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The future of religious geopolitics: towards a

research and theory agenda


Tristan Sturm
Geography Main Ofce, N430 Ross Building, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
M3J 1P3
Email: tristan.sturm@gmail.com
Revised manuscript received 21 February 2013
In this introduction to a special section on the future for research on the topic of religion and geopolitics,
some terminological, theoretical, methodological and analytical possibilities are set out. A distinction is
drawn between religious geopolitics and the geopolitics of religion. Research published thus far on this
intersection has limited thematic and topical scope. I further this critique by suggesting new theoretical
and methodological possibilities by pointing out the poverty of thinking in the dualistic terms, religion/
secular. I conclude this introduction by providing four analytical approaches to the intersection between
religion and geopolitics. The essays in this special section are attempts to present future coherence to this
growing literature but also illustrate the many divergent possibilities.
Key words: religious geopolitics, geopolitics of religion, international relations, critical geopolitics
Reassembling religion and geopolitics
This short special section concerns the nascent interest in
religion in political geography generally and critical geo-
politics specically (Secor 2001; Nyroos 2001; Agnew
2006 2010; Dittmer 2007; Dittmer and Sturm 2010;
Megoran 2010). Such interest has emerged on the coat-
tails of similar concerns in international relations, speci-
cally in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the so-called
war on terror (Philpott 2002; Hatzopoulous and Petito
2003; Fox and Sandler 2006). I argue there is more to
religion and geopolitics than this single dualistic event.
The interest recently in critical geopolitics has been one
focused on both practical-governmental inuence on
domestic and foreign imaginations of borders, attributions
of enchantment, motive and signicance (especially eco-
nomic and post-colonial) to and by different social
groups, and how national imaginations have been imbri-
cated into religious doctrine. What is lacking is any kind
of sustained research agenda that takes religious move-
ments seriously rather than reporting on the newest
fashionable geopolitical worldview or event that needs
to be debunked of its geographical assumptions. David
Newman, the co-editor of the journal Geopolitics,
recently echoed this concern for incorporating religion as
a category of analysis in geopolitics. When asked about
the future of geopolitics, he wrote, We dont understand
enough about the geopolitical and global underpinnings
of religion and, more recently, religious fundamentalism
(2012, np). But to suggest religion is merely an instru-
mental underpinning is to forget its own rich histories,
texts, performances, cultures and the way secular moder-
nity attempts to temporalise religion by separating it from
politics as tradition. This is not to advocate a purely
cultural perspective that ignores the working of power
behind and beyond religion, but rather to allow a per-
spective that also understands religion as power in its own
discourse and therefore its own geopolitics as well as the
powerful underpinnings of religious politics inseparably
related to it.
While much has been written recently, there has been
little in the way of framing the subject, dening its terms
and potential subject matter, reviewing the literature and
especially proposing new lines of inquiry (cf. Dijkink
2006; Dittmer 2007). The rst two sections of this intro-
duction attempt to dene the terms of analysis, frame the
subject matter and illustrate how the essays in this issue
contribute to the enrichment of the intersection of religion
and geopolitics.
In the last section of this introduction, the terms reli-
gion and geopolitics, what has been variously called
religeopolitics or religious geopolitics, are explored
analytically. It is argued that there are at least four ways to
study religious geopolitics at a broad analytical level,
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Area (2013) 45.2, 134140 doi: 10.1111/area.12028
Area Vol. 45 No. 2, pp. 134140, 2013
ISSN 0004-0894 2013 The Author.
Area 2013 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
each having its own promise and pitfalls. This introduction
rst provides some terminological suggestions as well as a
critique of the literature thus far, and some methodologi-
cal and theoretical suggestions for future research.
