Religion and International Relations in the Middle East
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Religion and International Relations in the Middle East • Sotiris Roussos Religion and International Relations in the Middle East Edited by Sotiris Roussos Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religion and International Relations in the Middle East Religion and International Relations in the Middle East Special Issue Editor Sotiris Roussos MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Sotiris Roussos Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of the Peloponnese Greece Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) in 2020 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/ international relations). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03936-527-2 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03936-528-9 (PDF) c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Sotiris Roussos Introduction—Issues and Debates on Religion and International Relations in the Middle East Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 263, doi:10.3390/rel11050263 ................... 1 Mariano Barbato Postsecular Plurality in the Middle East: Expanding the Postsecular Approach to a Power Politics of Becoming Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 162, doi:10.3390/rel11040162 ................... 9 Anna M. Solarz Religion and International Relations in the Middle East as a Challenge for International Relations (IR) Studies Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 150, doi:10.3390/rel11030150 ................... 20 Marina Eleftheriadou Fragmentation and Cooperation in the Jihadi International (Sub)System: ‘Islamic State’ vs. Al-Qaeda and Beyond Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 168, doi:10.3390/rel11040168 ................... 41 Ihab Shabana Crusaders in Reverse? The Emergence of Political Islam in the Middle East and the Reactions of British Foreign Policy, 1978–1990 Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 196, doi:10.3390/rel11040196 ................... 57 Moria Bar-Maoz A Theory on the Involvement of Religion in National Security Policy Formulation and Implementation: The Case of Israel before and after the Religionization of Its Security Environment Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 227, doi:10.3390/rel11050227 ................... 71 Panos Kourgiotis ‘Moderate Islam’ Made in the United Arab Emirates: Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Containment Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 43, doi:10.3390/rel11010043 .................... 96 Stella Athanasoulia From ‘Soft’ to ‘Hard’ to ‘Moderate’: Islam in the Dilemmas of Post-2011 Saudi Foreign Policy Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 211, doi:10.3390/rel11040211 ...................113 v About the Special Issue Editor Sotiris Roussos Associate Professor of International Relations and Religion in the Middle East and the Mediterranean at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Peloponnese and Scientific Supervisor of the Centre for Mediterranean, Middle East, and Islamic Studies (CEMMIS). From 2015 to 2018, he was Coordinator of the Centre for Religious Pluralism in Middle East (CRPME). He served as Senior Middle East Expert at the Greek Foreign Ministry, and was member of the Task Force for the Palestinian Refugees and Water Issues of the EU Special Representative for the Middle East and of the International Informal Group on the Status of Jerusalem. Sotiris Roussos was, in 2009, appointed Personal Envoy for the Mediterranean Partners of the President-in-Office of the OSCE. He was Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2012. He has written extensively on the Middle-East Christians as well as on religion and regional politics in the Middle East. vii religions Editorial Introduction—Issues and Debates on Religion and International Relations in the Middle East Sotiris Roussos Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of the Peloponnese, 20132 Corinth, Greece; [email protected] Received: 18 April 2020; Accepted: 19 May 2020; Published: 21 May 2020 Abstract: By the end of the 20th century, after great political upheavals, two world wars, the decolonization process and political, social and scientific revolutions, it is hard to miss that the world is in a deep de-secularization process. In the Middle East, this process has taken multiple trajectories and has made geopolitics of religion central in reshaping regional issues and in restructuring modes of international politics and international system’s intervention in the Middle East. Keywords: religion; international relations; Middle East; Islam; foreign policy regional politics; non-state actors; global order 1. The Role of Religion in International Politics International Relations theories have been based on the argument that the Westphalian Treaty excluded religion from international politics, pushing it outside of the public sphere. Religion belonged, according to this argument, to the sphere of individual and of the irrational, and as such could not be considered in analyzing international politics. Cold War international relations saw in religion a mere ideological tool, despite that the Irish issue, the India–Pakistan conflict and the Iran–Iraq war had an inherent religious element. Political science theories had, for analytical purposes, reduced religions to institutions and handily categorized them as non-government or transnational organizations, mere elements of the civil society acting in accordance with rational choice theory. What stays out of scope in such definitions is the experience of the communion with God, the spiritual life of religious communities (Kubálková 2000, pp. 682–83). Since the Enlightenment, among political and social thinkers and scientists prevailed the view that religion constitutes a relic system of ideas of pre-modern societies of the past, and that technological progress and the development of modern political institutions would minimize its role in society (Roussos 2015, p. 54). Central in this exclusion of religion from international relations is the theory of secularization in modern societies, understood either as a decline in people’s religiosity and/or as a process of withdrawal of religion from the public to the private (Fox 2001, p. 56). Following the secularization theory, the modernization processes not only would reduce religion to the private sphere, but they also would eliminate religious influence on the society. This approach overlooks, however, several issues that place religion at the center of the public sphere even during periods of modernization. First, the decline of the role of religion was never lineal; instead we observe several moments of religious revival in the midst of rapid modernization. The nineteenth century, an era of intense globalized modernization was also an era of tremendous reach of world religions and of their missionary, educational, publishing and cultural impact (Bayly 2004, p. 325). Pankaj Mishra focuses on two great late 19th century Asian intellectuals, al-Afghani and Liang Qichao, who tried to reconsider their religious tradition in order to bring it in harmony with an onward modern intellectual movement (Mishra 2012). In the early twentieth century the Irish national movement enlisted the structural rigor and the spiritual influence of the Catholic Church (English 2008). The Algerian anticolonial movement, in the Religions 2020, 11, 263; doi:10.3390/rel11050263 1 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 263 interwar period, was based mainly on the dichotomy between French and Muslims (Zack 2002, p. 80). Hindu and American Christian fundamentalisms were formed in the late 1920s. Secularization theory treats all religions as monolithic, static and uniform. It also refers to a certain episode or episodes and historical periods and not to a wider circle of decline and reassertion of religion. Nationalism has been seen as a secular ideology but in fact it has integrated religion by nationalizing it. Greek, Hindu, Jewish and Irish nationalisms have been largely defined by religion, while Britain and the Netherlands were long considered Protestant nations before including the Catholics in the nation-state (van der Veer 2015, pp. 9–10). Two centuries after the Westphalian Treaty, religion had re-asserted its role in the public sphere, impacting considerably on the global order. In the early 19th century, religious leaders played a decisive role in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the Second and Third Great Religious Awakenings influenced modern American social culture and activism. Ibn Taimiyya, a 13th century Muslim thinker, influenced Islamist movements in the 20th century. At the end of the 19th century, after two industrial