Thinking about Religion and Religious Soft Power in International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis

Abstract

Abstract This chapter introduces the volume by offering a survey of scholarship on religion in international relations (IR) to date and explaining the sources of religion’s exclusion from the canon of IR. It proceeds to frame the concept of religious soft power as a useful supplement to Joseph Nye’s well known formulation of soft power, arguing that current shifts in global order are generating renewed salience for religion as an instrument of statecraft. The chapter then provides an overview of the volume and its contents, showing how the various country case studies and theoretical discussions that collectively comprise the book offer a comprehensive analytic portrait of emerging cross-national patterns in the use of religion as a tool of foreign policy.