A terminological distinction should be made between
the geopolitics of religion and religious geopolitics
(Sturm and Wilford forthcoming). The former refers to
conicts between actors who are clearly and rather
unproblematically concerned with theologically inspired
representations of how the world should be divided. The
latter refers to plainly secular geopolitical discourse and
action (the underpinnings Newman refers to above) that
nevertheless can be seen to employ political-theological
vocabularies, symbols and action. Concerning the latter, I
draw on the well-known formulation of the German
political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt that all signicant
concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised
theological concepts (1985, 36; cf. Asad 1999; Taubes
2009 [1947]).
At least four elements have emerged to date that have
pigeonholed religious geopolitics and the geopolitics of
religion. First, researchers have begun to pay serious
attention to apocalyptic forms of religion and their geo-
political consequences. Second, American evangelical
Christian foreign policy has begun to serve as a template
for religious geopolitics in a post-secular Western interna-
tional system. Third, religion has come to be seen as
another type of political and cultural phenomenon for
critical geopolitics, with researchers often employing the
same theories used to unveil the motivations of all other
social movements; and fourth, religion has come to be
seen as a binary opposite to a perceived secular moder-
nity. A rise in religious geopolitics, then, is seen to portend
a diminution in secular democracy (Mignolo 2002;
Yorgason and Della Dora 2009; Wilford 2010). Dittmer
and Sturms (2010) edited volume is in some ways a
culmination of these trends in empirical form and because
of this it should be clear that new lines of inquiry are
necessary.
Neglected questions, theories, methods and topical
matter are addressed in this special section by Nick
Megoran, Elizabeth Olson, Janette Habashi and Fiona
McConnell, including concerns with transnationalism,
children, postcolonialism and the geopolitics of gender,
Revelation as resistance, imperial secularisation, and
other religions besides Christianity Islam and Buddhism.
New methods like ethnography and interviews, as well as
new lines of inquiry, are introduced in this special section.
These new explorations need to enter the literature to
open up new paths of theoretical and empirical inquiry
for this burgeoning interest in religion and geopolitics. I
briey introduce each paper below as they help expand
the literature of religious geopolitics and the geopolitics
of religion.
While Schmitts secularisation theory of political lan-
guage serves our terminological distinction above, he
took this theory too far by seeing the revolutionary powers
of apocalyptic thinking as limited only by the katechon,
the restrainer [who] holds back the end of the world,
which to him was the Third Reich, thus justifying fascist
power by naturalising history through religious idiom
(Schmitt 2003, 59). Nick Megorans paper in the special
section sees no such limit. Making messy the neat cat-
egorical division between religious geopolitics and the
geopolitics of religion, Megoran argues that the critical
geopolitics scholarship thus far criticising apocalyptic
thought might better be turned around to see the progres-
sive force of apocalyptic and millennial thinking. Short of
suggesting apocalyptic thought is the spirit of history as
Karl Lowith (1949) would have it, he argues the eschato-
logical visionaries of the Bible had rather progressive
revolutionary ideas, ones that have been misinterpreted to
justify violence today by more fundamentalist groups. But
on the whole if contextualised, such future millennial
thinking could break through Schmitts katechon. Paral-
leling Megorans argument, Jacob Taubes criticised
Schmitt, If revolution points to nothing beyond itself, it
will end in a movement, dynamic in nature but leading
into the abyss (2009 [1947], 11).
Elizabeth Olson also contributes to the literature by
critiquing its topical focus, especially in how gender ques-
tions have been ignored. Olsons contribution pushes
open the geopolitics of gender a vastly under theorised
and discussed issue within critical geopolitics by using
Judith Butlers recent deconstruction of how state institu-
tions discipline Muslim bodies by gendering them tempo-
rally through a dualism of tradition/progress. Judith
Butlers claim is that state secularism authenticates reli-
gious practices as foundationally civilisational and
perhaps universal as it is cast as progressive, thereby
disciplining bodies through a geopolitics of modernity.
