Living Critically and

20 Pages·2011·0.33 MB·English

MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Forum Article
Millennium: Journal of
Living Critically and ‘Living International Studies
39(2) 505–524
Faithfully’ in a Global Age: © The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829810385053
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the Political Theology of
International Relations
Scott M. Thomas
Bath University
Abstract
This article asks is there a place for religion and spirituality in a critical theory of international
relations (IR)? The usual answer is ‘no’ because of critical theory’s generally negative assessment
of religion in domestic and international politics. However, while many of these criticisms can be
acknowledged, a critical theory of IR still has to grapple with the more complex understanding of
religion that already exists in critical theory, and the global resurgence of religion how Eurocentric
its concept of religion actually is and how rooted it is in the European experience of modernisation.
For the people of the global South – which comprises most of the people in the world – the struggle
to ‘live faithfully’ amid the problems of world poverty, climate change, conflict and development can
not be separated from their struggle for justice and emancipation. Therefore, a greater dialogue
between critical theory and theology is necessary if critical theory is to more fully and creatively
contribute to our understanding of some of the most important global issues in the study of IR in
the 21st century.
Keywords
critical theory, international relations, political theology
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world, without deepening his own
self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give
others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his
aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire
prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of
power and action to which men are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and
misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet
Corresponding author:
Scott M. Thomas, Bath University
[email protected]
506 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)
we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and love than we have
ever been. The result of this is evident. We are living through the greatest crisis in the history
of man; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action
and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant,
prayer, meditation, and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America today.1
- Thomas Merton
This article argues that prayer, meditation and contemplation are of the utmost impor-
tance for the promotion of social change and political transformation in IR. This may
seem like a rather surprising claim since the question for scholars of IR is how on earth
(and not in heaven) can theological or spiritual insights such as those of Thomas Merton
actually be made relevant to the study of IR? One could add the perspectives from other
religious and spiritual traditions, such as those of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Martin Buber
and Thich Nhat Hanh who have all combined a variety of types of spirituality with social
and political action. What can a scholar of IR actually do with these kinds of perspec-
tives? How can such insights from theology and spirituality be made relevant to foreign
policy, for whom are they relevant, and in what way?
For over a decade the ‘religious turn’ in the study of IR has examined how religion has
been marginalised in the discipline, and why it remains relevant to understanding inter-
national conflict, security and cooperation.2 Religion has been theorised broadly within
the approaches of realism/neo-realism and liberalism/neo-liberalism that dominate the
positivist mainstream, or it has been studied within social constructivism (for some
scholars these approaches have overlapped).3 However, the use of critical theory is one
of the clearest ways to show how prayer, meditation and contemplation are relevant to
IR. The reason is it can open up a wider, more challenging, conceptual space than the
positivist mainstream or social constructivism for theological and spiritual insights rel-
evant to the theory and practice of IR. For theologians, activists and people of faith
(categories which often overlap in the global South), critical theory offers a more com-
pelling way to bring their religious and spiritual insights to bear on the problems of world
affairs. Critical theory can do this because it offers a wider, more probing, conception of
what theory is, for whom it is for and what it is supposed to do in IR; it has a more holistic
conception of what international relations are; and it asks more deeply what ‘knowledge’
is, how it is constructed and for whom it is for in IR; and, moreover, it offers a more
satisfying ethical conception of what the final goal is of IR.
Why, for critical theorists, is this argument worth making at all? Why should they be
interested in bringing the insights of religion and spirituality into a critical theory of IR?
The reason is that critical theory has a radical, transformative, vision of IR that could
1. Thomas Merton, ‘Contemplation in a World of Action’, in Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, ed.
Christine M. Bochen (New York: Orbis Books, 2000), 84–7 (emphasis added).
2. Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, eds., Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile
(London: Palgrave, 2003); Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler, Bringing Religion into International
Relations (London: Palgrave, 2004). Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the
Transformation of International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2005).
3. Daniel Philpott, ‘Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?’ Annual Review of Political Science 12
(2009): 183–202; Eva Belin, ‘Faith & Politics: New Trends in the Study of Religion and Politics’, World
Politics 60 (2008): 315–47.
Thomas 507
engage better than it has so far with a wide variety of secular and religious constituencies
around the world. However, two factors seem to limit its full potential and relevance in IR.
