International politics as global politics from below: Pope Francis on global politics
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International politics as global politics from below: Pope Francis on global politics Jodok Troy1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract There are several considerations of the papacy’s vision of what global politics should be like. There are, however, few mappings of the papacy’s actual concept of global politics, of how it evaluates the current state of global politics, understood as global political, social, and economic trends, patterns, actors and their relationships. This article delineates Pope Francis’ conception of global politics and contextualises it within the papacy’s trajectory of participating in global politics. Attending to a particular concept, of how the pope thinks about global politics, helps to better understand and place the papacy in the study of global politics. The article shows how Francis conceptualises global politics from below, from the periphery of society and politics, which leads him to unmask global inequalities. In particular, the article illustrates that Francis contests widespread assumptions of central hierarchic interstate relations and individualism, dominating the conceptual discourse about global politics. Keywords Church · global politics · human rights · international society · Pope Francis · religion
Introduction Extended space for global political engagement (Constantinou et al. 2016) is a key feature of global politics populated by religious actors and their visions of a postsecular world (e.g. May et al. 2014; Cerella 2014; Mavelli and Petito 2012). A shared global social space and an extension of religious actors’ global political engagement notwithstanding, without a ‘a clear political meaning, the “global” could be a space of exchanges and interconnections, or disempowerment and alienation’ (Rosenboim 2017: 282). Identifying this political meaning of the global, the literature on global * Jodok Troy [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Universitätsstraße 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria Vol.:(0123456789)
J. Troy
politics remains short on mapping ‘visions of global politics’ (Marchetti 2009: 136), particularly religious visions. Therefore, scholars of International Relations argue to engage in the study of culture and religion to better comprehend religious worldviews and practices, how they conceptualise and, eventually, affect global politics (e.g. Philpott 2009: 198–99; see also Paipais 2019). Among the post-secular visions of global politics, the one of the head of the Catholic Church, the pope, is arguably a prominent one. The papacy has access to a vast global network in civil society and the world of states to transfer human, material, and ideological resources and to disseminate ideas beyond its constituency. In fact, there are several considerations of the papacy’s theological visions of what global politics should be like. However, there are few mappings how the papacy conceptualises global politics understood as global political, social, and economic trends, patterns, actors and their relationships. Th
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