Religion’s Contribution to International Relations Theory
With the political salience of religion on the rise, international relations scholars must consider how religious belief systems, movements, and authority structures affect the international system and our approaches to understanding it. This theoretical task is long overdue, notwithstanding a handful of recent pioneering works, most of them by contributors to this volume. Here and elsewhere, they have shown that religion has played a significant role in shaping the modern state system from its inception to the contemporary period.
Taking account of the preceding chapters’ contributions, this chapter lays out some considerations for continuing that research. We examine the challenges that religion poses to conventional ways of thinking about international politics as well as potential contributions that a focus on religion might make to invigorating theoretical debate in that field. In particular, we ask what explains religion’s rising salience in contemporary international politics, whether religion is a distinctive realm that requires dramatically new approaches and methods, whether religion challenges the centrality of the state, and how the role of religion can be fit into existing theories.
WHY THE RESURGENCE OF RELIGION?
Assuming, as most of our contributors do, that religion has reemerged as a force in global politics in the past several decades, why has it done so? Drawing on our contributors’ insights, we conjecture that the rising prominence of religion in world politics reflects an increasing demand for mass political participation in response to the perceived failure of secular institutions to satisfy mass expectations.
First, waves of democratization around the globe have given a greater voice to all kinds of actors, including religious ones. More citizens in more states than ever before are articulating the political demands that are anchored in their belief systems, and can organize, vote, and engage in broader advocacy in pursuit of those goals.1
Second, secularization has ironically proved to be religion’s protector in many settings. Over the past two centuries, secular toleration and democratization have provided freedom of religion for many states’ citizens.2 This has led to increasing political expression of existing religious diversity. It has also led to increasing religious diversity as individuals exercise their right to adopt, convert to, or renounce religious beliefs and identities, and as religious groups exercise their freedom to form new religious communities based on points of doctrine and practice.
Third, migration has increased religious diversity in many states. This new reality has challenged the post-Westphalian status quo of national religions and corresponding secularist arrangements, especially in Western Europe. Western patterns of interaction between states and specific majority religious heritages have been “normalized” by Western powers and scholars over two centuries.3 The entry of other religious groups and other forms of religiosity into those societies has challenged status quo arrangements by demanding renegotiation of religion-society-state relations. This has fueled social and political conflicts over a range of religious, ethnic, cultural, and economic diversity issues.
Fourth, the fall or perceived failure of many secular regimes and nationalist movements left many societies or groups with legitimacy vacuums for political authority. Religiously based political movements and ethnoreligious causes resonated with citizens in this political environment.4 Some governments, realizing that secular ideologies were wearing thin as bases of legitimacy, tried to strengthen their hold on power by integrating religious symbolism and authority into national ritual and rhetoric.5
Finally, dissatisfaction with secularist establishments long incumbent in national governments and international institutions has fueled political opposition by religious actors and movements. This opposition takes many forms. Religious opposition parties, advocacy groups, or armed insurgent groups struggle to change national political structures. Religious humanitarian, advocacy, and issue-based movements make political appeals to international courts and organizations. Transnational religious networks coordinate political appeals across systems. Antisystemic religious insurgent networks attack the dominant actors and state-centric assumptions of the entire interstate system.
This analysis of the origins of religious resurgence has important implications for international politics. These populist religious actors display widely divergent political goals and strategies in their struggles against secular orders that they think have failed them. Diverse doctrines on the moral legitimacy—or even necessity—of extreme tactics shape contrasting political programs. Conflicts on the domestic, regional, and global levels affect one another through the transfer of ideas, fighters, and funding, posing a challenge to analyses that compartmentalize international and comparative domestic politics.6 That said, transnationalism is hardly a new topic in international relations theory, so we still need to ask what difference religion, including religious transnationalism, makes for international relations scholars’ choice of conceptual tools.
IS RELIGION DISTINCT FROM OTHER
BELIEF SYSTEMS, INCLUDING SECULARISM?
A key question of this book has been whether religion is distinct enough from other legitimizing belief systems to warrant its own analytical space in international relations frameworks, and whether its resurgence signals the need for a reconsideration of ideology and transnational social movements more generally. The book’s contributors are not agreed on this point.
Daniel Nexon does not believe that studying religious beliefs and networks requires a complete retooling of international relations theory. He argues instead that “in many respects, religion provides a new vehicle to cover rather familiar terrain in disciplinary debates about the significance of, for instance, ideational forces and non-state actors.”.7 Il Hyun Cho and Peter Katzenstein argue that religion plays a particularly important role as a legitimizer of political goals in East Asian societies and in the region more broadly. They call for theoretical and methodological imports from the field of comparative politics to help understand how this works. Nonetheless, legitimation is familiar terrain for at least some existing approaches to international relations theory.