The first factor, dealt with in the initial section, is the problem of the reception of critical
theory in the global South, which by 2050 will comprise almost 90 percent of the people
in the world. Critical theory, with its broadly secular assumptions, has to engage more
effectively with the religiosity of the global South, and the global resurgence of religion.
The second factor, dealt with in the subsequent section, is the reception of religion in
critical theory, how religion is often conceived within its broadly Marxist assumptions. For
many critical theorists religion is a problem to be overcome if there is to be genuine social
justice and emancipation. In fact, critical theory’s engagement with religion, particularly
the Frankfurt School, is more complex than is usually thought, even though its conceptions
of religion are still limited by the way they are informed by the Eurocentric experience of
modernisation, colonialism and imperialism. This article focuses primarily on some of the
key theorists in Critical Security Studies to illustrate some of these arguments. However,
since they share many of the same core values, goals and assumptions of critical theorists,
it can be argued that they also apply more generally to critical approaches to IR.
The final section briefly examines some of the areas in critical theory where it may be
possible to open up a conceptual space to engage with religious and spiritual perspectives on
social justice and emancipation. The article focuses on Christian theology – Desmond Tutu’s
ubuntu theology, political theology, Neo-Calvinism, contextual theology and Catholic social
teaching – and it focuses on Judaism, to more broadly indicate the areas where theologians,
activists and people from various religions may be able to creatively engage with critical
theory in IR. The reason for choosing Christianity and Judaism is that critical theory emerged
out of the Western tradition, and it may be difficult to disentangle Judaism from the early
Frankfurt School. At the same time, the article indicates for critical theorists what some of
these perspectives might consider the limitations of critical theory in IR.
Rethinking Critical Theory for the Religious World of the
Global South
It is now more widely recognised that the global resurgence of religion is one of the main
characteristics of contemporary IR. Some of its main features in the global South are briefly
examined in this section, and why critical theory needs to engage better with this world.
Firstly, the global religious resurgence is not confined to any particular region – be it
Christianity in the Southern United States or Islam in the Middle East; it is occurring in coun-
tries with a wide variety of religious traditions, which are also at different levels of economic
development, so the religious resurgence is not driven, or is not primarily driven, by poverty
or social exclusion (mega-cities, mega-churches and educated, middle-class lifestyles from
São Paulo, to Lagos, to Seoul, to Jakarta all seem to go together). The religious resurgence is
also more broadly based than what is usually called religious fundamentalism, which briefly
can be defined as the strict, rigid adherence to a set of rituals, doctrines and practices.4
4. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the
World (London: Penguin, 2009); Scott M. Thomas, ‘Outwitting the Developed Countries?’ Journal of
International Studies 61, no. 1 (2007): 21–46.
508 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)
Second, the religious resurgence is being reinforced by the politics of religious
demography. The future global religious landscape is characterised by the massive, gen-
eral demographic shift in population from the developed countries in the North with
their declining or stagnating populations – Western Europe (more so than North America)
and the lands of the former Soviet Union – to the booming populations of the developing
countries (although the story is complicated by falling fertility in Japan and China). The
North accounted for 32 percent of the world’s population in 1900, 29 percent in 1950,
25 percent in 1970, about 18 percent in 2000 and it is estimated that the North will
account for only 10–12 percent of the world’s population in 2050.5 The term the ‘global
South’ reflects this demographic reality of IR. What is driving this demographic shift to
the global South? One of the most important reasons is religious demography, that is,
how faith influences lifestyle. Theology has emerged as one of the most accurate indica-
tors of fertility, far better than religious, denominational or ethnic identities. Why? More
devout families – Jews, Muslims and Christians – believe children are a blessing from
God, and so they have more of them than their secular counterparts. What this means for
the politics of the secular, liberal West – especially for Europe – is that its population,
especially with its immigrants from the global South, may be more religious at the end
of the 21st century than it is now at the beginning. Thus, the concept of the religious
world of the global South is not an indication that a new type of ‘North–South gap’
characterises IR – between a secular North and a religious South.6 Religion in the North
certainly exists, even though it is lived out in a variety of ways.7 Religion, moreover, for
all these reasons, will increasingly be a part of European politics as well as the politics
of the global South.8
It is surprising given their Marxist pasts that Christianity is exploding in China and
Russia. China now encourages established religions (such as Christianity and neo-
Confucianism, but not, for example, Falun Gong), even if it is to promote social order
amid rapid economic development. China (along with the United States, Brazil, Nigeria
and the Philippines) has one of the largest numbers of Pentecostal and evangelical
Christian populations in the world. The rest of Asia is also religiously dynamic. In
Asian societies the types of religion are less individualistic, more communal and
socially embedded. The secular forms of politics masks a religious spirit, and inside
a variety of politically modernising states other meanings are being constructed.9 A
genuine religious revival of Orthodox Christianity is taking place in Russia. The
Russian Orthodox Church’s unification of its domestic and overseas hierarchies (a
legacy of the Soviet era), and closer Church-State relations, have established the
5. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 84.
6. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
7. Grace Davie, ‘Patterns of Religion in Europe: An Exceptional Case’, in Blackwell Companion to the
Sociology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 264–78.
8. Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (London: Profile Books, 2010); Timothy A. Byrnes and
Peter J. Katzenstein, eds, Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
9. Richard Madsen, ‘Secularism, Religious Change, and Social Conflict in Asia’, in Rethinking Secularism,
eds Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Oxford University
Press, forthcoming 2011), 388–422.
Thomas 509
religious and political foundations for a greater role on the world stage for Russia and
the Russian Orthodox Church.10
The world religions where we can really see explosions of religious fervour are Islam and
evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. The global Islamic resurgence reflects a genuine
Islamic revival, which is more wide-ranging than Islamic fundamentalism, while the global
spread of Pentecostalism and evangelical Protestantism is the most dramatic religious explo-
sion in the world today. Pentecostalism is rapidly spreading across the world, and is remak-
ing the face of global Christianity. Pentecostalism’s growing numbers, its popularity among
the aspiring middle classes and its increasing political involvement means it will be a major
social force shaping religion, politics, democracy and development in the 21st century.11
Critical theorists argue, contrary to the positivist mainstream, that ‘all life is lived
within theories; they create the structures within which we live and they provide the facts
that we take to be the real world’.12 While this view is in many ways correct, it insuffi-
ciently takes into consideration the religious world of the global South. All life is not only
lived within theories; far more importantly is the fact that for most of the people in the
world all life is lived within theologies and spiritualities. Critical theory, given its broadly
secular assumptions, has to develop a more complex understanding of religion since reli-
gion is an increasingly (or, indeed, always has been) an important part of the way people
in the global South interpret their personal lives and social world, and this understanding
is crucial since critical theory claims to be interested in emancipation in the global South.
This does not mean that other types of community relations are unimportant – race, clan
or ethnicity (for example, in African politics), or political or economic types of social
interaction (consider the new geostrategic alliance between the BASIC countries – Brazil,
South Africa, India and China). What it does mean is that for people of the global South,
how they interpret the world is a complex part of their theology and spirituality, their
doctrines about the nature of God and the presence of God in the world; and so prayer,
meditation and contemplation will inform their struggles for social justice and emancipa-
tion, as they seek to live faithfully amid the problems of world poverty, climate change,
conflict and development in the 21st century.
Rethinking Religion, Critical Theory and IR Theory
It is often thought that in critical theory, religion is a part of the problem rather than the
solution, in so far as it is indebted to Marxism – from Marx, Engels and Feuerbach, to
Gramsci and Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School. Religion is little more than false con-
sciousness, an ideological subterfuge; it is one of the main ideological pathologies, forms
of capitalist hegemony, that seeks to legitimate the status quo, to mask the potential for
social justice and emancipation, and to reinforce the fear and coercion that maintain the
10. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
11. Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001); David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
12. Ken Booth and Peter Vale, ‘Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Southern
Africa’, in Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, eds Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams
(London: UCL Press, 1997), 330–1.
510 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)
prevailing domestic and international order.13 This is still the view of religion by some of
the leading critical theorists in IR, Ken Booth and Wyn Jones, for example, who often
identify religion with war, bigotry, racism, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, intolerance
and extremism.14 When critical theorists have recognised religion’s potential for promot-
ing social justice and emancipation (e.g. Ken Booth, Hayward Alker or Fred Dallmayr),
it has been on the basis of mainly finding cognate ideas, concepts and thinkers acceptable
to critical theory and its emancipatory project.
