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RelGlob

Across the globe, religious institutions and actors have become increasingly influential in the political sphere. They often draw on religious doctrines and moral teachings to legitimize and guide their political involvement. Conversely, political movements and leaders frequently invoke religious values, symbols, and traditions to craft narratives of civilization in response to fears of social and cultural fragmentation and a perceived feeling of decline. This intersection of faith and politics is evident in a wide range of global events, where religion has acted both as a catalyst for violence and as a source of profound compassion. The Religion and Global Politics unit explores, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the diverse ways in which religion and politics intersect—shaping power structures, fueling political conflicts, and influencing societal order.

Head of Unit

  • Rosario Forlenza

    Rosario Forlenza

    Rosario Forlenza specializes in the history of modern Europe and Italy in its global implications. He works at the intersection of history, politics and anthropology and focuses particularly on democracy and authoritarianism, political revolutions, nationalism and the politics of memory, politics and religion, symbolic politics, and the Cold War. He has written six books, co-edited two volumes, and published over forty peer-reviewed articles and chapters, most notably in The American Historical Review, Past & Present, and Journal of Contemporary History, He is currently working on a comparative history of revolutions from the perspective of political anthropology, on the totalitarian experiences in interwar Russia, Italy, and Germany, and on the global history of Christian Democracy.

Researcher

  • Kristina Stoeckl

    Kristina Stoeckl

    Kristina Stoeckl is full professor of sociology at the Department of Political Science at Luiss. She holds degrees from the European University Institute and the Central European University. Her areas of expertise are political sociology, social and political theory, sociology of religion, and the sociology of human rights and social movements. The focus of her research lies on politics and religion, state-religion relations in Russia, Orthodox Christianity, norm- and anti-gender mobilizations and transnational religious actors. Among her recent publications are “The Moralist International. Russia in the Global Culture Wars” (Fordham 2022) (co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner) and “The Global Fight against LGBTI-Rights” (New York University Press 2024) (co-authored with Phillip Ayoub).

  • Marco Martino

    Marco Martino

    Ph.D. candidate in History at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and teaching assistant at LUISS Guido Carli (Rome), my research interests focus on political history and history of ideas of modern Europe and Latin America, which I analyze through political anthropology and microhistory, exploring the implications of socio-political, cultural, and intellectual phenomena on individual and collective human experiences, especially during revolutions and political transitions of the contemporary period. I am currently working on the end of the Italian Communist Party, and the anthropological and existential implications that the period 1989-1991 had on its grassroots militants.

  • Bjorn Thomassen

    Bjørn Thomassen

    Bjørn Thomassen is Professor in Social Science at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Research areas include: history of social thought, social theory, Italian studies, global religion, urban studies, identity & memory politics, nationalism, liminality and social change, revolutions, social and cultural dimensions of globalization. He has published more than 50 articles across the social and political sciences. He is the author of ”Italy’s Christian Democracy. The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2024, with R. Forlenza), ”From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2019, with A. Szakolczai), ”Liminality and the Modern. Living Through the In-between” (Routledge, 2016), “Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City” (Indiana UP, 2014, with I. Clough-Marinaro). He is currently leader of a research project funded by Velux on “The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Global Modernities” (2021-2025).