Antagonisms, Alliances and Friendships: Religious and Sexual Politics in the Polish Public Sphere

This thesis is about conflict in the Polish public sphere. It investigates a recent wave of tensions around religious and sexual politics through two case studies: the first looking at mosque constructions and the second at abortion politics in Warsaw. The study is informed by three interconnected theoretical strands: Conflict and the Public Sphere, Secularism and Post-secularism, and Postcolonial theory in a Central and Eastern European context. Mixed qualitative methods were employed during a year-long fieldwork in Warsaw between 2011-2012. These comprised of interviews, focus groups and participant observations with 72 participants from secular, Muslim, feminist and Catholic groups. The thesis puts forward questions about how religious and sexual politics are mobilised in public spaces, to what extent the groups involved rely on secular narratives, how imagined categories of the West and Central and Eastern Europe are constituted, and finally, what possibilities there are to surmount antagonisms and foster alliances between the conflicting groups. With that, the study aims to contribute to geographies of religion and post-colonial geographies, furthering knowledge of the often neglected region of Central and Eastern Europe. The findings of this thesis evidence that there has been a shift in the way tensions around religious and sexual politics are mobilised in public spaces, with a heavy reliance on, on the one hand Western liberal secularism and on the other hand Catholic nationalism. The study engages critically with these categories to channel a broader discussion of the transformative possibilities of thinking differently about antagonisms among these groups in Poland.