ABSTRACT
Religious 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. In today's post-modern era, religious communities have become vigorous creators of an emergent transnational civil society. This chapter discusses the implications of transnational religions for conflict and cooperation, for security, for the future of the nation-state, and for the emergence of transnational civil society. Consideration of the relationship between security and religion has to recognize both possibilities, that is, religious communities as conciliatory components of viable civil societies and as sources of mutual alienation, distrust, and conflict. Hierarchy and self-organization provide the conceptual framework for the diversity of relationships that religious formations introduce in the space between civil society and the state. Religious networks and communities in domestic and transnational civil society render state claims to monopoly sovereignty problematic.
