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Religious Geopolitics and the Geopolitics of Religion

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Abstract

Geographers have long had difficulty in writing about religion as there are few researchers who have the methodological background to cross these disciplines. Nevertheless, to understand geography and war, we need to know the importance of religion. Examples from the USA, Russia and Vatican City will be presented. However, it will be argued that the literature as it stands suffers from two biases: a focus on religion in the USA and a focus on extremes. Suggestions will be made as to how future research can move away from these biases and focus research on elite feedbacks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sparke (2005) cannot resist waxing entertainingly lyrical: ‘a Jesus-trick imagined in the geopolitically incarnate form of the U.S. military coming down to earth (or at least dropping bombs down to earth) and bringing neoliberal apostates and agnostics into order’ (Sparke 2005, 308). See also Sturm (2010, 136).

  2. 2.

    The exact number varies, depending on whether we read Huntington (1993) or Huntington (1997). Across the two pieces, he identifies seven, eight or nine. In the earlier work, they were Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African. By the later work, he had identified Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. If you look carefully at the map of civilisations in the later work, you will notice that Israel has been shaded in with diagonal black-and-white stripes which, according to Huntington’s map, makes it part of the Islamic civilisation.

  3. 3.

    There are, of course, many more moderate and sophisticated views. As Wallace (2006) reminds us, ‘academic geographers, inured as they are to popular but crass misunderstandings of their discipline, might therefore be able to empathise, whatever their personal belief system, with claims that Christian theology embodies more substantive intellectual resources than those evidenced by tele-evangelists’ (Wallace 2006, 211).

  4. 4.

    For Yorgason and Robertson (2006, 259), it was never absent, it was just ignored.

  5. 5.

    Indeed, one of the reasons for Joseph Ratzinger’s choice of the pontifical name Benedict was that Benedict was the patron saint of Europe

  6. 6.

    Bowman (1942, 654; 656); Broek (1943, 143); Freeman (1961, 225); Morgenthau (1978, 164–165); Fukushima (1997, 408).

  7. 7.

    We can see the case of the 1993 siege in Waco, TX, in which 76 people died, as a form of ‘historic premillennialism’ – see Harding (1994, 15).

  8. 8.

    On numerology, religion and geopolitics, even quantitative conflict researchers, who should know better, are susceptible. For the Correlates of war project, every state in the world has a numerical ID. The original list and rationale were published as Russet et al. (1968) and the latest version is Correlates of War Project (2011). So for example, the country ID number for the USA is ‘2,’ while the country ID number for France is ‘220.’ Israel has been given ‘666.’

  9. 9.

    Mansfield (2003) also gives background on the effect that that Robison had on Reagan and George W. Bush.

  10. 10.

    Or, phrased more figuratively, ‘[l]ike a priest of the black arts, Bush has successfully disinterred the remnants of Reagan’s millenarian rhetoric from the graveyard of chiliastic fantasies, appropriated it for his own interests, and played it in public like a charm’ (McLaren 2002, 327).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics, Brunel University London, London, UK

    Steve Pickering

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Pickering, S. (2017). Religious Geopolitics and the Geopolitics of Religion. In: Understanding Geography and War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52217-7_5

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