The Moralist International analyzes the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state in the global culture wars over gender and reproductive rights and religious freedom. It shows how the Russian Orthodox Church in the past thirty years first acquired knowledge about the dynamics, issues, and strategies of Right- Wing Christian groups; how the Moscow Patriarchate has shaped its traditionalist agenda accordingly; and how the close alliance between church and state has turned Russia into a norm entrepreneur for international moral conservativism. Including detailed case studies of the World Congress of Families, anti-abortion activism, and the global homeschooling movement, the book identifies the key factors, causes, and actors of this process. Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner then develop the concept of conservative aggiornamento to describe Russian traditionalism as the result of conservative religious modernization and the globalization of Christian social conservatism.
The Moralist International continues a line of research on the globalization of the culture wars that challenges the widespread perception that it is only progressive actors who use the international human rights regime to achieve their goals by demonstrating that conservative actors do the same. The book offers a new, original perspective that firmly embeds the conservative turn of post-Soviet Russia in the transnational dynamics of the global culture wars.
The Moralist International is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

About the Author
Kristina Stoeckl (Author)
Kristina Stoeckl is Professor of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. The most recent of her books are The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014) and Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism (Brill, 2020).
Dmitry Uzlaner (Author)
Dmitry Uzlaner is research fellow at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Russia. The most recent of his books are The Postsecular Turn: How to Think about Religion in the Twenty-First Century (in Russian, Izdatel'stvo instituta gaiidara, 2020), The End of Religion? A History of the Theory of Secularization (in Russian, Higher School of Economics Press, 2019), and Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Brill, 2019, co-edited with Mikhail Suslov).



Book Information
ISBN 9781531502157
Author Kristina Stoeckl
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press