But Olson does so by expanding Butlers claim to recog-
nise the way multinational religious institutions like the
Catholic Church also enact disciplinary mechanisms on
the gendered body. Olson provides an empirical explana-
tion both using a discourse analysis of the Holy Sees
recent Letter to the Bishops . . . (2004) as it represents the
progressive ideas of the Church and also expanding the
methodological boundaries of the geopolitics of religion
by incorporating a short ethnographic sketch of how the
gender logic of the Catholic Church plays out between
Latin American nuns and priests.
Janette Habashis paper points out the limits to topics
available for discourse analysis by offering an ethnogra-
phy of yet another under-discussed topic: childrens geo-
politics. She does this by discussing the relationship
between Islam and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and
how the lived experience of both produces a specic
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geopolitical worldview of the war among young people.
Further, and unlike much of research on the geopolitics of
religion that has thus far privileged secular thought by
criticising religious geopolitics, Habashi shows how
Islamic idioms give children agency to resist the geopo-
litical agenda of the occupation.
Fiona McConnells paper, like Habashis, pushes the
topical envelope from the common Christian geopolitics
that is most often studied, to other religions like Islam, in
the case of Habashi, and Buddhism for McConnell.
McConnell takes an historical approach to illustrate that
Tibetan Buddhism is not underpinned by politics but
rather how Buddhist values and political policies are
inseparably entwined. McConnell argues that Buddhism
is not a foil for politics and that Tibetan policy is de facto
confessionalism, therefore she is studying religion on its
own terms despite the Chinese governments attempts to
separate the two in an attempt to delegitimise the Dalai
Lama and his successor as the religio-political leader of
Tibet. By exploring questions of legitimacy, agency and
authority, McConnell refuses the Western modern secular
penchant to geopolitically transpose a separation of reli-
gion and politics, especially in so far as this is done by
temporalising Buddhism as traditional practice and
(geo)politics as modern reason.
Religion, geopolitics and the secular
The subeld of religion and geopolitics is relatively incho-
ate, not least because the category of religion(s) is too
broad as a designation because each religion is made up
of divergent interpretations and performances. This vari-
ance makes it difcult to write of Christianity, for
example, and therefore requires methodological and
theoretical care. The inclusion in this volume of anthro-
pological methods and themes has helped focus attention
on racial and ethnic geographical difference as well as the
locality of global ows of religion. Within the geography
of religion literature such ethnography and participant
observation has been utilised but the focus has been on
community and identity formation and in particular the
urban manifestation of these relations. This literature
rarely engages with the political or power relations that
concerns work in critical geopolitics and therefore could
be seen as apolitical, apologetic or even anti-political.
This despite religion having real political inuence, effects
and, depending on ones theoretical perspective, under-
pinnings. As an example of this geopolitics, the political
scientist, Stuart Croft (2007, 692) argues that the Christian
Right has developed its own views on foreign policy that
challenge Realist, Liberal and Marxist positions, what
he terms evangelical foreign policy. Indeed religion is
returning to the public sphere or rather never left; perhaps
the secular public is even a product of religious vocabu-
laries, norms and values (Cloke 2010; Calhoun 2011).
This imbrication of religion and politics should suggest the
need for a focused analysis of religious geopolitics and the
geopolitics of religion. This volume attempts to make
present the political and power-laden manifestations of
religion and its production of geographies of fear, danger,
power, (in)security and ultimately qualications of/on
difference.
Modern concerns with geopolitics have excluded the
study of religion generally because of the assumption that
the modern world is a secular one and that religion is a
backwater on decline (Berger 1999). Recent work on
secularism and secularisation theory has challenged this
assumption, although with limited engagement within
geography (cf. Wilford 2010; Kong 2010). The assumption
is that by replacing religious faith with reason, modernity
has empowered us to interpret and contest meaning
as opposed to merely accepting religions supposedly
sanctied directives. Essentially this secularisation-as-
differentiation argument views religious reasons as ille-
gitimate in the political sphere and thus need secular
justication (Wilford 2010). Such a conception assumes
that politics is uncertain, so that any claims of religious
knowledge or inuence in politics are spurious
(Rosenberg and Harding 2005). Recent concerns have
shifted toward the postsecular, a move beyond the secu-
lars reductive assumptions about modern political
thoughts and specically the growing visibility of religions
in the public sphere, particularly as we might imagine an
anti-geopolitics critical of imprisonment, torture and war
that sees religious belief as multiple, pervasive and com-
plementary. As part of the postsecular turn, there has been
an explosion of interest on the concept of enchantment
that breaks with the Weberian iron cage of secularism by
positing that religion is much more pervasive in moder-
nity and (geo)political forms than the last 50 years of
social science has allowed. This includes renewed interest
in Adorno and Horkheimers (1979) theorisations that
attempt to collapse the binary modernity/myth (cf.