Timothy Shah and Daniel Philpott stake out a more ambitious view, arguing that religion is unique in its potential to unify and mobilize for political action. Since globalization has enabled growing numbers of religious communities to establish effective transnational networks and organizations, religious actors “can increasingly muster resources, mobilize constituencies, and apply pressure on governments and international organizations in ways that other non-state actors—and even some states—can only dream of.”.8 International relations theorists, they write, must recognize (1) the distinctive ends of religious actors and how those ends translate into politics, and (2) that religious movements and actors cannot be “easily subsumed into the state.” They cannot be so subsumed, Shah and Philpott argue, because the world’s major religions are older and more broadly legitimate than modern states, and because both their populations of adherents and their authority structures flow over borders. The historical permanence, legitimizing capacity, and transnational nature of religion, in their view, give it the potential to make significant impacts on world politics.
Several contributors compare the impact of religious and secular belief systems. For Michael Barnett, it is not sufficient to tack on religion as a “modifier” expressing one source of identity, norms, and values to be analyzed in abstract terms, as many constructivist international relations theorists do. Instead, he writes, scholars must recognize and explore the constitutive role of both religious and secular belief systems, often in combination, in social and political processes. Extending this view, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that it is a mistake to treat religion and secularism as antithetical from an analytical point of view. She notes that secularisms, like religions, are a source of norms and behavior on individual, societal, and international levels.
In practice, the similarities between religious and secular organizations—whether they are humanitarian, ethnonationalist, diasporic, issue-oriented, or insurgent—may be more important for some analytical purposes than their differences. Indeed, organizations such as Christian Democratic parties have some characteristics that are secular and some that are religious, and this mix may change over time. Organizations of both types engage in political strategies ranging from party mobilization to extreme violence. Both may have cosmopolitan leaderships. Both are based on deeply held norms and even transcendent ideologies including, as Barnett points out, universalist secularized doctrines of liberal international order. Both can become the basis of identity for their adherents, as Michael Ignatieff has written about secular humanists in the field of human rights.9 Activists in both religious and secular organizations display the entire range of commitment levels, including in some cases a willingness to die for their cause. Both can mobilize supporters transnationally. Though Shah and Philpott may be right that religions hold the largest and longest-standing cross-border constituencies of adherents, organizations based on secular appeals can boast impressive transnational mobilizations as well.
Still, some significant differences remain. It may be that religious organizations can appeal for legitimacy and political mobilization on a deeper and more persistent existential basis than most secular organizations can, since people who believe their goals are divinely inspired may be impervious to earthly discouragements. Further, as Monica Duffy Toft highlights, religious and secular movements often differ in the time horizons of actors’ expected payoffs for themselves (e.g., salvation versus contribution to a desired social order) and their societies (e.g., promotion of an eternal order versus promotion of some specific political structure or group). But actors’ ends rarely differ so greatly as such extremes suggest. In most cases, political and ultimate goals merge, in both individual reasoning and movement ideologies. Secular actors may not believe they will benefit after death from sacrifice for a cause. But they can, as Barnett notes, see their actions as promoting an order that advances the progress of humanity. Finally, religious and secular actors may differ in perceived sources of norms: while religious adherents may claim divine inspiration, secular groups can point to established group identity and interests, or more broadly to a norm respecting the dignity of human life. While secular actors do not claim divine inspiration, norms held by both types of actors will be shaped by a mix of practical experience, parochial interests, social functions, and rational thought, which may reduce the differences between religious and nonreligious normative orders.
The geographical reach, normative sources, and perceived ultimate ends of religion can make it a distinctive mobilizer. Yet for most purposes we suspect that common frameworks for analyzing religious and secular movements will offer greater theory-building leverage than separate frameworks tailored to the supposedly distinctive nature of religious movements.
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS:
CHALLENGE TO STATES OR CHANNELED
THROUGH STATES?
Traditional approaches to studying international relations remain centered on states, notwithstanding some attention to transnational groups and processes. The rising role of religion in world politics might be seen as challenging state-centered conceptual frameworks if religious movements were to take a heavily transnational form and play a major role in shaping the kinds of outcomes that concern international relations scholarship, notably global patterns of cooperation and conflict. We argue that state-centered paradigms remain highly relevant to studying many of the impacts of politicized religion, though our conceptual frameworks also need to be flexible in encompassing some processes that are more strictly transnational.
