Abstract Multiple intellectual paradigms shaped Anglo-American foreign policy debates about the Middle East and the threats posed by Islamists in the past decades. One was a liberal paradigm, represented by Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis. A second one was an identity politics paradigm, captured by Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. These paradigms fused in the context of the West’s liberal wars, seen as the solution to the challenges posed by sectarian conflicts and religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end and the attacks of 9/11. Two further realist and critical paradigms offered alternative assessments of Islamism and terrorism, focused more substantively on regional security and political dynamics than on ideology and identity. Chatham House’s research and events gravitated towards these latter perspectives, ultimately positioning the institute at odds with the British government’s most consequential decision in the ‘war on terror’—the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Discourses and practices reproducing a world where a plurality of distinct civilizations clash or dialogue, rise or fall, color multiple facets of global politics today. How should we interpret this unexpected surge in civilizational politics, especially notable in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, China, and Russia? This paper argues that the growing turn to civilizations or, better, civilizationism should be understood as a counter-hegemonic ideological reaction to the globalization of the liberal international order. It theorizes the deepening and widening of the liberal international order in the aftermath of the Cold War as enabled by powerful constitutive ideological forces, which congeal into a distinctively modern, informal, universal standard of civilization. This liberal civilizational standard can be experienced by a particular category of non (fully) liberal actors within and beyond the West as ideologically entrapping them-through processes of socialization or stigmatization-in a state of symbolic disempowerment. The paper shows how civilizationism provides an ideological path for resisting and contesting the liberal standard of civilization by articulating a distinct and valued (essentialized) sense of collective belonging, and an alternative (generally illiberal) normative system and (broadly multipolar) vision of international order. Along with theorizing and exploring in original ways the drivers of civilizational politics in the current historical juncture, the paper makes two further contributions. It highlights and unpacks the key role of ideological dynamics in the making and contestation of international orders in general and the liberal one in particular. It suggests and shows why civilizations are best approached as ideological constructs rather than cultures, identities, or discourses.

Abstract This chapter evaluates the Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power project, providing an overview of its contributions and shortcomings, while also identifying possible avenues for future research. The chapter begins by outlining the current volume and highlighting three of its main contributions to the field of international relations: its positioning of power analysis at the center of research on religion in world politics, its broadening of the typical approach to states–religion interactions in foreign policy, and its challenging of secularist assumptions about global politics. However, this volume is not without its limitations, which include a reductive approach to religion and an understanding of soft power that is at once conceptually broad and empirically narrow. Avenues for future research include considering religious power beyond the notion of soft power, identifying more systematically how different religions shape soft-power relations, and improving the measurement of religious soft power and influence.

Abstract This chapter presents evidence of religious soft power’s impact in US foreign policy in two time periods. The first is the early Cold War, when the United States was trying to establish its international leadership and form a global coalition against the Soviet Union. The second is the post–Cold War era, when the United States has struggled against violent Islamist nonstate actors—like al-Qaeda and Daesh/ISIS—while also trying to define the nature of the international order. There are major differences between these periods, such as the specificity of US initiatives under different presidential administrations, but both indicate the presence and impact of religious soft power in American foreign policy.

Abstract Religious and civilizational politics are widely recognized as powerful forces challenging key norms of the liberal international order in the twenty-first century. The chapter begins by emphasizing that religions and civilizations are not inherently illiberal phenomena incompatible with liberal principles and values. Upon clearing this conceptual ground, it turns to highlighting how resurging religious and civilizational politics are nonetheless involved in significant forms and processes of liberal contestation. On the one hand, much of the contemporary illiberal (global) politics of religion is implicated in a rejection of evolving transnational norms on gender, sexuality, and family associated with a cultural liberal script; on the other hand, the illiberal (global) politics of civilizationism mostly contests certain universalist, cosmopolitan, and globalist principles associated with liberal internationalism. While noting that the illiberal politics of religion and civilization can overlap and reinforce each other, both express an ambivalent and contextually specific attitude toward political liberalism.

This chapter starts by questioning the common perspective across multiple traditions that equate and reduce religion to ideology. It draws on scholarship in religious studies to suggest that religion should be approached as its own category of analysis and practice distinct from that of ideology. While claiming that we should not treat religion as ideology, the chapter nonetheless argues that religion can become ideological in the context of and in reaction to our modern secularized world. The chapter puts forward the concept of ‘ideological religion’ to capture the modern relationship between religion and ideology. It then proposes a tripartite categorization of ideological religion as political theology, religious ideology, and religious identitarianism. It argues and empirically illustrates how these manifestations of ideological religion lie on a continuum: from ideological expressions that have a deeper and thicker connection to religious structures and theologies, to those that have a weaker and thinner connection instead. Lastly, the chapter identifies three areas which make ideological religion a distinct phenomenon in world politics: its uniquely multivocal character; its ability to escalate and exacerbate divisions and conflicts; and its entanglement with some of the most powerful ideological forces contesting the current international order.

Depictions of the West abound in the propaganda produced by the self-proclaimed "Islamic State," presenting to potentially sympathetic audiences an overwhelmingly negative image of a supposedly homogeneous political entity. Combining quantitative and qualitative language and visual analysis, we systematically expose the various facets of this image and analyze the overall picture. Drawing on the "clash of civilizations" literature as well as on research on extremist language, we conceptualize this presentation of the West as a powerful radicalizing voice shaping today's global civilizational politics.

Abstract In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

A Secular Age Beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xviii + 422 pp. $28.00 e-book. - Volume 14 Issue 2

In this essay, I reflect on my encounter with Daniel Philpott (Dan) across three distinct phases of my academic journey so far. First was my encounter with "Dan the scholar." When I was a PhD student, Dan's work introduced me to the field and profoundly shaped my thinking about religion and global politics. My second encounter was with "Dan the mentor," a generous scholar who supports early career researchers. The third encounter was with "Dan the intellectual giant." The unparalleled breadth and depth of Dan's thinking became fully apparent once I began to lecture on religion and global politics myself.