Bennett 2001; McAlister 2008; Saler 2006) and also a
renewed interest in the supposedly secular academy of
theology and theological insights (Connolly 2008).
Religion is not lived as a thing apart from other socio-
cultural phenomena; it can be studied analytically sepa-
rate from politics, for example, but it is always connected
to it. It is intimately wrapped into political systems and
domains, society and economy. It does not operate in
daily life as an independently separate variable, yet it can
still be analytically separated. Therefore it is not essential-
ist to talk about typical features of religion; we can speak
of regularities without metaphysical classication of time-
less or geographically static ontological things. We can
speak, then, of characteristic features. Typically theories of
religion in religious studies followed four main pursuits:
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1 the specicity of religions (modes of operation);
2 the origins of religions (their emergence);
3 the functions of religions (the way they relate); and
4 the structure of religion (mechanisms and regularities).
The concern for geographers is generally not why but
rather how religions now appear to be the way they are,
and how they perform a geopolitics of difference. The
concern for the authors within this special section has
been with performances rather than beliefs, which sug-
gests that almost anything, geopolitics included, can be
performatively religious.
Recent work in interdisciplinary religious studies sug-
gests that the eld of political geography has much to gain
and much to offer by opening up pathways between reli-
gion and geopolitics. For example, an emphasis on prac-
tice as opposed to doctrine, using both Pierre Bourdieu
(1977) and Talal Asad (1993) among others, has led to
some fruitful engagements with religion that see it as a
more legitimate and complex movement than the relent-
less knife of critical geopolitics that often focuses on text
would allow. Furthermore, non-representational theory
and affect disseminating from geography in the last 10
years have received short shrift in political geography
generally and have much to offer religious geopolitics
and the geopolitics of religion, this despite the clear
interaction between religion, affect and politics (Carter
and McCormack 2006; Sturm and Wilford forthcoming).
Four analytical frames: explanation, element,
typology, analogy
As a general contribution to the analytics of religion and
geopolitics, this introduction considers four analytical
lines of inquiry for future research at the intersection of
religion and geopolitics. This is not to encourage future
research to be slotted into these categories but rather to
have writers acknowledge the epistemology of their
research. I borrow three of these categories from Roger
Brubakers (2006) analytical approach to the connection
between religion and nationalism. The rst is that religion
might be able to explain something about geopolitics,
particularly its origins. The second would explore how
religion is integral to geopolitical imaginations, that it is
often an element of geopolitical constructions. The third
would be that there is a particular religious typology of
geopolitics analytically separate from the tripartite practi-
cal, formal and popular that requires new methods and
theories. And the fourth approach is an analogous con-
struction religion as geopolitics. Such an analytical strat-
egy might prove helpful to organise future research by
illustrating new analytical paths and old pitfalls. In no way
should religion and geopolitics be conned to these ana-
lytics, nor are these analytics mutually exclusive. This is
merely an attempt to widen discussion and debate and
perhaps bring some coherence to this exciting line of
inquiry in critical geopolitics.
Explain: origins and power
The rst way to study the relationship is that religion
explains something about geopolitics. This of course can
take many forms depending on what it is about geopoli-
tics that is being explained and what part of religion is
doing that explanation. Here I focus on the origins of
geopolitics.
