R. Scott Appleby: From a Footnote to a Distinguished Scholar Award Winner

Abstract

This essay is a reminder of the briar path towards recognition of religion as an essential factor in International Relations (IR) and in its major academic organization, the International Studies Association (ISA). To positivists in IR, religion stands in sharp contrast to reason and is not to be taken seriously. A significant review article published in World Politics in 2008 is cited here as an example. It refers to the work of R. Scott Appleby and others as literature “in the public sphere”—which is “outside of the concerns of political science” and “not of interest”—and thus it is only mentioned in a footnote. In 2019 the ISA’s Religion and International Relations Section gave its Distinguished Scholar Award to Professor Appleby, which is in part a statement of a recommitment to keep challenging this attitude.

Keywords:

• religion
• international relations
• comparative politics
• political science
• International Studies Association

ORCID

Vendulka Kubálková http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4673-4304

Notes

1 See isanet.com.

2 The three-member 2018–19 Distinguished Scholar Committee of the ISA REL section consisted of: Vendulka Kubálková (chair), Professor of International Studies at the University of Miami; Mark Juergensmeyer, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara; and Fabio Petito, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sussex, UK.

3 See https://keough.nd.edu/profile/r-scott-appleby/.

4 This survey included, for International Relations, Fox and Sandler 2004; and Thomas 2005.

5 See Bellin 2008, 317, note 2: “There is a vast literature on the subject of religion in the public sphere. On religious resurgence, see, for example, Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby’s multivolume series on fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995).”

6 There were a couple of noteworthy exceptions, which Philpott listed. SAIS Review and Orbis in the US and Millennium at the London School of Economics in the UK published special issues in 1998 on religion and international relations. The latter, an initiative of LSE doctoral students, theorized for the first time the role of religion in IR. The LSE held an important conference entitled “Religions and International Relations” on 27 May 1998. This led to a special issue of Millennium in 2000. See also Fabio Petito’s (2004) book, Religion in International Relations: Return from Exile.

7 From the Annual report of the Religion and International Relations 2018–2019. The membership of the Section since its inception is: in 2015, 216 members; in 2016, 245; in 2017, 250; in 2018; 260; in 2019, 230.

8 See the Teaching, Research & International Policy (TRIP) project, https://trip.wm.edu/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vendulka Kubálková

Vendulka Kubálková (JUDr, PhD) is Professor of International Studies, University of Miami, and Visiting Professor, VŠE, Economics University, Prague. She has published on Marxism, critical theory, constructivism, postcolonialism, and religion and International Relations, coining the phrase (intended to be an approach) “International Political Theology” as a systematic study of discourses and relations amongst them concerning world affairs that search for—or claim to have found—a response, transcendental or secular, to the human need for meaning.