Philemon is the shortest and most personal letter we possess from Paul. The only NT comparison is 3 John, which is similarly addressed – both are personal, private, and short. At 335 words, Philemon is longer than most personal letters from antiquity but is the shortest letter in the NT. When we remember that Paul commonly wrote long public letters we should not be surprised at its length. The Pastoral Epistles are also brief as well as personal. Yet they are discussing matters of church-wide interest that make it certain that they were intended not just for Timothy and Titus but for a public audience.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

This chapter asks how two subjects defined in the terms of ‘religion’ – the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Jewish’ subject – became recognizable as such in the decades prior to the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan and the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel, which aligned the recognition and formation of the religious minority, the nation, and the state. It addresses the recognition of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyses the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. It shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and cemented very particular understandings of ‘religion’ and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of religious difference, the chapter illustrates the costs that come with the recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of the ‘Indian Muslims’ and the ‘Palestinian Jews’, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for the future challenge against them.

This chapter is about the concept of religion in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the pitfalls of multiculturalist approaches, and the potential of alternative approaches centring genealogical care. It illustrates this through close conceptual readings of central figures such as Daniel Philpott, Jürgen Habermas, William Connolly, and Iza Hussin. It argues that such conceptual analysis is necessary in order to understand the endemic ideological and cognitive bias built into the dominant multiculturalist framework on religion in IR, as well as the importance for alternatives to it. This is significant because these biases continue to structure both scholarship and political practice of religious freedom, the regulation and governance of religious minorities, the identification and evaluation of ‘religious’ conflict and conflict parties, as well as the initiatives for reworking the relationship between religion and politics within international practices and theory.

This introductory chapter contextualizes the inquiry and delimits the theoretical, historical, and practical concerns that motivate the study. After discussing key concepts informing the analysis, including the terms ‘religion’ and ‘recognition’, it summarizes the book’s main arguments and contributions and locates them in current International Relations (IR) scholarship as well as in the disciplines of religious studies and colonial history. It introduces the empirical case studies and illustrates how the quest for statehood, the contested question of minorities, political representation, and international border-making shaped and were shaped by the concepts, agents, and identities associated with ‘religion’ that broke through the threshold of political recognition to establish themselves as taken-for-granted political entities on the global stage. The chapter argues that religion is a space, concept, and realm of social and political life rather than separate from it. Consequently, struggles over authority, power, and political order shape the contours and meanings that ‘religion’ can take on. By the same token, analysing changes in such meanings and understandings help us understand the political structures and orders that characterize that particular place and time.