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Over the past decade, international politics has awoken from its fifty-year sleep to begin to take seriously, once again, the implications of religion. The 'exile' of religion from international politics (Petito and Hatzopoulos, 2003) ended when allegedly ethnic and religious violence broke out in the former Yugoslavia, former Soviet republics, and Central and East Africa after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Sociology and to a degree comparative politics were ahead of the curve, responding by the 1980s to events in Afghanistan and Iran, the spread of Liberation theologies and evangelicalism, and the 'public' face of religion in Eastern Europe and the US (Casanova, 1994). The upshot of much of the renewed interest in religion in these fields was the rejection of the secularization thesis. Peter Berger, a doyen of this thesis (which, in brief, argued that modernization must be accompanied by secularization), is now a leader in asserting that its assumptions ignore the persistence and growth of religious belief on a global level (Berger, 1999).1 Instead, the concept of 'multiple modernities', which acknowledges the existence of a variety of religious/secular forms in the contemporary world (Eisenstadt, 2000), is replacing the assumption that modernization inevitably diminishes the influence of religion in society.
Yet, in international relations, the initial attempts to make up for lost time in studying religion have often oversimplified it, trying to understand religion as unchanging dogma rather than evolving practice. When scholars take religion seriously, however, they can open up interpretive and constitutive areas of inquiry as well as important ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues for the field. Thus, tensions between dogma and practice in international politics as well as in religion itself are exposed. Paradoxically, opening these lines of inquiry can also provide a more robust basis for understanding and explaining concerns at the forefront of international politics today; that is, the relation between either religion and violence, or religion and peace.
I argue that equating religion with dogma is insufficient for assessing its role and importance. Rather, the most useful way to analyze religion in international politics is through examining its practice - the intertwining of ethics and action - in a variety of contexts, which requires conceptual and substantive work...