Religion: The Historic Hole at the Heart of International Relations Theory
The peace which passeth all understanding is a phrase familiar to us from the Blessing at the end of the Mass. It seems to many evocative of a celestial estate inherently remote from the hard realities of life in this world of our experience – so remote indeed that it is occasionally referenced with irony amidst conflicts – when a peace deal is proposed amidst realities that make it unlikely to hold. The title of a celebrated analysis, of the baleful consequences during and after the First World War, carried a similar sense of irony: A Peace to end All Peace… creating the modern Middle East 1914-1922 (by David Fromkin).
Having just been in the region, one could not but be reminded of the fact that in Israel-Palestine we have now our own version of an intermittent Hundred Years War that continues to offer little hope of resolution. Then again, I am writing on September 11, a date forever etched in our minds with the awful events of that day in 2001.
As we contemplate such history – and the fractures and conflicts of the Middle East in particular – one thing that might seem deeply odd would be to suppose that specifically religious dimensions were absent throughout; yet, exactly that view, has been a presupposition dominant in mainstream theorizing about International relations for many decades. But as a point of detail, before going further, I should just clarify one point.
Many will want to say here that religiously framed acts of violence are not necessarily consistent with the authentic understandings of what the religions invoked truly teach. But that point has nothing to do with the salience of religious phenomena itself to the course of international events. And aside from that, what the legitimacy or otherwise of religious invocations made by perpetrators of violence may be – this of itself merely highlights a different question: which is the importance of establishing who does (and who should) decide what is authentic in a given religion. And the fact remains, the perpetrators themselves often specifically invoke their religious views when perpetrating their acts of violence – so it is not for others to set that aside and disregard what they themselves say.
The Conceptual Hole at the Heart of Historic IR Theory
All this brings us to one of the great intellectual paradoxes of recent decades, which is the deeply strange fact that the theorists behind the study of International Relations (often abbreviated as IR) for many decades entirely omitted the category of religion from their analyses. For much of the discipline’s post-1945 history, religion was either marginalised as epiphenomenal, or analysed reductively, so that religious claims were deemed actually to be about something else entirely. Religion thus got reinterpreted using secular categories such as power, interest, or identity. It is only since the 1990s that there began to be a so-called “religious turn” within IR that challenged the hitherto normative secular presumptions and even argued that religion can be 1) irreducible to other categories and also 2) causally significant.
This brings us back to another date – namely 1648, which is best remembered as the year of Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the overlapping Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648). The settlement encompassed the joint treaties of Münster and Osnabrück and instituted terms that brought conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and other European powers to an end. The treaties reaffirmed prior religious settlements granted after the Peace of Augsburg Treaty of 1555, which had formally recognized the Lutheran faith. This Treaty had ended the religious war between Catholics and Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire and established the legal principle of cuius regio, eius religio. The overall Peace of Westphalia thus solidified the newly emerging era of religious tolerance which was expanded to cover the practice of Calvinism in the Empire.
On a political and geographic level, the treaties affirmed the independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands from Spanish control, though the Southern Netherlands remained under Spanish rule. Within the Holy Roman Empire, the treaties granted extensive autonomous control to the German princes who ruled over the various provinces and cities.
While still in principal under imperial authority, the princes of the Empire emerged as recognized sovereigns able to determine the religion of their territories, which were themselves hereafter deemed sovereign possessions in regard to diplomatic relations and military agreements. In exchange, the German states pledged to avoid armed conflicts between each other in the future. Austria and Sweden made additional territorial concessions during the negotiations, but the major change was that the specifically religious compromises enshrined, together with recognition of princely autonomy, established the foundation for an overarching peace and brought an end to decades of empire-wide conflicts.
This settlement represented an important and innovative instance of a diplomatic congress resolving complex religious, territorial, and political disputes between diverse combatants through negotiated compromise rather than through battlefield combat alone. This model created an enormously important precedent for what was possible through future international agreements. It is also important to note that religion, and what believers defined as vital to them, were dealt with as such – not reduced to other categories.
In contrast to this last point however, the subsequent trajectory in International Relations theorising – from classical and structural realism onward – ended up systematically downplaying religion as a factor. This underemphasis continued on through liberal and neoliberal institutionalism, which viewed religion as a private variable (if not indeed vice), and on to constructivism. It was only with the rise of the English School of IR that there began to be some recovery of the rather basic point that religious ideas, identities, and institutions can be and often are constitutive elements within international relations.
In the light of this history it was prescient indeed (so far ahead of 9/11) that the late Samuel P. Huntington, in his famous article in Foreign Affairs (1993), and later book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) was able to make a radical move of recovery and to write: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural… The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” While he still holds back from directly speaking of religion, Huntington’s thesis nonetheless placed religiously defined “civilizations” at the center of his vision of the likely course of post-Cold War conflict.
