Introduction ‘The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, caught the United States and the West by surprise’. -
Jonathan Fox, 2004 Religion, Civilization and Civil War i
“[R]eligion’s place in political science scholarship is vastly underproportioned to its place in headlines around the globe” -
Daniel Philpott, 2009 “Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?” ii
It has been ten years since Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked passenger aeroplanes and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. The effect of the attacks on global politics and International Relations has been mixed, with some scholars arguing that the world changed irrevocably after 9/11 (Ikenberry 2001: 19; Statham Jr 2003: 221; Benvenisti 2004: 695; Johnstone 2004: 829), while others claimed the world was no different (Cox 2003: 3; Gray 2002: 226; Waltz 2002: 350-352). One of the most enduring effects of the 9/11 attacks has been the questions it raised about the role of religion. What the Al-Qaeda attacks emphasized, perhaps more than any other event in recent history, was that religion continues to be a powerful force in global politics (Philpott 2002), yet one whose influence is only partially understood by scholars and practitioners alike. The inability of any International Relations theory to predict that an event like the 9/11 attacks was even possible, coupled with the surprise and shock of scholars, policymakers and the general public in the West in response to the attacks, signalled that something was amiss in the way that International Relations scholars approached global politics in general and the question of religion in particular (Philpott 2002). Since then, there has been growing recognition amongst International Relations scholars of the existence of a “secularist bias” within the field (and, arguably, in public and political discourses within the West more generally). This bias in many ways explains why, for much of the history of International Relations, scholars failed to even consider the place of religion within global politics (Fox 2001). Other more recent works have emphasized how this bias contributes to inaccurate and incomplete