Content area
Full text
Underdevelopment is also a state of mind, and understanding it as a state of mind, or as a form of consciousness, is the critical problem. Understanding development as a state of mind occurs when mass needs are converted to the demand for new brands of packaged solutions which are forever beyond the reach of the majority.1
-Ivan Illich
We live in a world that is not supposed to exist. Religion was supposed to decline with modernization and economic development.2 Depending on your preferred version of the end of history, Marxist or socialist ideology were supposed to mobilize the wretched of earth to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, or capitalism and liberal democracy were supposed to transform the world. Yet over the past thirty years, to the surprise of Western governments and social scientists, it has been religion rather than secular ideology that has increasingly mobilized people in developing countries. This global resurgence of religion is transforming foreign policy debates regarding diplomacy, national security, democracy promotion and development assistance.3
Scholars of international relations have increasingly examined the global resurgence of religion over the past decade. Various concepts-religious radicalism, extremism, militancy, revivalism, resurgence and fundamentalism-have been used to label, define and describe the global religious phenomena. Scholars simply do not agree on what these concepts are supposed to convey about religion and politics, what social or political groups they refer to-the BJP in India, the AKP in Turkey, Egypt's Muslim Brothers, the Christian Coalition in the United States-nor what they convey about religion and international relations. This disagreement is demonstrated in the Fundamentalism Project, the MacArthur Foundation's massively funded research on religion worldwide led by Martin E. Marty, a leading church historian at the University of Chicago and R. Scott Appleby, a leading scholar of Catholic studies at the University of Notre Dame. This analytical and conceptual problem is also seen more popularly in "God's Warriors," CNN's August 2007 documentary on religion and world politics.4 Both studies equated serious religiosity with fundamentalism, which remains a popular interpretation of the role of religion in international relations.5
However, the concept of a global resurgence of religion has been challenged by a revised version of the theory of secularization. The orthodox theory argued that secularization, a decline in the importance and...