The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict

Abstract

politics need to do a better job of considering the influence of religion. To cite only a couple of works, Scott Appleby’s The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and Scott Thomas’s The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) are well worth reading. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations is more explicit about its critique of a secularist bias among students of international politics and about the social construction and influence of norms. Further, Hurd’s work is concerned with the conventional distinctions between IR, on the one hand, and foreign policy and comparative politics, on the other, which, she suggests, may obscure for students of international politics the influence of culture and religion. The strength of Hurd’s work resides more in her theoretical discussion than in the case studies. Her work represents a critique of much recent IR theory, although she does draw on the work of scholars such as Daniel Philpott, who have expressed similar views on the influence of religion in international politics, and have proposed recommendations for directions future work on religion in IR might pursue. As Appleby suggests, it would be an oversimplification to view the influence of religion as either necessarily one of peace-building and reconciliation or necessarily one of fostering division and violence. Considering religion as one manifestation of identity politics is complicated by the fact that for any individual religion represents only one aspect of identity, and that sometimes religious cleavages coincide with other cleavages and sometimes they crosscut other cleavages. Progress will require further case-study research identifying ways in which different political cultures seek to negotiate the relations between religion and politics on the one hand, and between private and public spheres on the other.