Geopolitical imaginations long preceded its coining by
Rudoph Kjellen in 1899. In Kjellens time, geopoliticians
most commonly employed geography for military and/or
nationalistic purposes. Geopolitics was used to make stra-
tegic predictions based on what was perceived to be rooted
in physical geographical features, distance, and territory.
The socio-cultural elements like religion were not seen as
variables within the practice of geopolitics, despite reli-
gious assumptions entering their calculations through per-
sonal beliefs or cultural norms about other places (see
Megoran 2013, this issue, on what might be called the
historical beginnings of apocalyptic geopolitics).
I use Hobbess Leviathan to illustrate this point. Hobbes
is often read in a selective and presentist way to claim that
decisions of the state should not be decided by moral
inuence but rather by rational interest. However,
Hobbes Leviathan devoted two of the four books to reli-
gion. While Books I and II, Of Man and Of Common-
Wealth are most often read and quoted, the little read
and much less studied Books III and IV, Of a Christian
Common-Wealth and Of the Kingdome of Darknesse,
receive little attention. Realist scholarship has long
ignored how Hobbes himself was stuck in a theist millen-
nial trap within the temporal frame of his time. Time was
still thought of as contiguous, not progressing forward, but
stuck in a cycle of life that could only change with Christs
disrupting return (Koselleck 2004). Following Martel
(2004), Hobbes himself called into question absolute sov-
ereignty, seeing the inter-state system and absolute terri-
torial sovereignty as one point en route to a cosmopolitan,
and Christian, Kingdom of God.
Therefore, rather than a presentist reading of Hobbes
secular perspective, we must understand the beginnings
of geopolitical thought as having its roots in religious
thought. This said, we should not confuse the result with
the origin of the phenomenon, that is, just because geo-
politics arose from a Hobbesian world on the verge of
Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment imaginations of
nature and Hegelian ideas of history, all of which are
movements toward a theory of secularism. Geopolitics, as
John Agnew (2003) points out, may precede not only its
name but also may have its roots in religious methods of
exclusion and division.
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An element of geopolitics
Analysing the connection between religion and geopoli-
tics sees religion not as something outside of geopolitics
that helps to explain it, but as something that is inter-
twined with geopolitics as to be part of the phenomenon.
Religion does not necessarily dene the geopolitical
imagination, but it supplies myths that are central to geo-
political imaginations. But it may not make sense to sepa-
rate out religion from geopolitics, as it is often an essential
part that makes up geopolitical thought, as is language,
race, environment, economics and ethnicity. To remove
one or more of these would leave geopolitics empty (see
McConnell 2013, this issue, on the inseparability of reli-
gion and politics).
Perhaps the most obvious way to study religion as being
part of geopolitics is through language. It has long been
hinted at that religion has had much inuence from
American geopolitical and security regimes to wider
European assemblages. In Carl Schmitts formulation, he
writes,
all signicant concepts of the modern theory of the state
are secularised theological concepts . . . the omnipotent
God became the omnipotent law giver. (1985, 36)
Thus Schmitt, although not talking about geopolitics,
argues that religious ideas can be secularised, in his case,
the theory of the state had a theological pedigree. But
beyond the analogies that Schmitt makes clear here, it is
necessary to outline the social formations in which they
occurred. It is not necessarily then, as Asad (1999) avers,
that secular ideas are just transplanted religious ideas.
Using religious tropes and motifs for political purposes
is not new, from Cromwells declaration of the English
nation by the hand of God to Hitlers use of Christianity,
there are political consequences hiding under a veil of
religious language often as a last resort for legitimacy
(Shapiro 1984). We must ask, what authority does reli-
gious voice have in geopolitics, does it simply enrich the
language? And how is religious language merely a meta-
phor in a language inseparable from religious references?
Therefore, at what point is religiously tinged language
secular? And how is religious language, beyond the inten-
tions of the speaker, received? If anything, we can surmise
that a binary between religious and secular is far too
simplistic, especially in pluralistic societies like the USA.
