Transnational religious actors and international relations

This chapter focuses on the role which transnational religious actors play in international politics. Conventionally, international politics has been organized around the principle of state sovereignty since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Peace of Westphalia ‘secularized international relations by undermining religion as a mode of legitimacy’ (Teschke 2003) and enshrined the territorially bounded sovereign state as the basic unit of international relations. Recently, however, globalization has called into question the claims of the state to unconditional sovereignty thereby creating space for the (re)emergence of transnational religious actors in global politics.