ABSTRACT

The condemnation of existing 'civilization' in 'The Sacred Conspiracy' was very much of a piece with a wide variety of radical early twentieth-century discourses across the cultural and political spectrum. This chapter initiates an interdisciplinary and historical reflection on one of the central preoccupations of time: the relationship of religion to international order. It talks about the story of international law over the past century through the lens of its relationship to religion-a lens that both overlaps with and differs from that of nationalism. The chapter expresses that 'internationalism' and 'religion' have an equally mutually constitutive relationship. Its historical narrative is rooted in the early twentieth century-a period to which so many of our 'modern' cultural conceptions may be traced. Its methodology is broadly interdisciplinary, setting changing international legal conceptions of religion in relation to contemporaneous developments in domains such as sociology, religious studies, and historiography.