Religion

Common meanings of "religion" are basically attached to the idea of belief in the divine. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a more complex picture. Religion inhabits a diverse set of commitments and practices that link mystery and myth, ethics and first principles, prohibition and licence. With the advent of modernity, the Protestant version of religion emerges as a universal reference that conditions cross-cultural mappings. This notion stresses the privatization of belief and individual salvation removed from collective imaginings. In copying the Protestant view of religion, International Relations (IR) inexorably hierarchizes international society by privileging the secular over the religious. While the restrictive understanding of religion as belief and the hegemony of the secularization thesis have faced a discernible challenge from post-secular interventions which underscore the continued salience of the religious as a part of the human condition, IR remains entrenched in Enlightenment thinking with its assumed secular undercurrents.