In sharp contrast to the path opened up by Samuel Huntington, the prior long dominant strand of IR scholarship had worked with what later scholars have termed a “Westphalian presumption.” Simply stated, this treats as a given that modern international politics is conducted by secular states in a system where religion is either seen as a private matter or displaced by ideologies such as liberalism and communism. As one overview puts it, “for hundreds of years, international relations, especially in the West, has been both state-focused and secular in outlook,” with religion treated as redundant because religious phenomena can “also be described in other terms,” which is to say reductively.
What is particularly striking is that this presumption was largely unexamined and “almost entirely implicit,” even though the effects were huge since it meant that “religion as a topic or concern simply fails to appear for the most part.”[1]
This left religion, first defined, in essentialist or epiphenomenal terms and secondly framed within antagonistic binaries such as “the secular versus the religious.” It also had the ironic consequence that this framework effectively “de-sacralises and re-sacralises the public square” in ways that exclude faith from serious analysis.Several strands within this dominating perspective merit particular consideration here.
Classical Realism
This approach (especially exemplified in the work of Hans J. Morgenthau) acknowledged religion primarily as a source of moral tension rather than as an independent causal force in international politics. Morgenthau famously stressed the gap between Christian ethics and political success, arguing that “the moral problem of politics is posed by the inescapable discrepancy between the commands of Christian teaching, of Christian ethics, and the requirements of political success.” In a 1962 discussion he went further: “it is impossible, if I may put it in somewhat extreme and striking terms, to be a successful politician and a good Christian.”
For Morgenthau, the statesman’s task is not to realise religious ideals but to minimise their violation: “While he is precluded from acting morally, the best he can do is to minimize the intrinsic immorality of the political act… to try to choose the lesser evil.” Religion here functions as a transcendent moral horizon that highlights the tragic character of politics, but it does not feature as a variable that explains state behaviour in an anarchic system. As one study notes, Morgenthau’s framework ultimately subjects religious faith to a determinism that is “more materialist (as in liberalism and Marxism) or more ideational (as in realism and constructivism),” thereby subsuming it under conventional IR concepts such as power and interest.
Structural Realism
Kenneth Waltz’s neorealism sharpened this exclusion by restricting theory to the international system and treating states as unitary, rational actors whose behaviour is determined by systemic constraints. Within this framework, “religion plays de facto no role in Waltz’s theory because he limits his theory to the international system.” Waltz’s position can be described as “methodological agnosticism or methodological naturalism”: he aims at a scientific explanation that “leaves out religious or theological concepts.”
When Waltz does mention religion, it is typically to contrast it with material and institutional forces. He observes that among those who expect moral improvement to bring peace, “individual behavior is determined more by religious-spiritual inspiration than by material circumstance,” a view his structural approach explicitly rejects in favour of systemic explanations. Within neorealism, “religion is reduced to morality or a set of rules,” and structural realism’s “black box” treatment of the state makes it “the most difficult theory to accommodate religion.”
Liberalism and Neoliberal Institutionalism: Religion Privatised
Liberal and neoliberal theories share realism’s secular orientation but locate religion differently: not as irrelevant, but as a domestic, societal, or private phenomenon that may indirectly shape state preferences. Liberalism’s focus on interests, parties, and domestic coalitions allows religion to appear as one source of societal preference formation, yet it remains secondary to rational calculations of interest and institutional design. As a result, “three of the most significant theoretical approaches applied to the study of international relations—realism, liberalism and constructivism—all struggle to factor religion into their analyses” in a systematic way.
Neoliberal institutionalism, with its emphasis on regimes, cooperation, and rule-governed issue areas, finds religion even more awkward to place. Hence, Jack Snyder cautions that religion is hardly a “rule-governed issue area, and what rules do exist (e.g., aspirational norms of religious freedom) are not consensual and are not institutionalized.” Liberal theories thus tend to treat religious actors as interest groups within states or as transnational NGOs, rather than as constitutive of the international system itself.
Constructivism (so near but so far)
Constructivism might have been expected to be a natural theoretical home for a more engaged view of religion, given its emphasis on ideas, norms, identities, and culture. And indeed, “constructivism, as compared to realism and neoliberal institutionalism, seems the most compatible with studying religion in international politics based on its focus” on intersubjective meanings. Some constructivists argue that “religion and societal ideologies may exercise stronger control functions over global society than do international law and industrialism,” suggesting a potentially central role for faith in shaping global order.
Yet leading constructivist accounts have in fact largely neglected religion. Something I experienced first hand as a student of IR studying under Alexander Wendt at Yale and as reflected in his impressive work A Social Theory of International Politics. While this did indeed seem to revolutionise IR by arguing that “anarchy is what states make of it,” he offers little sustained engagement with religious ideas or actors. Jack Snyder notes that “in Wendt’s constructivism there is no place for religion,” and that despite constructivism’s friendly terrain for religious analysis, “Wendt does not have anything much to say about religion.” As one critic puts it, because Wendt’s states “simply do not speak” in any particular language and only “interact” or “signal,” his framework “cannot handle anything to do with faith or religion in any innovative way; indeed, it cannot handle it at all.”
