Religion in IR Theory: From Christian Realism and the English School to New Marxism and Radical Orthodoxy

Abstract

Theories of International Relations are usually seen as secular theoretical concepts created to explain a secular empirical reality. Challenging this positivistic perspective, the Third Debate has over the last two decades opened inroads for religion especially on issues of ideas, identity, and culture. Mainstream theories have to face criticism for their secular bias, religion is used as a source for normative debates, a powerful source of agency and action, and theoretical approaches are adapted to understand the ideas, motives, and discourses of religious actors in world politics. The interpretive or post-positivist constructivist approaches, more indebted to Critical theory and the English School, explore the way power, culture, and religion (and the ways they intersect), are an important part of what is defined as the secular, religious, or political (and the boundaries between them). In these ways religion is an important part of the semantic, linguistic, construction of the social discourses and the social reality of international relations. The panel brings together approaches that share the view that religious ideas, practices, and actors are worth being integrated into theoretical approaches, and that theorizing in IR can learn from religious semantics and how religious traditions shape social reality and experience. The history of IR theory has many approaches rooted in religious concepts. Approaches like Reinhold Niebuhr’s or George Kennan’s Christian Realism or Martin Wight or Herbert Butterfield’s approach in the English School. Classics like Las Casas, the Spanish beginning of international law and human rights can be brought back into the debate regarding religion and IR theory. How does today’s religious thinking inform tomorrow’s IR theories? How can reason and faith, scientific rigor and religious metaphysics be brought together? How can the “deep pluralism” (Connolly) of a multicultural world find a common ground to develop IR theory beyond secular positivism?

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