The future of religious geopolitics: towards a research and theory agenda

Abstract

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.

Religion and gender inequality: The status of women in the societies of world religions

“…Muslim and Hindu societies are expected to undergo the most significant changes in order to achieve this. But changes can occur in the opposite direction as well, due to the rise of religious fundamentalism and post-secularism (Sturm, 2013). Even in the more liberal Christian and Buddhist societies, progress towards absolute gender equality has not reached its final destination.…”

The Geopolitics of Religions Christian-Islamization of the Planet Between 1900 and 2100

“…With the overpopulation of the planet, fulminant development and population education, by stopping colonialism and expanding democracies culminating in the globalization and emergence of an increasing number of independent and sovereign states, Christian and Islamic mega-religions tend to encompass the entire planet, moving from their traditional value, through a combination of scientific and archaeological discoveries, to a value with a modern tinge in which science has not become challenged to religion and the proof of existence (Keller, 2009;Avram, 2009;Herman and Grama, 2018;Sturm, 2013).…”

Postsecularity, Political Resistance, and Protest in the Occupy Movement

“…Although Occupy represents a highly significant series of event‐spaces in its own right, we suggest that it provides a significant opportunity both to examine emergent postsecularity in political protest, and more generally to reconfigure the hegemonic grammars by which relations between politics and religion are typically understood. Political economic analyses of contemporary globalisation and governance tend to associate religious belief, ritual and institutions as natural collaborators in the promulgation of the logics, spatialities and subjectivities of neoconservativism and neoliberalism (see, for example, Dittmer and Sturm ; Goode ; Hackworth ; Jordan ; Sturm ). Drawing on imaginaries that are disproportionately fuelled by the strange and widely mediated antics of “Tea Party” Republicanism in the US (Rosenthal ; Skocpol and Williamson ), some political geographers seem prone to assume that the role of religion in Western Europe and America is to shore up and inspire the political right as part of the Evangelical‐Capitalist resonance machine (Connolly ), and thus to serve as significant “little platoons” that simply perform the inherently problematic duties of neoliberal revanchism and global injustice (Peck and Tickell ; Smith ).…”