In fact, the relationship between religion and critical theory, particularly the early
Frankfurt School, was far more complex than is usually considered to be the case. Some
of its early thinkers – for example, Adorno and Horkheimer – were not nearly as hostile
to religion as it is usually thought. Similarly, Habermas has more recently expressed the
need to preserve religious insights for democratic discourse since he sees them as still
having the potential for promoting liberation.15 The more recent dialogue on religion,
democracy and social transformation between Habermas and Cardinal Ratzinger (now
Pope Benedict VXI) is slowly making its way into IR.16
The efforts to bring religion back into critical theory is also part of a more complex
understanding of religion and religious critiques of authority that are altering our concep-
tion of the Enlightenment.17 The Enlightenment inveighed against religion to emancipate
people from a specific understanding of rationality, order and authority, and social theory
emerged out of this legacy. However, the Enlightenment, in the form of modernism,
applied its own oppressive rationality and authority to reorder the world. Critical theory,
at least the early Frankfurt School, responded to this ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ by argu-
ing that religion could be used to promote social transformation, and it could help to rec-
tify the kind of rationality, conformism and oppression the modern world has brought us.18
The desire to change the world in critical theory can be called a type of spiritual sen-
sibility. At least in Horkheimer, and perhaps also in Adorno, this desire seemed to be
infused with deep spiritual insights from the Jewish tradition, including the mysticism of
transformation; even if it can be debated whether this was a predominantly ‘atheistic
Jewish messianism’, unique to assimilated, central European Jews, especially in Germany.
13. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); Grace Davie, ‘The Evolution of the Sociology of Religion’, in
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 61–78.
14. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22–3, 416–19;
Richard Wyn Jones, ed., Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 45, 49, 53.
15. Craig Calhoun, ‘Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere’, in Rethinking Secularism, eds Craig
Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
111–34; Jürgen Habermas, Rationality and Religion: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002); and ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1
(2006): 1–25.
16. Mariano Barbato and Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Towards a Post-secular Political Order?’ European Journal
of International Relations 1, no. 3 (2009): 317–40.
17. James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley eds. Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame, 2001), S. J. Barnett, Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
18. Raymond Geuss and Margarete Kohlenbach, eds, The Early Frankfurt School and Religion (New York:
Palgrave).
Thomas 511
Indeed, their concept of emancipation, even if it is in the form of a this-worldly redemption,
seems to reflect almost a longing for a type of spiritual transformation.19
However, even if the more complex legacy of critical theory’s engagement with reli-
gion is acknowledged, it still has to grapple with how Eurocentric this legacy is, how
rooted the concept of religion is in the European experience of modernisation, colonial-
ism and imperialism. Many critical theorists still seem to expect the model of religion
and secularisation in Europe to be the model for the entire world.20 However, other schol-
ars, sympathetic to critical theory, increasingly use it to critically evaluate this kind of
Eurocentric approach to religion in critical theory.21
Therefore, for a variety of reasons it is important for critical theorists in IR to engage
more deeply with religion, and especially within their own critical tradition, and they
need to rethink their understanding of religion given the religious world of the global
South. This would mean recognising that the origin of many of the core concepts in criti-
cal theory and the sociology of religion emerged out of the European experience of
modernisation, which was driven as much by science and state expansion as by religious
convictions. They now need to be reconstructed as ‘global concepts’, adapted from the
cultural and religious experience of religiosity and modernisation in the global South
that is transforming the sociology of religion.22
Alasdair MacIntyre’s social theory may be able to assist critical theorists rethinking reli-
gion in ways that are relevant to the study of IR. Critical theorists argue strongly that life is
lived within theories, which provide the ‘facts’ that we take to be the ‘real world’.23
MacIntyre’s social theory and his revival of the virtue-ethics tradition also explain why this
is the case, but in a way that takes religion seriously. His approach provides some of the
concepts through which we can see how people live not only within theories, but also within
theologies and spiritualities as an important part of how their social world is constructed.
Religion is a type of social tradition, with a corresponding set of virtues and practices
historically extended, and they are socially embodied now in living faith communities.
Contrary to what we seem to believe the Enlightenment has taught us, values, norms,
virtues and moral judgements, and the answers to questions regarding what is good, what
19. Eduardo Mendieta, ed., ‘Introduction: Religion as Critique: Theology as Social Critique and Enlightened
Reason’, The Frankfurt School and Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York and London:
Routledge, 2005), 1–20.
