This collection constitutes a first comprehensive effort to provide academics, journalists, policy makers and international activists with scholarly resources to understand the nexus of religion and international affairs. The strengths of this volume are many. The pieces included offer brief and compelling summaries, not unlike policy memoranda, that pack a clear empirical, theoretical, or normative punch. They cover an ambitious range of topics, from humanitarian intervention and terrorism to democratization, transitional justice, and the media. Each chapter is followed by an annotated bibliography and the volume as a whole is capped with a detailed listing of websites that any scholar or practitioner of religion and international affairs would find of use.
Although only a handful of the contributions are original to this volume, many others are reprinted, revised, or abridged versions of important “classics” at the intersection of religion and International Relations. These include Monica Duffy Toft's work on religion, rationality, and violence; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's exploration of the social construction of secularism; Alfred Stepan's call for mutual toleration between democratic political authorities and religious actors; and Walter Russell Mead's observations about the influence of American Evangelicals on U.S. foreign policy.
These familiar writings sit side by side with innovative contributions that offer contemporary and policy-relevant insights. Robert Hefner problematizes the link between Islam and democracy by investigating why so many Arab states have failed to democratize and by exploring the distinct legal and organizational legacies of Muslim-majority countries that have democratized. Katherine Marshall investigates the tensions between religion and women's rights. An outstanding chapter by Thomas Banchoff examines the evolution and current state of interreligious dialogue. John Witte and M. Christian Green catalogue the primary international covenants regarding proselytism, conversion and blasphemy, proposing a new (if fanciful) approach toward religious rights. Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Nichole J. Allem provide a balanced yet provocative account of Islam in the global media and the ways in which Arab and Muslim networks, news stations, and blogs challenge Western perspectives.
The book's approach is novel in other ways. For one, the editors have foregone the customary hand-wringing over how to define religion, whether one can define the concept at all and, indeed, whether one is permitted to utter the word without conjuring up the evils of reification, colonialism or ahistoricism. Dodging this tiresome, if fashionable, conundrum, the editors adopt a pragmatic approach, clearly stated in the chapters by Timothy Samuel Shah and Jose Cassanova, encouraging each author to approach the issue as they see fit. This pluralism allows the contributors to focus their attention outwards, on pressing global issues and concerns, rather than on parochial scholarly debates. Yet it also means that the emphasis on practice in the political realm is not mirrored by a similar emphasis on practice in the religious realm. Most of the authors focus on religious ideas, identities and institutions at the expense of investigating religious authority, symbols, rituals or discourses. Two exceptions are noteworthy: Michael Barnett provides an illuminating account of the convoluted relationship between religion and humanitarianism that highlights the religious experiences of human rights practitioners. A truly original and delightful addition to this volume is Diane Winston's study of Buddhist symbols and rituals that have affected the reporting of the Saffron Revolution in the new media.
The privileging of religious faith and identity over other forms of the religious life was typical of scholarship in the immediate aftermath of September 2001, when authors sought to account for radical religious ideas and affiliations as motivators for violence. This predisposition, and a preoccupation with secularization theory, put to rest in the late 1990s, gives several of the chapters a somewhat outdated feel. It is odd to read, in J. Bryan Hehir's chapter, of a scholarly disregard for religion and international affairs. Academics have been Bringing Religion into International Relations, noting the Global Resurgence of Religion and declaring its Return from the Exile (all titles in the decade-old Palgrave book series on Culture and Religion in International Relations) for a while now. Several chapters cite as inspiration a 2002 statement by Robert Keohane, about “mainstream theories of world politics [that] ignore the impact of religion.” Yet more books and articles have been published on religion and international religious since 2002 than were ever published prior to his declaration. The primary theoretical foils of this volume continue to be Huntington's 1993 essay, Casanova's 1994 volume and Stepan's 2000 chapter. Casanova makes some effort to reappraise his ideas but does not quite follow through on his promise to offer a less Eurocentric analysis of differentiation.
The collection's empirical and normative value makes up for these theoretical shortcomings. One of its primary innovations is to shift attention away from the discipline's preoccupation with Islam and towards other religions, including religion in America and its impact on foreign policy. Most of the chapters do focus on Islam and, indeed, take such an exclusive focus for granted, as exemplified by Toft's chapter on terrorism and civil war or Frederick D. Barton, Shannon Hayden and Karin von Hippel's chapter on the United States government and its engagement with religion. But some of the most interesting chapters in this book look beyond Islam. Banchoff emphasizes Catholic interlocutors in interreligious dialogue. Daniel Philpott's excellent analysis of religious actors in post-conflict reconciliation exposes the motivations of Muslim, Jewish and Christian agents alike. Winston's chapter on Burma is paralleled by an intriguing study of secularism in India: Rajeev Bhargava proposes that we learn from the Indian example how a state can assume a principled distance from religion, supporting all religions while maintaining the right to prohibit specific practices.
Moreover, Rethinking Religion and World Affairs deserves praise for its unique emphasis on United States religion and United States policy. In addition to the pieces by Mead, Marshall and Barton mentioned above, it includes a frank and critical reassessment of the United States international religious freedom policy by Thomas Farr, the first director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom. Overall, the book is refreshing in its seamless integration of contributions from leading political scientists, like Philpott or Barnett, legal scholars like Witte and Green, practitioners like Barton, Farr, or Hayden, and scholars/practitioners like Banchoff, Hehir, or Shah. Their contributions offer fascinating insights for students of religion and politics, leaders involved in policy making, implementation and assessment, and practitioners forging the road ahead.
