Religion and foreign policy

Abstract

Religion has become (again) a recognisable significant factor in many aspects of international politics. Any consideration of its role inevitably raises in the mind of the British reader the current threat of terrorism from ‘Al Qaida and related terrorist groups’ as MI5 puts it (1). For reasons that I will return to later, this ‘international terrorism’ is not labelled as being in any sense related to, or derived from Islam officially in the British language – MI5 describes the threat as being not even from readings of Islam, but rather from ‘Al Qaeda’s ideology’ (2). But all recognise this terrorist threat as being related in some form to religion. The attacks on New York and Washington, Bali, Istanbul, London, Madrid – have all brought into sharp relief the mobilising effect of religion. But religion is not only important in the twenty-first century because of those terrorist acts and threats