Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 1/08

Journal of International Affairs

RELIGION & STATECRAFT
Vol. 61, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2007

EDITORS' FOREWORD (PDF, 3 pages, 80 KB)

CAPSTONE ESSAY

• Michael Blake
  Tolerance and Theocracy: How Liberal States Should Think of Religious States

  Michael Blake is an associate professor of philosophy and public policy at the University of Washington. He has previously taught at the Kennedy School of Government and at Harvard College. His research interests are in international ethics and multicultural political justice. He received his B.A. in philosophy and economics from the University of Toronto and his legal training at Yale Law School. He specializes in social and political philosophy, philosophy of law and international ethics.

ESSAYS

• Scott M. Thomas
  Outwitting the Developed Countries? Existential Insecurity and the Global Resurgence of Religion

  Scott M. Thomas lectures on international relations and the politics of developing countries in the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages at the University of Bath, United Kingdom. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath. He is a graduate of the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC and holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics. Thomas is the author of The Diplomacy of Liberation: The Foreign Relations of the ANC of South Africa since 1960 (1996) and, most recently, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (2005). He has also published chapters in over ten books and in various journals on religion and international relations, including Millennium, International Affairs and SAIS Review. He is a contributing editor of the Review of Faith & International Affairs.

• Jonathan Fox
  Religious Discrimination: A World Survey

  Jonathan Fox is an associate professor in the political studies department of Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and serves as director of the Religion and State project. He received his Ph.D. in government and politics from the University of Maryland in 1997. His work focuses on the influence of religion on politics, conflict and international relations, as well as on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. He has published over forty articles and four books on these topics. His forthcoming book, Religion and the State: A World Survey of Government Involvement in Religion, will be published in 2008.

• J. Paul Martin, Jason Chau and Shruti Patel
  Religions and International Poverty Alleviation: The Pluses and Minuses

  J. Paul Martin is the cofounder of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and served as the Center's executive director since its inception in 1978 until June 2007. He is now a senior scholar at the Center and adjunct professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he directs the Human Rights Studies Program. Martin has published works on moral education, human rights and human rights education. His key publications include "Promoting Human Rights Education in a Marginalized Africa," with Cosmas Gitta and Tokunbo Ige; "Epilogue: The Next Step, Quality Control," in Human Rights Education for the Twenty-First Century (1997); and "Ethnicity and Racism," in The Columbia History of the 20th Century (1998). He has contributed to the Oxford Encyclopedia on Political Science and the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East. Martin earned a Ph.L. and S.T.L. from Angelicum University in Rome, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Teachers College at Columbia University. Martin also served as a dean at the University in Lesotho, Africa. For the last twenty years, he has worked with human rights NGO coalitions and universities in Africa and Latin America to develop local research and training programs in human rights.

• Daniel Philpott
  What Religion Brings to the Politics of Transitional Justice

  Daniel Philpott is an associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. In 2001, he published his first book, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (2001). His current research revolves around the topic of reconciliation. In particular, he is looking at transitional justice—the question of how societies address past injustices, seeking to balance truth, justice, reconciliation and stability. He is also collaborating on a major study of global religion and politics based at Harvard University, focusing on religion’s impact on the politics of peace and reconciliation. A senior associate at the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, he travels regularly to Kashmir, where he trains leaders in faith-based diplomacy, an activist dimension of his scholarly interests. Reflecting his interests in political theory, ethics and international relations, he has also written on the morality of self-determination and religious freedom as an end of American foreign policy. He has published articles in World Politics, Ethics, Political Studies, Journal of International Affairs and National Interest. Philpott has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University and the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame.

• Sheherazade Jafari
  Local Religious Peacemakers: An Untapped Resource in U.S. Foreign Policy

  Sheherazade Jafari is the assistant director of the religion and conflict resolution program at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. She has a background in conflict resolution, international development and women’s rights. She is a coauthor of Tanenbaum’s Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (2007). She has also published in the International Public Management Journal and authored the first chapter in a publication that followed the World Bank’s MENA Development Forum. Jafari holds an M.A. in international affairs from George Washington University and a B.A. in sociology and women’s studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Ron E. Hassner
  Islamic Just War Theory and the Challenge of Sacred Space in Iraq

  Ron E. Hassner is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of the Religion, Politics and Globalization Program at Berkeley. He is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. Hassner’s publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and mobilization, and the role of national symbols in conflict. He was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security from 2000 to 2003, and a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security at Harvard University from 2003 to 2004.

