The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, particularly in the wake of the so-called "postsecular turn". Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.
While the positive relationship between democracies and peace is by now a commonplace of international relations (IR) literature, the possible dangers of democratization processes for international peace and security have only recently become a focus of IR research. This article argues that some of the mechanisms prevalent in democratizing states' ambivalent conflict behaviour help to explain why the state of Israel initially entered into the peace process with the Palestinians, but soon reverted to former hostile policies. In the initial stages of the peace process in the early 1990s, the Labour-led government based its efforts towards peace on the typical norms of democratic peace and thus explicitly stated the need to improve Israel's defective democratic regime. This involved amending the electoral system by ending the de facto control of the Palestinians in the territories, who did not participate in Israeli democratic politics. However, the prospect of 'land for peace' threatened the politicized religious Jewish settler-elite in the territories who feared not only the destruction of the basic tenets of their religious identity, but also the loss of both power and resources in Israeli politics. As a consequence, this threatened elite engaged in fierce religious-nationalist mobilization in order to derail the peace negotiations and at the same time subvert the process of improving Israel's democratic regime.
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