Religion as security: an introduction

In recent years, the discipline of international relations (IR) has undergone a religious renaissance. The previously stable distinctions between the religious and the secular, sacred and profane and ontology and theology have been decentred by a resurgence of interest in religion, culture and identity. This is reflected not only in the proliferation of studies focusing on the rise of religious violence in various parts of the world (and its capacity for peacebuilding) but also in efforts more generally to locate religion in IR itself as one of the constitutive elements of the discipline. Religion, broadly defined, may be seen to have been present in the foundations of the contemporary (European-based) international order at the Peace of Westphalia and greatly influenced the ‘expansion of international society’ through the ‘civilizing mission’ of modern colonialism. It was also, as Weber reminded us over a century ago, present in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in the West. Consequently, the globalization of capitalism and the Westphalian states system or international community of territorialized nation-states has posed profound existential challenges for societies with very different faith traditions and cosmologies.

The ‘religious resurgence’ in IR can be traced back not only to 9/11 and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ but to the globalization of transnational religious identities. Much of the literature on religion and IR has narrowly focused on ‘Islamic exceptionalism’ and, specifically, the security threats posed by ‘Islamic’ terrorism. For explanatory IR theories, the pathologies of religion in general and Islam in particular constitute a problem to be contained by the ‘international community’ through the establishment of secular security architectures which stress the importance of state-building, liberal peacebuilding and human rights. Realists favour the establishment of strong secular states capable of ‘securitizing’ the threats posed by transnational religious movements from within their borders with the help of the ‘international community’. Liberals believe that these secular state structures need to be legitimized through periodic elections, the establishment of human rights mechanisms and the rule of law, the so-called ‘Liberal Peace’ (Doyle 2005). States are furthermore reminded of their ‘responsibility to protect’ their citizens from religious-inspired extremist violence. Failure to do so opens up the possibility of intervention by ‘the international community’ in the form of periodic air-strikes.

Critical accounts, most particularly those influenced by postcolonial framings, problematize the representation of Islamic societies in mainstream IR discourse as ‘orientalist’ (Said 1978). However, efforts to ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty 2000) IR by bringing in voices from ‘outside’ the West have hitherto privileged the secular. This is noticeably the case with Marxist-inspired Critical Theory and its application to security studies and international political economy. Capitalism, the source of so-much insecurity today, is understood following Marx as a secular mode of production, abstracted from the cultural and social milieu. Critical security studies conceives of security as emancipation (Booth 1991, 2005) from various forms of structural and cultural violence represented by ‘religion’. The atomized, unencumbered individual, unburdened by attachments imposed by membership of cultural and political communities, is similarly considered to be the main referent object of Human Security discourse, including attempts to steer Human Security in a more ‘critical’ direction (Shani 2014) as will be discussed later.

However, critical theory has opened up space for the ‘return’ of religion to IR through the deployment of ‘religion as critique’ (Mendieta 2005). Viewed as a fundamental part of the ‘lifeworld’, religion was pressed into the service of critical theory to rescue ‘reason’ from the fetishism and idolatry of technology and the market. It was in the realm of ‘religion’ that the ‘human’ lived on. Yet capitalism itself was seen by Benjamin among others as religion in that it ‘essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion’ (Benjamin in Mendieta 2005). Constructivist accounts open up space for the ‘return of religion’ by focusing on the role of norms in IR but have hitherto failed to engage in religion per se. Post-structuralist approaches do so but tend to reduce faith-based claims to power relations.

More recently, attempts inspired by critical theory – in a broad sense – have been made to emancipate IR from its dominant secular moorings through an encounter with the ‘post-secular’ which has opened up potentially productive avenues of inquiry. For Jürgen Habermas (2008), the term ‘post-secular’ refers to the inclusion of religious-based worldviews, translated into a language accessible to all, into the public sphere so as to guarantee its neutrality. Recent critical scholarship has cast doubt on the extent to which translation is possible without doing violence to the ‘vital core’ of faith (Shani 2014) and how the inclusion of religious-based worldviews necessitates an essentialization of fluid faith-based traditions, in turn reifying religious boundaries and empowering unrepresentative elites to speak on behalf of religion, ‘religion-making’ (Dressler and Mandair 2011). Attempts to apply the post-secular to IR are still in their infancy (Mavelli and Petito 2012) but have taken the form of an engagement with culturally constituted difference (Pasha 2013). Most, however, have limited this engagement to the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) leaving other cosmologies unexplored.

In the remaining section, I will attempt to briefly sketch a post-secular approach to Human Security. Two decades ago the United Nations Development Program introduced the concept of Human Security as safety from existential threats posed by hunger, disease and repression as an alternative to rampant neoliberal globalization, which prioritizes the needs of markets over people, and conventional approaches to security, which continue to prioritize the needs of states over citizens (UNDP 1994). Despite its institutionalization in the United Nations system, Human Security – redefined by a United Nations General Assembly Resolution as ‘the right of people to live in freedom and dignity’ (United Nations General Assembly 2012) – has failed to make significant inroads into the hegemony of the ‘national security paradigm’ and has been co-opted into a neoliberal world order based on ontological and methodological individualism.

