Beyond Just War and Jihad: Competing Visions of World Community in Catholicism and Islam

Abstract

The return of religion as an object of academic enquiry did not take place in a geopolitical or academic vacuum, but was coloured by Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ paradigm, the terror attacks of 9/11, the US-led war on terror, as well as realist, liberal, and constructivist attempts to demonstrate that religion ‘matters’. Under the influence of materialism and positivism most researchers, however, have narrowly defined the ‘importance’ or ‘relevance’ of religion to be the degree religion serves as an efficient cause for large-scale outcomes. A more critical approach to the study of religion and global politics would explicitly adopt a more normative methodology by studying how religious traditions and ideas contest or reify hegemonic narratives, debates, or policy decisions, and how this relates to the way religious traditions are lived out in spirituality and in social practices. This panel bridges the recent ‘religious turn’ and international normative theory by focusing on two of the politically most salient religious traditions: Islam and Catholicism. Papers on aspects of the following or related sets of questions are welcomed: In an era marked by polarising dichotomies such as ‘the West vs. the rest’, ‘Islam vs. the West’, ‘the secular World vs. the religious World’, what visions of world community do these religious traditions offer? How do they fit into the larger communitarianism/cosmopolitan debates, or debates about nature/creation/environment? What is the impact of contending theories of the ‘ummah’ or the ‘Church’ when it comes to nationalism, war, peace, or humanitarianism, i.e. moral obligations beyond one's own community or religious tradition? What are the relevant debates on these issues within these religious traditions, and how do they intersect with the spirituality of these traditions? What moral and political problems arise when religious actors want to live out their underlying normative visions in real-world practice?

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