20. Critical theorists, often as much as their mainstream counterparts, have not sufficiently recognised the
extent to which the concept of ‘religion’ – as a set of ideas, beliefs, doctrines, as well as the boundaries
of what is called ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’, were themselves invented, constructed by (Western)
modernity, and, more often than not, they were done so as political decisions, as part of the state-building
projects in European history, and as a part of colonial and imperial domination. William T. Cavanaugh,
The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009); Derek R. Peterson and Darren Walhof, eds, The Invention of Religion: Rethinking
Belief in Politics and History (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
21. Harmonie Toros and Jeroen Gunning, ‘Exploring a Critical Theory Approach to Studying Terrorism’, in
Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, eds. Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen
Gunning (London: Routledge, 2009), 87–108. For a critique of emancipation as simply a Western trajectory,
see Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1999).
22. Jose Casanova, ‘Religion, the New Millennium, and Globalization’, Sociology of Religion 62 (2001): 415–41;
Grace Davie, Sociology of Religion (London: Sage Publications, 2007).
23. Booth and Vale, ‘Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity’, 330–1.
512 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)
is social justice or what is emancipation, are not simply free-standing moral statements
or propositions to which anyone can assent to intellectually. Rather, as MacIntyre explains,
the meaning of such values, norms, virtues and moral judgements is shaped by the lin-
guistic conventions of a community, and are inseparable from the community’s cultural
and religious traditions. In other words, morality, rationality and conceptions of peace,
social justice or emancipation are tradition-dependent, and cannot be detached from the
traditions and communities through which most people in the world live out their moral
and social lives.24
MacIntyre’s social theory – with its concepts of virtues, practices and religion as a type
of social tradition – shows the limitations of the way many critical theorists have tried to
engage with religion. Critical theorists, in a post-11 September world, want to find Hindu,
Buddhist and (now especially) Islamic thinkers whose doctrines endorse their (allegedly
universal) conception of social justice and emancipation, without recognising that this
search is itself a product of liberal modernity and the Enlightenment project in the West.
The separation between doctrine and ethics, faith and life, beliefs and behaviour is itself
a modern Western construction. For if we go back to ancient history, philosophia in the
Roman Empire, early Christianity, Platonism, Stoicism and Epicureanism all named par-
ticular ‘ways of life’, in which each community of adherents shared similar views on the
ends of human life, and the nature of the virtues, and practices, as they aspired together to
live out the doctrines to which they gave their allegiance.25
Therefore, religion in critical theory needs to move beyond a verbal and propositional
conception of religion. Religions are not, or are not only, ideas, ideologies or doctrines
(theology), which are capable of being negatively manipulated by political elites for
power-political purposes (e.g. whether it is Nasser’s Egypt, Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka
or Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević), nor are religions, as some critical theorists now argue,
simply a part of ‘trans-religiously or cross-culturally valid forms of highly motivating
narrative’ to promote justice and emancipation.26
Rather, religions, which critical theorists should appreciate from their own understand-
ing of the relational or intersubjective construction of social identity, are comprised of
ideas, but they are also comprised of rituals, practices and symbols. These are the aspects
that constitute the larger cultural and linguistic and intersubjective formulation of identity
and meaning for the individuals and faith communities that make up the global South, and
so what it means for them to live out their moral, social and political lives. This cultural-
linguistic conception of the social world reinforces the reasons already given for why
the struggle to live faithfully for people in the global South is an inherent part of their
24. For an explanation of MacIntyre’s social theory, and its relevance to international relations theory, see
Scott M. Thomas Thomas, The Global Resurgence and the Transformation of International Relations
(New York: Palgrave, 2005), 85–96.
25. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘On Doctrine and Ethics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine,
ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22; Alasdair MacIntyre, God,
Philosophy, and Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Plymouth:
Sheed & Ward/Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 21.
26. Hayward Alker, ‘Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project’, in Critical Security Studies and
World Politics, ed. Ken Booth (London: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 189–214; Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among
Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (London: Palgrave, 2003).
Thomas 513
struggles for social justice and emancipation. It also reinforces the reasons why critical
theorists need to engage more creatively with scholars, activists and ordinary believers in
the global South who share these theological and spiritual perspectives.
Opening Up a Conceptual Space for Theology and Spirituality
in a Critical Theory of IR
This section indicates some of the areas where it may be possible to open up a conceptual
space for critical theory to engage with the kind of religious and spiritual perspectives
that can contribute to social justice and emancipation. These areas of discussion include:
what theory is; the types of international actors; the nature of knowledge; and the final
goal of IR. It also indicates where the theologians, activists and people of faith can cre-
atively engage with critical theory in IR. At the same time, it indicates what, for these
perspectives, may be some of the limitations of a critical theory in IR.
