Miscounting and Disidentifying Sectarianism

This chapter sets out the argument and suggests that sectarianism is based on a miscount—a way of identifying who ‘counts’ and who doesn’t. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I suggest that this way of thinking about and doing politics is fundamentally about drawing boundaries around equality. Rancière describes this process as the distribution of sensibility—the demarcation of who is visible and what can be said and the establishment of what is deemed appropriate to be heard and dealt with. I suggest that the delineation of the religious from the national is untenable from that perspective and that it works to obfuscate and occlude the ways in which the political is bordered by the prioritization of particular characteristics.