Constructivists have, however, highlighted how the secular framing of IR itself limits the visibility of religion. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd then argues further that “the whole arena for foreign policy has been defined to be secular; hence, the traditional positivist research agenda will find inevitably that religion does not have any or much influence.” On this view, religion’s apparent irrelevance is partly an artifact of a secularly constructed research agenda that presupposes the Westphalian secular state as the basic unit of analysis.
As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has argued, IR theory, including much constructivist work, thus generally treats secularism not as a contested worldview but as a neutral background: “secularism is frequently taken for granted and used as the standard prism through which world politics are examined.” This leads scholars to “rely on secularist assumptions as an organizing framework” even when they claim to be studying religion, thereby reproducing “the religious-secular or religious-political binary” as if it were fixed rather than “socially and historically constructed.”
This failing has led Hurd and others to argue that historical, classic IR theory has been “largely unable to effectively explain religious behaviour in the context of international relations due to the secularist assumptions these theories have been based in” and their “inattention to the ways in which religious beliefs, principles, and practices are mutually constitutive of culture and language.” Constructivism may focus on ideas and identities, but if those ideas are already filtered through secular categories (public/private, rational/irrational, religious/secular), then religious actors’ own self-understandings are distorted or marginalised.
While “post-positivist constructivist studies of religion go further in challenging the religious-secular and religious-political binaries,” critics argue that “all IR scholars, even those that problematize the rigidity of these binaries, continue to rely on a distinction between religious and secular or political phenomena that may not, in fact, exist.”
A further line of criticism would point out that constructivism tends to reduce religion to generic ideational variables—norms, identities, culture—thereby losing what is distinctive about religious belief and practice. And as Shubha Kamala Prasad has noted: “while Constructivist theory affords much more space and power to the world of ideas, Telhami and Barnett et al struggle to separate and define clearly the difference between religion, culture and identity.” As one may also say Huntington did.
When religion is treated as just another form of identity or cultural background, its specific doctrinal content, ritual practices, and soteriological claims disappear from view which is not to engage religion as understood by its practitioners as one might say!
For this reason positivist-leaning constructivism is “methodologically incapable of doing anything but forcing ‘irrational’ religion into secular and positivist categories, at one end of the spectrum treating it superficially as a culture or identity, at the other end of the spectrum subordinating religion to the existing positivist IR categories.” Religion becomes a label for a type of identity rather than a complex tradition with its own internal logics.
Moreover there is a lurking tendency as another recent overview has argued for the “dominant theories – realism, liberalism, and constructivism – to view religion through a utilitarian lens, if at all,” so that “faith is often seen as an instrument for diplomacy, a cause of strife, or a cultural backdrop rather than a central driver of political and social change.” Even when constructivists highlight religious norms, they may analyse them primarily in terms of their functional effects on cooperation or conflict, not as expressions of ultimate concern or divine command.
Then there is the related consequence that constructivism (like mainstream IR more broadly) lacks the categories needed to take theological claims seriously. As Hurd argues, “IR theory lacks the categories of analysis necessary to explain behavior that is not premised on individualism and the division between public and private.” Many religious actors do not conceive of themselves as private individuals pursuing interests in a secular public sphere; they understand their actions in terms of obedience to God, participation in a sacred community, or fulfilment of eschatological promises. Constructivist frameworks that assume methodological individualism or a secular public/private split struggle to represent these self-understandings without distortion.
Moreover, constructivist approaches usually avoid engaging the truth-claims of religions, focusing instead on their social effects which amounts to a de facto bracketing of what many religious actors regard as most important: namely the reality of God, revelation, and the whole transcendent order. Some constructivist work in religious studies therefore is easily accused of “failing to clarify its theoretical basis adequately” and of being “too often accepting the role of antagonist to realism,” without specifying “what is constructed from what and how.”
Jack Snyder observes further that, despite constructivism’s apparent openness to ideas and identities, “in Wendt’s constructivism in particular there is no place for religion,” and that leading constructivist texts say very little about faith traditions or religious actors. Similarly, a recent survey notes that “constructivist theorists have not focused much on the function of religion in the formation of ideas or identities, despite this theoretical possibility.”
Then again, there is the risk of being “power reductionistic (reducing the analysis to power as a monocausal variable), which is then unable to extricate critically refined theological and religious content from its negation of colonial discursive formations; in short, throwing out the baby with the bath water.” Here the critique is that deconstructing religion as a colonial or power-laden category can end up erasing the substantive content of religious traditions yet again.
Needless to say there is much further to be said – but for the moment this will suffice on a topic to which I do however intend to return given its importance for how Christianity is viewed in our ever more secularised and administrative wider culture and society. And as we think further we need to consider such questions as: What does it mean to explain something and what do we mean by claiming to know the cause of something ? Must an adequate explanation include claiming to know the cause? Such questions have generated their own extensive literature…..
[1] See Peter Katzenstein, and also, “The Marginalisation of Religion in International Relations: Deconstructing Secular IR Theories” by Shubha Kamala Prasad, South Asian Survey, 21(1&2) 35–50, 2017)