{"id":663,"date":"2014-05-27T07:44:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T07:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/david-smith-on-religion-international-relations-and-foreign-policy.html"},"modified":"2014-05-27T07:44:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T07:44:00","slug":"david-smith-on-religion-international-relations-and-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/05\/david-smith-on-religion-international-relations-and-foreign-policy.html","title":{"rendered":"David Smith on Religion, International Relations, and Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Does religion affect the way nations interact with one another? Does it affect foreign policy?\u00a0 And if so, why have scholars of international relations ignored the role of religion until recently?\u00a0\u00a0David Smith<\/strong>, a lecturer at the University of Sydney in the\u00a0Department of Government and International Relations\u00a0<\/strong>and a researcher in the\u00a0United States Studies Program<\/strong>, provides us with an overview of how religion has played, and possibly still plays, a role in international relations and foreign policy.<\/span><\/div>\n

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We start out with an overview of the field of international relations (IR), a sub-discipline in political science (and one that stretches across other academic fields), and why scholars working in that area have, until recently, ignored religion.\u00a0 David takes us back to 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia to explain this general academic oversight.\u00a0 It is argue that since Western Europe essentially took the \u201creligious question\u201d off the table in the real of interstate conflict and diplomacy following the Thirty Year\u2019s War, it was never considered to be a point of interest to scholars studying IR.\u00a0 Add to this the general tendency to favor materialist and realpolitik explanations in studying nation-states, and religion never seemed to be something interesting to study.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Things begin to change in the IR field with the 1979 Iranian Revolution.\u00a0 We note that although the Peace of Westphalia may have conditioned thinking about the role of religion (and ideas more generally) in diplomacy, the rest of the world really wasn\u2019t party to this worldview.\u00a0 The general pattern of thinking in U.S. foreign policy prior to 1979 was that Islam would always be an ally to America in the battle against communism, thus the popular revolt that swept Islamists to power in Iran caught policymakers by surprise.\u00a0 Prof. Smith notes that the Iranian revolution has had the effect in the US State Department of creating a concern over popular uprisings with religious overtones.\u00a0 He illustrates this with the recent US reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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Does religion affect the way nations interact with one another? Does it affect foreign policy?\u00a0 And if so, why have scholars of international relations ignored the role of religion until recently?\u00a0\u00a0David Smith, a lecturer at the University of Sydney in the\u00a0Department of Government and International Relations\u00a0and a researcher in the\u00a0United States Studies Program, provides us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Smith on Religion, International Relations, and Foreign Policy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Does religion affect the way nations interact with one another? 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