Law, Religion, and Decolonization

This series aims to explore the roles of colonialism and decolonization in the interaction of law and religion.

Religion and religious institutions can be employed by the state to support its imperial expansion and facilitate the loyalty and cultural homogenization of colonized territories and populations. Historically, these processes are often combined with proselytizing the imperial religion. They can, however, also preserve some religious freedom or autonomy for the domestic population, as Stanislav Panin discusses regarding Russia’s colonization of Siberia and the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in that colonization.

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Spiritual Decolonization, National Security, and Religious Freedom: Squaring a Triangle in the Case of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Andriy Fert is a UNET non-resident fellow at Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien in Berlin.

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

In June 2023, the fashionable Ukrainian multimedia cultural project Ukraїner published an article on decolonization. Decolonization, as the author describes it, is “a process of cleansing the public space from the markers of (Russian) occupation,” including monuments, mosaics, names of streets, and public premises associated with the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

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No End to the Dead End? The Difficult Relationship Between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate

Regina Elsner is a researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin.

A year ago, a few days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, I wrote a post here about the final split between Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy. This split was inevitable due to the “scandalous ignorance of the situation of the people in Ukraine, whom [Patriarch Kirill] claims to defend, a deliberate reversal of perpetrator and victim, and [the] open support of the ideology of the murderous regime” by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).

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