HANDBOOK ON RELIGION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.

AuthorSmith, Anthony

HANDBOOK ON RELIGION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Editor: Jeffrey Haynes

Published by: Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2021,

400pp, 180 [pounds sterling].

In 1966, Time magazine famously (or infamously) ran a cover story under the question 'Is God Dead?', as recounted here by one of the contributors to this volume. This is a signature moment in pop culture. But an intellectual debate surrounds this kind of theme too. As London Metropolitan University Professor Jeffrey Haynes noted (in this volume under review, and in his excellent 1998 book Religion in Global Politics), the 'secularization hypothesis' was once quite strong amongst Western intellectuals, whereby advances in science, economic growth and democracy would further weaken religious belief systems. This idea found fertile ground outside the West too, particularly amongst the world's Marxist-Leninist regimes, which attempted at times to completely phase out religion. It did so even amongst a range of secular Middle Eastern leaders (such as Ataturk or the Shah of Iran, and many others) who saw religious fervour as a barrier to modernisation and a possible source of internal division.

However, the secularisation hypothesis, in as much as it may have applied to selected Western countries, was shown to not necessarily have great explanatory power for a good many countries around the world. In 2009, the Economist magazine contributors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote a book entitled God is Back. The events of 9/11 obviously dominated a lot of discussion on global politics in the 2000s. The idea of religion as a force in global politics, though, had been noticed by international relations scholars at a much earlier time--Haynes argues that the Iranian revolution was 'seismic' in this regard, while also stressing the changes in global politics unleashed by the al-Qaeda attack on the United States in 2001. Haynes's latest edited volume, like his earlier work, is a valuable contribution to a wider discussion on religion in international politics, particularly perhaps for a Western audience that might increasingly be less able to understand it.

An inescapable part of reading this edited volume is the number of contributors who feature prominently Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisations' hypothesis from the 1990s--an argument that had particular currency after 9/11, the first time in the modern age that a religious actor had attacked a great power at such scale (as Davis...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT