Postsecularism and international relations (revised and updated version)

Postsecularism has gained increasing relevance within and beyond international relations (IR) in recent years. Within IR, the term has been employed primarily in two different yet interconnected ways. Firstly, postsecularism has operated descriptively to explain the return or resilience of religious traditions in modern life. Secondly, postsecular perspectives have emerged as forms of radical theorizing and critique prompted by the idea that values such as democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion, and justice may not necessarily be best pursued within an exclusively immanent secular framework. Quite the opposite, the secular may be a site of isolation, domination, violence, and exclusion. The question raised by the postsecular, then, is not just one of incorporation of the presence of religion into existing theoretical frameworks, but one of conceptual innovation to account for a transformation which invests the very structures of consciousness and power, and existing understandings of political community. This chapter introduces these two dimensions of the contemporary debate on postsecularism in IR with a particular emphasis on the latter. It outlines some of the key conceptual developments surrounding this concept and considers their relevance in view of the ongoing refugee crisis and recent debates on the religious nature of neoliberalism, thus showing how some strands of postsecular theorizing intersect with existing critiques of the neoliberal order.