Beyond the "Religious Turn": International Relations as Political Theology

IR’s inhospitality to religion is not sui generis; its aversion to alien forms of religiosity arises from its inability to code that religiosity into a familiar vernacular. If, indeed, the major political concepts in Western IR are secularized variants of the Christian mental landscape, IR embodies a provincial and provincializing political theology. The character of IR as a provincial discourse, therefore, rests less in ontological divergence than cosmological make-up. Naturalized as a secular discourse, a particularized form of religiosity that informs IR easily escapes cognizance. The principal implication of reading IR as political theology in this manner is neither the discovery of religious roots to the discipline nor the recognition of a specter of religion haunting modern political concepts, but the awareness of an essential religious alterity that is produced as a constitutive basis of the discipline. The main sources of provincialism lie deeper—in the recesses of political theology.