Recognizing religion: Politics, history, and the “long 19th century”

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Analyses of religion and international politics routinely concern the persistence of religion as a critical element in world affairs. However, they tend to neglect the constitutive interconnections between religion and political life. Consequently, religion is treated as exceptional to mainstream politics. In response, recent works focus on the relational dimensions of religion and international politics. This article advances an “entangled history” approach that emphasizes the constitutive, relational, and historical dimensions of religion — as a practice, discursive formation, and analytical category. It argues that these public dimensions of religion share their conditions of possibility and intelligibility in a political order that crystallized over the long 19th century. The neglect of this period has enabled International Relations to treat religion with a sense of closure at odds with the realities of religious political behavior and how it is understood. Refocusing on religion’s historical entanglements recovers the concept as a means of explaining international relations by “recognizing” how it is constituted as a category of social life. Beyond questions of the religious and political, this article speaks to renewed debates about the role of history in International Relations, proposing entanglement as a productive framing for international politics more generally.