Critically reworked, I have argued ‘human security’ has the potential to constitute a powerful global ethic by engaging with the multiple religio-cultural contexts in which human dignity is embedded. Human security in lower case opens up the possibility of conceptualizing ‘security’ from multiple culturally informed perspectives of which the cosmopolitan liberal tradition is merely one. This entails locating the emancipatory impulse of contemporary Western-led attempts to liberate human beings everywhere from fear and poverty not in universal entitlements to security and freedom but in the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Christian tradition and possibly in other traditions?

Christians affirm that all human beings have a ‘natural right’ to be treated equally since we are all created in the image of God (Imago Dei). Although it could be argued that the end result is the same – equal entitlements to freedom from fear and want – individuals, in the Christian tradition, cannot be the ultimate source of agency and autonomy. Roman Catholicism in particular considers Imago Dei to be foundational and grounds its post-Vatican II defence of human rights in the concept. Similarly, Islam holds that security resides not in individual autonomy and rationality but in our equal submission to the divine will of Allah. Those who submit form the umma, the universal community of believers. Muslims hold the Qu’ran to be the ultimate source of truth and relations between Muslims are regulated by Shar’ia Law. Space, however, is allocated in Islamic law for itjihad, independent judicial reasoning and interpretation of the Quran.

Indic religio-cultural traditions, however, have a different cosmology from the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and lack a central revealed text such as the Qu’ran, Torah or Bible. In South Asia, the collection of local faiths subsumed under the term ‘Hinduism’ have as their central concern the concept of dharma. Dharma governs all legitimate world ends (purushartha), prescribing different rights and duties for different ‘castes’. Ontological security resides in following one’s karma, the application of dharma to individual action. Karma in turn determines the cycle of birth, death and rebirth (samsara). Brahmans and other ‘twice-born’ castes have more ‘security’ than those of other castes as they are nearer to achieving moksha (liberation from suffering). There is, therefore, in Hinduism, a ‘hierarchy of protection’ (Brekke 2013). In Buddhism as in Hinduism, dharma is seen as the provider of protection, and thus, ontological security rests with following one’s karma. However, nirvana (liberation from suffering) is possible through individual meditation or as part of a community, sangha. In Sikhism, dharam (a variant of dharma) guides action and liberation can be achieved through the recitation of the ‘true name’ (Satnaam). However, the communal aspect of religious identity is emphasized through the wearing of the five external symbols of faith making a distinction between the ‘religious’ community (Khalsa) and ‘nation’ (qaum) difficult (Shani 2008). Gender equality is particularly emphasized in Sikhism whereas Buddhism extends the principle of equality to all sentient beings while questioning the uniqueness of individual identity through the doctrine of anatman (no self). Although this discussion was necessarily brief and drawn almost exclusively from the traditions with which I am most familiar, it serves to illustrate the main point of this brief paper; that religion can act as a form of security and that, furthermore, contemporary understandings of security are drawn almost exclusively from a particular tradition: the Judeo-Christian.

Three central concepts of modernity, which are constitutive of IR, have their origins in this tradition. First, the concept of the nation as an ethnic community has its origins in the Jewish idea of a ‘chosen people’ transformed into a ‘community of blood’ by Christianity through the act of transubstantiation. By partaking of Jesus’s flesh and blood through the Eucharist, Christians formed a distinct ‘nation’ or ‘race’ which could be differentiated from others (Anidjar 2014). Second, the state, as Schmitt has argued, may be seen as a ‘secularized’ theological concept. Schmitt based his understanding of the ‘sovereign’ on the founding father of the ‘realist tradition’: Thomas Hobbes. Central to Hobbes’s thought is a view of the sovereign as a Leviathan, a secularized ‘Mortal[l] God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defense’ (Hobbes [1651] 1985, 227). This ‘Mortal[l] God’ alone is capable of bestowing protection on his subjects in return for their liberty. Finally, the development of capitalism, as Weber pointed out, cannot be understood in Europe without reference to the Protestant work ethic and, more recently, as Anidjar has recently pointed out, to the concept of circulation, which has its origins in the flow of Blood in Christ’s body.

This collection of essays, based on a roundtable at the International Studies Association Annual Convention held at New Orleans which I chaired with Mustapha Kamal Pasha,¹ builds upon Carl Schmitt’s insight that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt [1922] 1985, 1) by critically examining the ontological and epistemological foundations of IR in general and security studies in particular in the Judeo-Christian tradition and more specifically in a Protestant worldview (Hurd 2008). If, as Jack Snyder (Snyder 2011, 1) has recently argued, ‘mainstream international relations scholars find it difficult to integrate religious subject matter into their normal conceptual frameworks’, it is suggested here that this might be because their ‘normal’ conceptual frameworks are themselves secularized theological frameworks.

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Notes on contributors

Giorgio Shani

Giorgio Shani PhD (London) is Professor of Politics and International Relations at International Christian University, Tokyo, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre of International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age (Routledge 2008) and Religion, Identity and Human Security (Routledge 2014). He has published widely in internationally reviewed journals including International Studies Review and The Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Currently, he is serving as President of the Asia-Pacific region of the International Studies Association (2014–1017) and is series co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Religion in International Politics (Rowman and Littlefield). See, for details, http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/critical-perspectives-religion-international-politics; http://www.routledge.com/authors/i7881-giorgio-shani.

Notes

1. It also forms the basis for a book series, Critical Perspectives on Religion in International Politics, which we edit for Rowman and Littlefield International. For more details, see http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/critical-perspectives-religion-international-politics.