Are rising authoritarian powers such as China and Russia converging towards or challenging the normative structures of the liberal international order? This article argues that scholarship on norm contestation provides a fruitful theoretical avenue for addressing this question. It finds, however, that this literature has problematically tended to either overlook or externalize power dynamics from norm contestation. The article therefore proposes and develops a power political approach to norm contestation that, informed by a realpolitik sensibility, more explicitly and consistently makes power central to the analysis. A power political perspective conceptualizes norm contestation as the expression of battles for influence in world politics that take place at the ideational level and through symbolic instruments. It understands these struggles as occurring in the context of an international system profoundly marked by conflicting interests, cultural pluralism, hierarchical structures, and power asymmetries. This power political lens is then used to identify four modes of contestation that Russian and Chinese actors are engaged in: liberal performance, liberal mimicry, civilizational essentialization, and counter-norm entrepreneurship. It empirically explores how these contestatory practices express themselves at different intensity levels—applicatory, meaning, and validity—and display specific power political logics—fragmenting and integrative—with the goal of undermining the ideational hegemony of liberal Western-based actors and structures in world politics, and advancing alternative non-liberal visions of domestic and international order. Along with contributing to the literature on norms, this article also makes a broader intervention in current debates about rising powers and the future of the liberal international order.

The chapter shows how two epistemic communities embedded in postsecular modes of thinking provided the intellectual impetus since the 1990s that led to the creation of the Religious Engagement regime in 2013. It identifies how both epistemic communities shaped the regime during the Obama presidency. The chapter then assesses the multiple processes of foreign policy desecularization that the regime is both a product of and contributes to. In terms of global effects, it argues that the regime has potentially shaped religious landscapes internationally by empowering what it views as “good” religion; that it has tended to religionize world politics through mechanisms of elevation; and that it has contributed to the diffusion and consolidation of similar policies across Western governments and international institutions. The conclusion summarizes the chapter’s findings and compares the Religious Engagement regime to the previous three regimes. It then considers developments taking place under the Trump administration.

Since the end of the Cold War, religion has been systematically brought to the fore of American foreign policy. US foreign policymakers have been increasingly tasked with promoting religious freedom globally, delivering humanitarian and development aid abroad through faith-based channels, pacifying Muslim politics and reforming Islamic theologies in the context of fighting terrorism, and engaging religious actors to solve multiple conflicts and crises around the world. Across a range of different domains, religion has progressively become an explicit and organized subject and object of US foreign policy in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. If God was supposed to be vanquished by the forces of modernity and secularization, why has the United States increasingly sought to understand and manage religion abroad? In what ways have the boundaries between faith and state been redefined as religion has become operationalized in American foreign policy? What kind of world order is emerging in the twenty-first century as the most powerful state in the international system has come to intervene in sustained and systematic ways in sacred landscapes around the globe? This book addresses these questions by developing an original theoretical framework and drawing upon extensive empirical research and interviews. It argues that American foreign policy and religious forces have become ever more inextricably entangled in an age witnessing a global resurgence of religion and the emergence of a postsecular world society.

The study of religion and international religions has witnessed an exponential growth in recent decades. Courses and programs exploring the complex entanglements between faith and global politics have likewise mushroomed around the world. Despite this ferment, reflections on teaching religion and international relations have so far lagged behind. This forum seeks to remedy this general silence. It brings together a diverse range of scholars from a multiplicity of national, religious, methodological, and theoretical backgrounds who teach across a variety of different geographical settings including North America, Europe, and East Asia. Contributors reflect on three broad themes. First, how do we engage with the contested character of religion as a category of analysis and practice, and with the multidisciplinary nature of its study? Second, how does the context within which we operate—be it geographical, cultural, institutional, or historical—influence and shape who, what, and how we teach? Third, how do we address the important and, at times, contentious personal and ethical challenges that our research and teaching on religion and politics inevitably raises in the classroom?

This article argues that it is pertinent to situate academic metrics (journal, institutions and individual scholars’ rankings and ratings) within the broader logic of neoliberal government, in order to better identify and understand the impact of these metrics on political scientists’ perceptions, behaviours and identities. The results of a pilot survey conducted among political scientists in the United Kingdom and Belgium are used in order to further expose this impact. More precisely, we claim that although metrics are widely seen as a core element of a broader and undesirable political agenda, their repeated use leads to their endorsement, shapes and standardizes individual strategies, and shifts the codes of academic identity to the point of eroding academics’ sense of purpose and permeating their judgements about colleagues.

This article draws from Habermasian post-secular theory to broaden the scope of Constructivist research on norm dynamics beyond its current Western-centric focus. In an increasingly post-secular world society, we conceptualize the mechanism of institutional translation to explain processes of norm diffusion whereby culturally situated thick' norms acquire a thinner' ethical status via a dialogical process of normative contestation across diverse ethical perspectives. Institutional translation differs from, but also complements, mechanisms of norm diffusion, such as persuasion and localization, by illustrating how norms conceived and promoted by non-Western religious-based actors can acquire global legitimacy within the institutions of the international liberal order. The article investigates the explanatory value of this framework through an empirical analysis of two contrasting cases of norm promotion by the Organization of Islamic Conference at the United Nations. The first case considers the global diffusion of the norm of dialogue of civilizations as an example of successful institutional translation. The second case illustrates the failed diffusion of the norm against the defamation of religion as an instance of unsuccessful institutional translation.