The Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against Israel seeks to embed the Palestinian struggle within the Global Justice Movement in order to mobilize support from transnational ...business and civil society actors. The article analyzes how two important Christian faith-based organizations respond to the BDS movement's global justice frame: the World Council of Churches (WCC) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Drawing on recent research into justice in international relations, the analysis shows the process of normative interaction between diverging justice claims of the BDS campaign and these Christian organizations.
The State of Israel seems to be caught in a protracted conflict - not only with the Palestinians, but also between secular and religious variants of national identity. Moreover, both conflicts ...intersect: While the secular population is held to be the liberal, peaceful part of Israeli society which is ready for a compromise with the Palestinians, the religious nationalists are identified with hawkish policies and the settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories. This common perception reflects the secularist assumption that religion and politics can be analytically distinguished and should be factually separated for the sake of democracy, pluralism and peace. Yet such an approach neglects the dense interrelations and overlaps between religious and secular nationalism throughout the history of the Jewish state. A different analytical perspective which treats these seemingly opposing conceptions of national identity as closely intertwined reveals how they have concurred in promoting and legitimizing the overriding raison d'état of the Jewish state as well as the occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories.
While the positive relationship between democracies and peace is by now a commonplace of international relations (IR) literature, the possible dangers of democratization processes for international ...peace and security have only recently become a focus of IR research. This article argues that some of the mechanisms prevalent in democratizing states' ambivalent conflict behaviour help to explain why the state of Israel initially entered into the peace process with the Palestinians, but soon reverted to former hostile policies. In the initial stages of the peace process in the early 1990s, the Labour-led government based its efforts towards peace on the typical norms of democratic peace and thus explicitly stated the need to improve Israel's defective democratic regime. This involved amending the electoral system by ending the de facto control of the Palestinians in the territories, who did not participate in Israeli democratic politics. However, the prospect of 'land for peace' threatened the politicized religious Jewish settler-elite in the territories who feared not only the destruction of the basic tenets of their religious identity, but also the loss of both power and resources in Israeli politics. As a consequence, this threatened elite engaged in fierce religious-nationalist mobilization in order to derail the peace negotiations and at the same time subvert the process of improving Israel's democratic regime.
The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, ...particularly in the wake of the so-called "postsecular turn". Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.
The article critically reviews Karsten Lehmann's reading of the debate on religion's role in International Relations. Contrary to Lehman, it is argued that IR by & large remains a secularist ...discipline. Moreover, his distinction between micro- & macroperspectives of religion in IR scholarship lacks the analytical clarity needed to conceptualize the interdependence of religion & politics. Alternatively, his empirical example of human rights advocacy by the World Council of Churches could serve as an example for a broader research endeavor on transtiational religious activism. Borrowing from social movement theory, research should focus on how & to what effect a rapidly growing population of faith-based actors constructs collective action frames, mobilizes resources & uses the opportunity structure of global governance. Adapted from the source document.
Dieser Forumsbeitrag setzt sich kritisch mit Karsten Lehmanns Rezeption der Debatte über Religion in den Internationalen Beziehungen auseinander. Im Gegensatz zu Lehmann wird argumentiert, dass die ...IB noch immer eine weitgehend säkularistische Diszplin sind. Seine Identifikation von mikro-und makroperspektivischen Religionskonzeptionen bleibt zudem zu vage, um seiner Forderung nach einer Fokussierung aufdielnterdependenz von Religion und Politik analytischen Mehrwert zu verleihen. Alternativ könnte sein empirisches Beispiel -die Menschenrechtsarbeit des Ökumenischen Rates der Kirchen in den Vereinten Nationen -als ein erster Baustein eines breiteren Forschungsprogramms zu transnationalen religiösen Akteuren in den IB gelesen werden. Zu untersuchen wäre einerseits, wie religiöse Akteure kollektive Handlungsrahmen konstruieren und Ressourcen mobilisieren, um die Opportunitätsstruktur von global governance für ihre religiös begründeten öffentlichen Anliegen zu nutzen; und andererseits, wie sich dieser neue religiöse Aktivismus inhaltlich auswirkt. The article critically reviews Karsten Lehmann's reading of the debate on religion's role in International Relations. Contrary to Lehman, it is argued that IR by and large remains a secularist discipline. Moreover, his distinction between micro-and macroperspectives of religion in IR scholarship lacks the analytical clarity needed to conceptualize the interdependence of religion and politics. Alternatively, his empirical example of human rights advocacy by the World Council of Churches could serve as an example for a broader research endeavour on transnational religious activism. Borrowing from social movement theory, research should focus on how and to what effect a rapidly growing population of faith-based actors constructs collective action frames, mobilizes resources and uses the opportunity structure of global governance.
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