ABSTRACT
Taking a long perspective on transnational religious actors ‘[r]eligious communities are among the oldest of the transnationals: Sufi orders, Catholic missionaries, and Buddhist monks carried word and praxis across vast spaces before those places became nation-states or even states’ (Rudolph 1997: 1). In terms of a shorter perspective more appropriate to the modern world, however, transnational religious actors have typically had to operate in environments dominated by territorial state authorities which have jealously contested the legitimacy of any outside interference in their affairs, whether by religious or other international instances. In recent centuries such influence as religious bodies have been able to exert has accordingly been through the development and application of ‘soft power’ means, relying on the discursive promotion and defence of religious – or religiously validated – values and interests by means of preachment or argumentative persuasion (Nye 2004, Haynes 2001). In the contemporary context of globalization the opportunity to exert such influence has been expanded by the development of ‘an emergent transnational civil society’ in which religious communities become distributed across state borders at a time when rapid and easy travel and a media revolution has made for relatively untrammelled communication (Rudolph 1997: 1).
