A Political Science Perspective on Religious Fundamentalism

Abstract Religious fundamentalism is a phenomenon still understudied in political science: both analytical perspectives and definitions are indeed crafted mostly for sociological, theological and philosophical analyses. Moreover, comprehensive studies of the interactions between religious fundamentalism and democracy have rarely been worked out. This paper first examines the most prominent works in the comparative literature about fundamentalism, trying to identify the main theoretical perspectives, and their usefulness for a political science research. Later, it tries to integrate this literature with mainstream literature about collective identities and social movements, in order to build a definition of religious fundamentalism which could be appropriate for research in the field of political science. Throughout the essay, examples belonging to different religious fundamentalisms are proposed, in order to clarify the theoretical issues.