Theorizing Religious Resurgence
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Theorizing Religious Resurgence Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Department of Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Most attempts to theorize religious resurgence rest on assumptions that reveal more about the social and cultural foundations of contemporary international relations than they do about the phenomenon under study. These assumptions encourage scholars to see religion as either an irrational force to be expelled from modern public life or as the foundation of entrenched competition between rival civilizations. I present an alternative theorization that identifies religious resurgence whenever authoritative secularist settlements of the relationship between religion and politics are challenged. Through a case study of the rise of Islamic political identity in Turkey, I show that the religious resurgence is neither epiphenomenal nor evidence of cultural incommensurability. It is instead a manifestation of attempts to reconfigure modern divisions between the sacred and the secular. International Politics (2007) 44, 647–665. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800212 Keywords: Islam; secularism; religion; Turkey; international relations; Kemalism
Introduction For at least three reasons, it has now become impossible to maintain that religion is irrelevant to international politics, as most conventional international relations (IR) theory would have it.1 The United States and others have had a hard time imposing their vision of secular democracy around the world. Second, there has been the advent of a US foreign policy model in the George W. Bush administration that is officially secular but inspired by a kind of Christianity. Third, over the last several decades there has been a rise in religious movements and organizations with broad bases of national and transnational influence (Keddie, 1998). These developments and others like them have led many to refer to a ‘resurgence of religion’ in IR (Keddie 1998; Thomas, 2000, 2005). Thomas (2005, 43) has described this resurgence as the result of ‘a collapse in the faith of modernizing religionymotivated by the desireyto rethink and reevaluate how religion and modernity are related.’
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Theorizing Religious Resurgence
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There is good evidence for the resurgence. It is now unsustainable to claim that religion plays no significant role in IR; it has become a critical consideration in international security, global politics and US foreign policy (Haynes, 2004). Timothy Shah testified recently before the House International Relations Committee that ‘the importance of the religion factor in public life is not decreasing or remaining static but is increasing in almost every part of the world’ (Shah, 2004). Berger (2001, 445), previously one of the foremost proponents of secularization theory, has observed that, ‘put simply, most of the world is bubbling with religious passions.’ Petito and Hatzopoulos (2003, 3) recently suggested that, ‘the gl
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