Religion in International Relations Theory

2 Religion and its influence in the international arena

The overall goal of this book is to find a way to understand the influence of religious phenomena in the public sphere without losing the insights provided by mainstream international relations theories. Before we address these interactions, we must identify the multiple ways in which religion can influence international politics. In order to accomplish this task in a systematic manner, we catalog the ways in which religion can influence international relations in this chapter. In subsequent chapters, we use this catalog as a basis for the discussion of whether these elements can be incorporated into each of these bodies of theory. This approach also allows us to compare the ability of these ...