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Wolff, S. (2017). “Religion and secularism relevance to US and European foreign policies”. Global Affairs, published online 16 June 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2017.1336329
Pre-Print Version accepted 26 May 2017 Beyond Religious Freedom. The New Global Politics of Religion Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015 ISBN: 9780691166094 Securing the Sacred. Religion, National Security and the Western State. Robert M. Bosco University of Michigan 2014, ISBN: 978-0-472-11922-6 Secular Wars. Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence Stacy Gutkowski IB Tauris, 2013. ISBN: 9781780765358 ‘Religion plays a role in politics – not always for good, not always for bad. Religion can be part of the process. What makes the difference is whether the process is democratic or not’, declared the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) Federica Mogherini (Mogherini, 2015). Referring to the role of Islam during the Arab uprisings, this statement proves the rising awareness of European foreign policy-makers for religion in international relations. Although this has been common practice for US foreign-policy makers, where religious groups are more influential, since 9/11 secular European foreign affair ministries are getting to grips with religion. The Foreign Commonwealth Office has developed a toolkit on the Freedom of Religion of Belief (FoRB) and French laïc foreign-policymakers are developing strategic expertise on religious issues. The European External Action Service is also training its diplomats on religious issues (Wolff, 2015) and promoting ‘religious literacy’ (EEAS, 2016). From a research perspective, these developments are rarely being analysed. Europe remains indeed the most secularized continent in the world, and its academics were late in acknowledging that modernization does not necessarily leads to more secularization. Globalization, migration and democratization provide religious actors with a rehabilitated voice on the international stage (Cochran Bech and Snyder, 2011). However empirical in-depth studies substantiating these claims are seldom. The three books under study fill in this gap and analyse how religion, faith and their corollary secularism impact international relations but also states’ and international organizations’ behaviour. They all consider that religion and secularism are factors of international relations that merit to be further researched. Stacey Gutkowski’s book provides the most remarkable analysis of British ‘secular’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the massive amount of studies on the war on terror, dealing inter alia with securitization theory, strategic narrative of elites towards Western public opinion or counter-terrorism, she makes a pivotal claim by arguing that British foreign policy makers have acted according to their secular habitus. Following Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus, she argues that religion played a central role in ‘Western security perceptions and policy from 20019’ (p.2). Gutkowski offers a sophisticated and nuanced approach which highlights that the encounter between religion and secularism ‘produces far more messy, ambiguous, fluid and reciprocal results’ (p. 6). In doing so, she builds upon the work of critical scholars such as Hurd, that considers secularism as a specific worldview in international relations. Secular habits do not always necessarily have negative consequences. They produce ‘tolerance of cultural difference and a warm reception of ‘moderate’ religious actors among policy-makers and implementers as often as it did suspicion and securitization’ (p. 21). Embedded in the field of war studies, her meticulous, though too long, study dissects the impact of the Western secular habitus on warfare and how reversely Western warfare impacts on ‘the taken for granted secular habits of everyday Western life and politics’ (p. 7). Methodologically sound, the study relies 1