‘Living Responsibly’ in the World – Challenging Critical Theory’s Conception of
What Theory Is, and What It Is For
One of the central tasks of critical theory is to probe what theory is, whom it is for and
what it is supposed to do in IR. Its wider, more probing, conception of theory – theory as
foreign policy ‘problem-solving’, ‘theory as negative critique’ and as ‘everyday social
practice’ – opens up a conceptual space for a dialogue between a variety of secular, theo-
logical and spiritual perspectives that challenge the existing international order. However,
some of these perspectives offer a more radical, holistic, if also contentious, conception
of the underlying unity of the social and spiritual worlds.
Critical theory challenges the mainstream, realist/neo-realist and liberal/neo-liberal
form of theory in IR, what Robert Cox famously called ‘problem-solving theory’, that is,
theory as it is used within rationalist or positivist research programmes to explain (alleg-
edly objectively) the workings of the existing international system. Mainstream theory
makes use of the existing frameworks of diplomatic or political institutions, social relations
and social meaning to solve or at least manage more effectively foreign policy problems
for the great powers in the existing international order.27 In other words, problem-solving
theory is about the way great powers seek to rationally dominate the world since they seek
to replicate the working of the existing international system, rather than to change it.28
Critical theory begins with an assumption that we all live in one social world of IR,
characterised by global interdependence, with each part of the world connected in vari-
ous ways. This is why it argues that problem-solving theory is based on a kind of strategic
dualism – ‘our stability’ (i.e. the West) and ‘their instability’ (the ‘their’ usually refers to
27. Robert W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 126–55; Ken Booth, ‘Critical Explorations’,
in Critical Security Studies and World Politics, ed. Ken Booth (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005), 4–10.
28. Robert W. Cox, ‘The Point is Not Just to Explain the World but to Change It’, in The Oxford Handbook of
International Relations, eds. Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 84–93.
514 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2)
restless natives, peoples and countries in faraway places of which we in the West know
very little) – without probing too deeply into how the conditions of stability and instabil-
ity are related. Scholars may point to bipolarity, or nuclear parity and so on, to explain
the peace and stability of Western Europe, but this was intimately connected to the rest
of the world. What the West experienced as the ‘Cold War’ got rather ‘hot’ in South-East
Asia, Southern Africa and Central America.29
However, people of faith in the global South would add to critical theory’s contention
that we all live in one social world of global interdependence the idea that we also all live
in one spiritual world or one spirit world, as they would say in Africa or Asia.30 The world
religions in many ways express this relational ontology or understanding of reality. The
Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, for example, argued there is a covenantal nature to the
world, which binds the creator to the creation (human beings and the natural world), and
this is the source of our responsibility to the creator, to other people and to the creation.31
An important example of this relational and spiritual understanding of reality is
Desmond Tutu’s political theology, the ubuntu theology of reconciliation.32 Political the-
ology can be broadly defined as the analysis of politics and social life from the perspec-
tive of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world.33 Tutu has explained that
in the Nguni languages the word ubuntu – or botho in the Sotho group of languages in
South Africa – conveys this holistic concept of social and spiritual interdependence, and
this helped provide the theological perspective underlying the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa.34
Tutu contrasts the African, ubuntu, inherently relational concept of personal identity,
and what it means to be human – ‘A person is a person through other people’ – with
Descartes’ rationalist aphorism, which indicates an autonomous, individualistic (‘Western’)
conception of personal identity: ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ Tutu explains, in terms that are
similar to Girard’s concept of mimetic learning:
None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or
speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other
29. Amitav Acharya, ‘The Periphery as the Core: The Third World and Security Studies’, in Critical Security
Studies: Concepts and Cases, eds. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (London: UCL Press, 1997),
299–327.
30. Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (London: Portobello Books, 2008), 313–18.
See also, John Allen, ed., The Essential Desmond Tutu (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1997), 54–5.
31. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
32. Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1997).
33. William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Scott, ‘Introduction’, in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology,
eds. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 2–4.
34. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider Books, 1999). Tutu’s concept of restorative
justice (not retributive justice), rooted in ubuntu theology, has been criticised for being a romanticised
vision of the rural African community. Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in
South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This criticism is reminiscent of the way
Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of virtue-ethics has been criticised, as an inadequate way to interpret faith
communities since faith was also used to support segregation in the deep South. However, such criticisms
ignore the way that the struggle in debate, dialogue and action for what it means to be faithful is inherently
a part of a viable tradition. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of
International Relations, 233–42.