The religious turn reconsidered

摘要

It may be the case that even 10 years ago the question posed in this collection would have been a very surprising - perhaps even a heretical - question to ask in the study of International Relations (IR; heretical in the sense of challenging the secular self-understanding of the discipline). It is still probably a surprise for many scholars to hear the idea that there has been a 'religious renaissance' or 'religious turn' in the study of IR. This collection grapples with the idea that previously stable concepts, categories, or distinctions, which almost appear to those of us in Europe or the West as natural concepts or distinctions - what constitutes the religious, the sacred, and the secular - and what constitutes the political or even the economic, have been de-centred - and, perhaps, even destabilized, by the impact on theory, and theorizing of the global resurgence of religion taking place in IR.