One cannot remove religion or relegate it to the private
sphere; this only puts a foil on a persistent and present
connection (see Olson 2013, this issue, on the religiosity
of the secular).
To avoid the question of what is meant by employing
religiously tinged language we can move to questions of
reception and affect. Compassion, fear, anger, anxiety and
other performances can mobilise opinion and action.
Ahmed (2004) further argues that emotions are integral to
the analysis of politics because they are not individual but
are rather historically and culturally contingent. Therefore
they are not universal, but rather have very specic geog-
raphies and geo-politics (cf. Moisi 2010). To conclude,
while there will always be elements of religion within a
geopolitical make up, what counts as religion is not
always apparent and requires different methods and
theories.
Religious geopolitics: typology
The claim that there can be a typology called religious
geopolitics does not simply mean that geopolitical rheto-
ric is infused with religious imagery, or that geopolitical
imaginations are cast and created in religiously inspired
language. It is not simply a claim about religeopolitical
interpenetration or resonance. Thus the concern here is
not necessarily rhetorical, but rather the composition and
subject matter. The claim would be that there is a type of
religious geopolitics, fundamentally different from secular
geopolitics. While such a formulation is fraught with
problems from the start concerning what counts as reli-
gious and what secular, we can assume a religious actor
claims to speak in the name of their religion is performing
for that cause (see Habashi 2013, this issue, on Palestinian
childrens Islamic geopolitics).
Implicit in ignoring religion in international relations
and geopolitics is a theory of secularisation that posits that
the roots of the sovereign state system emerged from the
differentiation of religion. Subsequently it is thought that
the fertile ground of Enlightenment-led modernity was
dened by a rise in non-religious ethics and the decline of
religious actors. However, recent challenges to secular
modernity by cultural theorists point out that modernity is
founded on its own religious myths and that there is a
pervasive enchantment that runs through all modernity at
every scale from the body to the state. The distinctions
between myth/modernity, religion/secular, enchantment/
enlightenment, rational/emotional are largely set up
against their binary to justify their own foundation (Saler
2006). So-called secular society, and by extension geo-
politics, is infused with enchanted and mythical beliefs.
Modernity itself is built on Christian myths not necessarily
by contrast, but assumed within itself. Given Western
societys pervasive enchantment, the typology of what
might be called religious geopolitics can be read as
almost anything.
Analogous constructions: religion as geopolitics
The last way to study the connection is through analogy.
Geopolitics and religion are both ways of seeing the
world. Geopolitics is a perspective on the world, a way of
seeing the world, not a thing in the world: a way of
expressing interests, categorising the world and signifying
events. Religion too, analogous to geopolitics, can serve
these same functions.
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Durkheim argued that religions essence is its sacrali-
sation of the social itself. Therefore religion has attached
itself to another kind of social object, that of geopolitics.
However, are the social processes of cohesion, identica-
tion, othering the same as in the geopolitical imagination?
Geopolitics satises a simple psychological function for
understanding the world and its processes. It, like religion,
is an arena for grand narratives that are bigger than an
individuals everyday life. Religion, like geopolitics, can
be a mode of identifying with and excluding others. While
geopolitics is not a performative arena for overcoming
death or achieving heavenly salvation, it is often a site for
formulating an earthly or immanent redemption, that if
the worlds processes can be dened and mapped in this
or that way, then we can save ourselves.
One could characterise the similarities between the
terms as worldviews that are inevitably politicised and
called upon to interpret world processes and how to act in
the world religion as a form of geopolitics. Both derive
from and form a set of myths and truths about the world,
for which one must have faith. This analogous analytic
may potentially be fruitful at the level of identity, where
both geopolitics and religion rely on a way of seeing the
world and a way to identify others at a cognitive level.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jay Joshi, Tyler McCreary, Rob
Sullivan and Justin Wilford for edits and the reviewers for their
helpful suggestions. All mistakes or misrepresentations are the
authors alone.
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