• Ann Elizabeth Mayer
  The Fatal Flaws in the U.S. Constitutional Project for Iraq

  Ann Elizabeth Mayer is an associate professor of legal studies in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She has written extensively on issues of Islamic law in contemporary legal systems, comparative law, international law and the problems of integrating international human rights law in domestic legal systems. A major portion of her scholarship concerns human rights issues in contemporary North Africa and the Middle East. She has published widely in law reviews, scholarly journals and books concerned with comparative and international law and politics. Her book Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (2007) is in its fourth edition. Her interest in international human rights law encompasses the emergence of new ideas of corporate responsibility under international human rights law and the problems that arise when transferring what were formerly state obligations to private actors. Mayer earned a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the University of Michigan; a certificate in Islamic and comparative law from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London; a J.D. from the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1975; an M.A. in Near Eastern languages and literatures (Arabic and Persian) from the University of Michigan; and a B.A. in German from the University of Michigan. A member of the Pennsylvania Bar, she consults widely on cases involving human rights issues and Middle Eastern law. She has also taught as a visiting scholar at Yale University Law School, Georgetown University and Princeton University.

• Rudolf von Sinner
  The Churches’ Contribution to Citizenship in Brazil

  Rudolf von Sinner is a professor of systematic theology, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue at the Faculdades EST-Lutheran School of Theology at São Leopoldo in Brazil, and serves as the school’s dean of postgraduate studies and research. He is a Swiss national ordained in the Reformed Church and now serves the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil. He has published extensively on ecumenism, interreligious and intercultural dialogue, contextual theology and political ethics, and is a member of numerous academic and church bodies, including the American Academy of Religion, the World Council of Churches’ Continuation Committee on Ecumenism in the 21st Century and the executive of the Global Network of Public Theology. While in residency at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey (2006 to 2007), von Sinner has been working on a book on the churches and democracy in Brazil, which will be published in 2008.

• John Anderson
  Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church: Asymmetric Symphonia?

  John Anderson is a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His primary research interests lie in the former Soviet Union, religion and politics. He is the author of a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet religious policy and Central Asian politics. Anderson is currently completing a book on Christianity and democratization. His publications include Religion, Democracy and Democratization (2005), Religious Liberty in Transitional Societies: The Politics of Religion (2003), Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s Island of Democracy? (1999), The International Politics of Central Asia (1997) and Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and the Successor States (1994).

INTERVIEW

• Amien Rais
  An interview by Alfred C. Stepan and Mirjam Künkler

ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY

• Hani Mansourian
  Iran: Religious Leaders and Opposition Movements

  Hani Mansourian is a graduate student at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is pursuing a master’s degree in international affairs, with a concentration in Middle East studies. He was born shortly before the 1979 revolution in Iran and lived through the Iran–Iraq war. He was an undergraduate engineering student during the beginnings of the reform movement and observed the process with keen interest. He has worked with a local NGO in Iran on social development and after the 2003 earthquake in Bam, he managed a child protection program for UNICEF. Mansourian moved to New York in 2006.

PHOTO ESSAY

• Beyond a Spiritual Calling: The Saffron Revolution

REVIEW ESSAYS

• Matthew Bagger, Religion and Democracy in India

• Anders Berg-Sørensen, Politicizing Secularism

• Annabella Pitkin, Salman Rushdie Loses His Cheerfulness: Geopolitics, Terrorism and Adultery

• Mimi Hanaoka,  The Devil in the Details

• Further Reading: Yael Slater, Jessie Daniels, Eamon Kircher-Allen, Erin Sikorsky, Emad M. Salem, Zarana Sanghani, Christopher Flavelle, Adnan Mirza, Veena Vasudevan, Michael B. Clyne