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Zognong, Dieudonne

Zognong, Dieudonne

Scholars-at-Risk Fellow

Religion and Human Rights in African Democratization Processes: The right to religion versus concrete human rights.

Research Question

Which political strategies motivated the prompt and generous liberalization of the theological sector by authoritarian regimes of sub-Saharan Africa, contrary to their autocratic habits; and what are the human rights consequences of those strategies?

Project Description

Failing to satisfy peoples’ basic rights, and apprehensive of insurrections in a population lying in a growing misery, many African regimes were keen to liberalize the theological sector in the 90s, and are now even stimulating populistic religiosities for their soporific effects. Then the current and unprecedented theological effervescence in Christian countries, under the thumb of inspired entrepreneurs who, claiming to be prophets, are developing demagogic exegeses for a lucrative exploitation of believers, while making sure to always defend the government, to guarantee its complicit silence in face of their own recurrent abuses of the people. My intent is to show how this politicization of Christianity concretely results in a system of human rights violations; social, economic, civil and political ones, amid the distortion of religious freedoms, and Christianity itself.

Selected Publications

1) L’Éthique des droits de l’homme chez Teilhard de Chardin : de l’évolutionnisme à l’humanisme juridique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012.

2) Philosophie et changement : méditations axiologiques, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013.

3) Le christianisme outragé : la misère religieuse en procès, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014.

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