A Celebration of the Handbook on Religious Toleration in Comparative Perspective

One-day symposium

Date: October 15, 2026, Panels. (Location: South Asia Institute, Columbia University)

Organized by: Karen Barkey, Jonathan Laurence, Karuna Mantena, and Vatsal Naresh

Special thanks to Eva Seto for coordination. 

A one-day event celebrating the publication of the Handbook on Religious Toleration in Comparative Perspective (Springer, 2026), edited by Karen Barkey and Jonathan Laurence, and to a conversation about what its history has to teach a present moment that badly needs it.

This Handbook took shape over more than a decade, beginning with a working group convened by Alfred Stepan at Columbia and carried forward through a network stretching from Berkeley to Boston College to Reset Dialogues in Italy. It gathers historical and contemporary cases of religious coexistence from Ottoman kanunnames to Tibetan Buddhist toleration of Capuchin missionaries, from the Pact of Umar to the Peace of Westphalia, from Ashoka’s edicts to the European Court of Human Rights. This is a genuinely global record of how societies have managed diversity without recourse to violence.

• Morning Panel (10am-11.15 am): The Long History of Living Together. A panel of contributors discusses specific historical cases (Ottoman, Mughal, early modern European, West African, East Asian) and what they reveal about the conditions under which toleration has been built, sustained, and lost. (Karen Barkey, Eugenio Menegon,Sourav Ghosh) Jonathan Laurence, moderator.

• Midday Panel (11.30am-12.45pm): Concepts That Travel. A session on the book’s key distinction between toleration (top-down, institutional) and tolerance (horizontal, communal). We want to ask whether these categories still do useful work in diagnosing today’s crises of majoritarianism, blasphemy politics, and religious nationalism. (VatsalNaresh, Karuna Mantena, Paolo Barrozo) Karen Barkey, moderator.

• Afternoon Panel (2pm-3.15pm): Toleration Today. A discussion bringing historians into conversation with scholars and practitioners working on contemporary religious freedom, democratic backsliding, and authoritarianism, asking directly: what does this history obligate us to do now? (William Bulman, Radha Sarkar, Elizabeth Reiner Platt) NabanjanMaitra, moderator.

• Closing Panel (3.30pm–4.45pm). A reflection that ties the volume’s dedication to our children “who will have to live in a darker world” to the responsibilities of scholarship in a moment of democratic retreat. (Sudipta Kaviraj, Da’Von Boyd,) Vatsal Naresh, moderator.

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