints.

In the next two chapters, I trace the emergence of a ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ subject in Pakistan and Israel, or rather, in the orders that preceded them, British India and Mandate Palestine. I trace this emergence through the enumerative practices of the census, demographic politics, and policies of representation. I study in close detail the workings of the boundary commissions in drawing the new international borders between India and Pakistan as well as Palestine and Israel and show how these politics and policies, ideas, and institutions were not contained to a single national story. In fact, by tracing the circulation of colonial and postcolonial personal and institutions I show how these practices and ideas moved between India and Palestine, Pakistan and Israel. The line between religion and politics is, as Hussein Agrama points out, ‘historically connected with modern state sovereignty and its constitutive indeterminacies’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Studying the birth of states claimed and recognized, in part, along the lines of ‘religious difference’ provides us with important resources for understanding the conditions and the costs of that constitutive relationship between religion, state sovereignty, and the system in which they are embedded.