The Intellectual Sources of Diplomacy's Religion Deficit

Since the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, there has been an outpouring of books and articles on religion and international relations (IR). Like the attacks themselves, however, the new focus on religion among IR scholars was so unexpected that one study labeled it religion's 'return from exile'. 2 It had been a long exile indeed. Since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, a major premise of IR was that religion had been subordinated to the state. The result, as IR scholar Daniel Philpott puts it, was that most in the field simply 'assumed the absence of religion among the factors that influence states'.