Only three of this book’s chapters take clear positions on this question. Although Nexon wants greater consideration of structures constitutive of states and their policies, he concurs with Jack Snyder’s introduction that there is some support for the assumption that transnational and substate politics will largely continue to be funneled through states to world politics. Shah and Philpott, however, argue that religious movements and actors wield greater potential for mobilization than other transnational and non-state actors, so “new assumptions are needed” for the study of religion and world politics.10
How, then, do religious beliefs and structures affect the international system? Following the recommendation of several contributors to examine religion’s role in constituting actors and interests at all levels of world politics, we propose five key channels of influence. First, the beliefs of religious individuals affect their choices as constituents and leaders of local and state governments; as donors or activists for local, national, or transnational advocacy organizations; and as staff of intergovernmental institutions and programs. Since the majority of individuals act politically through institutions and groups that target local and national political arenas, religious influence on the system through individual actors is primarily channeled through states. However, availability of rapid communications brings increasing numbers of individuals into direct contact with transnational organizations attempting to influence international processes directly, so individual transnational engagement—some of it shaped by participants’ religious beliefs—is on the rise.
Second, religious influence affects international politics indirectly through religiously based organizations that target political appeals to local and national decision makers. The use of this approach seems to be increasing. Muslim parties, for example, have found increasing success since the 1990s in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey.11 While these groups often focus their political action on intrastate processes, they may also affect international processes by influencing the individual states in which they operate. As Shah and Philpott highlight, this can include appeals over interstate affairs, as when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemns the Iraq War, India’s BJP pushes for a stronger Hindu homeland, and the Russian Orthodox Church urges state intolerance of foreign Protestant missionaries. Armed insurgencies involving religion, a focus of Toft’s chapter, also influence world affairs by challenging governments and the very legitimacy of states, and include majority-religion rebel groups like the GIA in Algeria, resistance movements with armed wings like Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, and parties to ethnoreligious conflict such as the IRA in Northern Ireland. All these organizations may also exchange ideas and resources with similar groups in other states. Cho and Katzenstein point out, in addition, that government responses to religious groups within a state may affect that state’s international reputation.
Third, explicitly religious transnational networks and organizations influence international processes both directly and indirectly through multiple states. These include aggregate bodies that promote religious unity and coordinate campaigns such as the network of Orthodox Churches, political and social movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, humanitarian organizations like World Vision, and militant networks like Al Qaeda.12 They engage in cross-border recruitment and fund-raising, influence citizen appeals to their states, and appeal directly to multiple governments and intergovernmental organizations themselves. Appeals to states are often concerted through individual members, national subsidiary organizations, and international leadership groups that raise issues of global concern on which policy is to be shaped within states, or on issues to be decided by member states in IGO structures and by IGO agencies and international courts. These networks or organizations vary widely in scope and strength, some holding continual political-religious legitimacy for citizens in multiple countries, while others are formed ad hoc for the purpose of making appeals on a particular issue. Their influence thus flows partially through states, though often through concerted campaigns, and they also attempt to influence international processes directly.
Further, supranational religious organizations (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church, the World Council of Churches, and the World Hindu Council) exercise influence in the international system with almost state-like diplomacy to affect state policy and with appeals through representatives directly to international institutions. While such organizations exercise influence through states by way of individual adherents and through constituent organizations, they also seek direct influence on international processes and institutions.
Finally, religious influence flows into the international system through religiously based intergovernmental organizations. There are few of these (the most obvious may be the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC), but they make a significant impact by (1) shaping some interactions between constituent states, (2) providing a platform through which leading national and transnational actors can influence member states and a world audience on issues of religious concern, and (3) forming (or at least giving the appearance of) a concerted front of states around issues of concern in the face of the broader international system and its leading states. The OIC, for example, was the site of appeals by religiously driven individual, non-state, and state-level actors for a joint statement of condemnation of a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of the now-famous “Muhammad cartoons,” driving the issue onto the world stage.13
While the first two dynamics described above flow overwhelmingly through state-based political hierarchies, the final three have direct transnational influence on interstate relations and international institutions. The question then remains to be researched: is the religious influence flowing into the system through these channels significant enough to warrant a rethinking of conventional approaches to international politics, at least in some issue areas?
DOES RELIGION POSE A CHALLENGE TO
TRADITIONAL WAYS OF CONCEPTUALIZING
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?
Our contributors see a number of tensions between religious subject matter and the philosophical presumptions of traditional approaches to international relations. Though these tensions do not correspond exactly to the three canonical paradigms, religion does give rise to distinctive problems for each paradigm.
