Religious nationalism and nation-building in Asia: an introduction

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Notes

1. There is an entire literature in international relations theory that explains the propensity of international relations scholars to regard religion primarily as a source of disturbance in the international order and to dismiss its legitimacy as a force in modern international politics. The literature argues in essence that the fault is located in the most fundamental foundations of the discipline of international relations: in the Westphalian consensus itself, which was an attempt to relegate religion to the private sphere and banish it from the ‘modern’ conception of politics, both domestic and international. This literature is not the focus of the essays in this collection, but examples may be found in Fox (2001: 54), Fox and Sandler (2004: 14–24), and Hatzopoulos and Petito (2003: 2).

2. Accepting this challenge seemed a natural extension of my work on ethnicity and nation-building in Singapore (Barr and SkrbiŠ 2008), and the interaction of religion and politics more broadly (Barr 2002, 2008a, b).

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Notes on contributors

Michael D. Barr

Michael D. Barr is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of International Relations at Flinders University. His latest book (written with Zlatko Skrbiš) is Constructing Singapore Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2008)