On Religion and the Politics of Security: How Religion’s Involvement in Domestic Politics Affects National Securitymaking

Abstract

This article explores how national security policies are influenced by national religious politics. First, the state's religious policy greatly influences which security interests the government pursues, as national-security policy is in part a continuation of government religious policy by other means. Second, the desire of decisionmakers to win the political competition against elites which differ in their religious affinities and vision for the state-religion relations steers them toward three possible securitymaking dynamics. Third, the political need of decisionmakers to accommodate the opinions on religion of the groups that secure their hold on power delimits their security policies.

Keywords:

• religion
• national security
• domestic politics
• religion-state relations

Notes

1 The selectorate, according to Morrow et al. (2008, 393), is the set of people in the polity who can take part in choosing a leader.

2 Rees (2015) claims that the place of religion in the political order can be influenced by more than one dynamic in time, and that, over time, it moves from one dynamic to another; however, for the purpose of analytical clarity, I relate here to each of the four dynamics as a category set in a given time.

 

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moria Bar-Maoz

Moria Bar-Maoz is a doctoral student at the Political Science Department of Bar-Ilan University, writing on the role of religion and secularism in the formulation and implementation of national security policies in France, Israel, and Uzbekistan. Her paper “What we talk about when we talk about state-secularity” was selected for the 2017 Best Graduate Student Paper in Religion and International Relations by the International Studies Association (ISA).