One tension with realism lies in religion’s transnational character. Although some religions are congruent with the borders of a nation-state, most are not. Another is the tension between the logic of the sacred and the logic of power politics. Nexon shows, however, that these two logics often interpenetrate at the nexus of the state, which is a central location for organizing collective action through which the activities of substate and transnational actors translate into outcomes in world politics. Exactly how this works, and how it should work, has long been a subject of philosophical and empirical analysis. At the philosophical level, there is a long Christian realist tradition running from Augustine through Luther to Reinhold Niebuhr recognizing dual logics of the divine realm and the realm of temporal power: the city of God and the city of man, the two kingdoms, moral man and immoral society. At the political level, the decidedly realist formula of the pre-Westphalian Peace of Augsburg, cuius regio, eius religio, provided a formula for sorting states neatly among transnational religions. And yet none of these formulas succeeded in banishing religion to an apolitical realm, insulating realpolitik from the impact of transnational religion, or subordinating either type of authority to the other. As Nexon argues, we need theory that can comprehend these realms’ interpenetration and interaction.
A tension with liberalism lies in religion’s sacred and transcendental qualities, which are at odds with liberalism’s interest-based rationalism. But this tension is also found within liberalism, between those who emphasize the normative underpinnings of the liberal order and those who stress the mechanical workings of institutions that check and channel self-interest. Explanations for the democratic peace that stress common norms and identities arguably have more in common with religious modes of understanding than they do with rationalist self-interest explanations based on institutionalized accountability to the average voter. Indeed, Hurd and other contributors discuss the ways in which Kantian liberalism provides a link between the West’s Christian traditions and its more secular present.
Canonical statements of the liberal international relations paradigm have not emphasized these connections to religion in part because the most prominent of these liberal manifestos are implicitly grounded in a one-track theory of modernization, in which the rise of the rationalized bureaucratic state, capitalist markets, and liberal democracy go hand in hand with the triumph of secularism. If liberal international relations scholars were more explicit about the grounding of their assumptions in modernization theory, they would have to acknowledge the reality of multiple paths of historical development leading to multiple modernities in which religion may play different roles. Sudipta Kaviraj points out, for example, that the elements of modernity were introduced in a different sequence in many late-developing societies than they were in Great Britain, with mass democratic politics institutionalized in India before the urbanization and secularization of society.14 If so, we need not just a single, invariant account of liberalism’s role in world politics, but a more variegated, contextualized theory that considers paths other than Western-secularist forms but nonetheless stays true to liberalism’s basic assumptions.
A tension with constructivism, Barnett notes, lies in the implicit secularist bias in the way that the paradigm’s central concepts of identity, values, norms, and beliefs are understood. Religious lifeworlds comprise all of these elements, but for at least some believers, they do so as an all-encompassing totality infused with the presumptions of sacredness and transcendence. In contrast, constructivist understandings of these terms are typically less totalizing and not turbo-charged with the divine. While constructivists may acknowledge that identities, norms, and values may have religious sources, they tend to treat those grounded in religion as functionally the same as those of other types. Recognizing the differences between religious and nonreligious social constructions of reality would arguably enrich constructivism’s contribution to international relations studies rather than undermine it.
In short, religion presents analytical challenges to all three of the traditional international relations paradigms, but incorporating religion would in each case enhance the subtlety, accuracy, and power of these approaches rather than undermine them. Some of our contributors, furthermore, urge that international relations theorists should seize upon the study of religion as an opportunity to loosen the grip of the traditional paradigms, use them more eclectically, and import ideas and methodological habits from the field of comparative politics. One crucial area in which comparative politics can play such a role is in the study of religious resurgence as a phenomenon of contemporary political development that features rising demands for mass political participation. Since these demands have major consequences for international relations, it is important to study the societal and transnational forces impelling them. We hope that the varied models presented in this collection will stimulate thinking about the way forward in theorizing the role of religion in international politics.
NOTES
1. Monica Duffy Toft, chapter 5 of this book.
2. As in the third and fourth concepts of secularism outlined by Timothy Samuel Shah and Daniel Philpott, chapter 2 of this book.
3. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, chapter 3 of this book.
4. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
5. Il Hyun Cho and Peter J. Katzenstein, chapter 7 of this book, describe such a development in China in recent years.
6. Mark Juergensmeyer’s The Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) expands on his earlier work by suggesting that conflicts between religious activism and secular nationalisms have escalated into a global confrontation, but this may blur the different grievances and goals of a diverse set of militant actors.
7. Daniel Nexon, chapter 6 of this book.
8. Shah and Philpott, chapter 2 of this book.
9. Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry,” Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–98.
10. Shah and Philpott, chapter 2 of this book.
11. Vali Nasr, “The Rise of ’Muslim Democracy,’” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 2 (2005): 13–27.
12. Shah and Philpott, chapter 2, and Barnett, chapter 4 of this book.
13. Hassan M. Fattah, “At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystalized,” New York Times, February 9, 2006; Organisation of the Islamic Conference, “Final Communiqué of the Third Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference” (Mecca, December 7–8, 2005).
14. Sudipta Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 46, no. 3 (2005): 497–526.