Bringing Religion Back In? Debating Religion in International Politics

All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace

All Azimuth, journal of the İhsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. It provides a forum for academic studies on foreign policy analysis and peace research as well as theoretically-oriented policy pieces on international issues.

It particularly welcomes research on the nexus of peace, security and development. It aims to publish pieces bridging the theory-practice gap; dealing with under-represented conceptual approaches in the field; and making scholarly engagements for the dialogue between the 'centre' and the 'periphery'. We strongly encourage, therefore, publications with homegrown theoretical and philosophical approaches. In this sense, All Azimuth aims to transcend the conventional theoretical, methodological, geographical, academic and cultural boundaries. All Azimuth is published two times a year by the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research.This article offers a combined review of three books :

+ Andrew Phillips, War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders
+ Timothy Samuel Shah, Alfred Stepan, Monica Duffy Toft, eds., Rethinking Religion and World Affairs
+ Timothy Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth

Overall, the author attempts to explain why it is his contention that religion and the religious is relevant to the practice and study of international relations, and yet the extent of its relevancy is, and will be, determined by the extent of troubled interactions between the religious and the political, especially the liberal, in contemporary international relations.

This argument is predicated upon two premises. First, religion and politics are distinct realms of social existence and activity, and are based on different systems of meaning and value. Second, religion and politics are both authoritative institutions, in the sense that they are both sources of authority which makes both the religious and the political to become proprietors and enforcers of authority. Although ontologically separate sources of authority, religion and politics address the same audience as the subject of their authority in which the authority claims of religion and politics interact. In some cases, the interaction is symbiotic, but in all cases it is hierarchical, that is, one side’s authority always takes priority over the other’s.

Therefore, it is argued, a balanced relationship between the religious and the political in international relations is not likely, and in cases of active engagements with each other, the relationship is always asymmetrical.

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