Narrating Religion and Disciplining IR

Abstract

The impact of religious actors on the international system has become a key area of interest for IR, in response to the intrusions of culturally-informed violence and political contestation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, less has been said about how this process has been narrated, by the actors themselves, by those they interact with, or by their academic observers. Religious and spiritual systems have traditionally been rich sources of ‘narrativization’ for individuals and societies and have, in many ways, provided templates for a number of other powerful and generative cultural tropes, as well as political action. Some of the primary narratives of the conduct and study of international politics – modernity, progress, liberalism, secularism, science and rationality—have their productive effects in common with “religious” narratives, such as global Jihad, world evangelization, Zionism, compassionate violence, and so on. In some cases, they share deep cultural roots. In others, there are deep divergences.. This panel seeks to stimulate the reflexive interrogation of religious and secular narratives within contemporary and historical scholarship. The focus is on narratives of and about religion, its academic inquiry, and the intersections between the two. What do the ways and means of such inquiry say about the contexts from which they derive? In what narratives do scholars of religion and IR situate themselves? What types of broader narratives – about the state, the international system and non-state actors – are reproduced through such inquiries? What types of ‘self’ conceptions are affirmed, and what do these say about the ‘other’? Key themes for this panel include: • The dominant narratives through which religious actors are thought to operate in global politics and/or how these accord with the formation of broader disciplinary narratives, approaches, and ‘schools’. • The ways in which narratives of modernity have been accompanied by those of progress and liberal secularism and how these have cross-cut narratives about the state, the law and the nature of politics. How have narratives about religion and secularism manifested themselves in areas of political economy, security, foreign policy, etc? What types of normative projects are sustained by these narratives, and why has modernity become such a dominant signifier? • How do narratives about religion and secularism manifest themselves, linguistically and symbolically? How are boundaries drawn between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in IR and other disciplines and what narratives accompany and drive these processes? How do the constructions of phantasmagorical sites such as the ‘Orient’ highlight the deep ambivalences of such boundaries and what might these narratives say about the knowledge–power entrenched in those categories? • How religious actors narrate their roles in the international system and how these roles are narrated for them by others, both in popular accounts and by scholars. How have these narratives – as constructed by “religious” actors and by others – become part of the transformative and emancipatory politics as well as authoritative practices in the international system? What processes of contestation and resistance, across a range of scales, have been involved in the production and re-production of these narrative frameworks? What power relations do these narratives reflect and sustain? • What impact these narratives have had “on the ground” – on policy choices, political techniques and governance.

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