In October 1947, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan took the floor of the United Nations General Assembly at Lake Success in New York State to make the case against the Partition of Palestine and the establishment of a ‘Jewish state’. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been part of drawing the new international border between India and Pakistan and was soon to become the latter’s first foreign minister. Now, he was at Lake Success as an official representative of Pakistan, and his views on Palestine held the weight of the emerging Islamic Republic. And notably, he did not countenance the idea that partitioning Palestine and partitioning India were similarly justified endeavours. Indeed, in June of that same year, Chaim Weizmann – the leader of the Jewish Agency and a main proponent of what would become the Israeli State – had spoken of a ‘Palestine Pakistan’, and Zafarullah Khan had emphatically rejected the comparison.Footnote ¹

Weizmann’s comparison and Zafarullah Khan’s rejection of it perfectly reflected the stakes of the complex political moment in which the quest for recognition and the global politics of religion were nested into the core of postcolonial governance. This book asks about the conditions, consequences, and costs of the global politics of religion. The entangled empire sits in its midst. Pakistan and Israel both became states during the early period of decolonialization associated with the undoing of the British Empire. In 1947, the British had abruptly withdrawn from India, and the Crown’s colonial holding was partitioned. In Palestine a year later, the British withdrew from their Mandate and handed over the future of the region to the young United Nations. Pakistan and Israel both emerged from situations in which minority populations sought to escape majorities whose persecution they rightly or wrongly feared, precipitating large-scale migration and the beginning of two of the world’s longest ongoing violent conflicts.Footnote ² Moreover, Pakistan and Israel were both manifestations of an understanding of the nation state in which the idea of religious difference had been built in. They were, respectively, a Muslim Homeland and a Jewish National Home.

Yet, to Zafarullah Khan’s point, it is hard to overstate the differences between their paths towards statehood. The emergence of Pakistan and Israel unfolded in parallel but were shaped by the chronologies, dependencies, and ideologies of two different empires – the British and the Ottoman. They had very different institutional legacies, models of statecraft, and political and economic structures following the First World War, as well as completely different experiences during the Second World War.Footnote ³ Nonetheless, entangled through British governance, they both gained statehood at a shared juncture when the very notion of statehood was itself undergoing significant transformation.

Notably, the two countries debated and resolved their nationality through a key question relative to each: who is a Jew and who a Muslim?Footnote ⁴ It was a question that, in effect, deterritorialized the nation, or as Faisal Devji put it, ‘divest[ed] the nation of its state’.Footnote ⁵ A few years later, in fact, it was the very same question that would push Zafarullah Khan out of his job and eventually out of the country. In 1953, large-scale riots targeted him and other members of the Ahmadiyya community demanding they be declared non-Muslim due to their ‘heretical views’ of extending prophethood beyond Muhammad.Footnote ⁶ Some decades later a constitutional amendment was passed that anchored a legal distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim in international trademark law.Footnote ⁷

In this book, I look at religion as a category of knowledge and an object of governance in the field of International Relations (IR). I ask about the politics, history, conditions, and costs of recognizing religion as part of global politics and international political theory. For the last twenty years, IR scholarship has continuously increased its efforts to understand the relationship between religion and politics. After a long period of disinterest, governments, international organizations, and universities started investing vast resources into assessing religion in conflicts as well as in engaging with religious institutions and actors and their ideas, claims, and visions of the world. While the place and role of religion in global politics continue to be disputed, international policymakers and scholars alike agree that one can no longer address world affairs without it: religion demands recognition. However, as decades of scholarship in religious studies have shown, religion is an unstable concept – just like sovereignty, democracy, and freedom. It encompasses an ever-shifting order, range, and scope of social relations, actors, institutions, ideas, and practices.

If the object to be engaged with – religion – is continuously shifting, then what exactly should we engage with, recognize, or include? In this book on the global politics of religion, I ask: what kinds of politics become possible, which actors are authorized and empowered, what relations are strengthened or undermined, and which actions and institutions are legitimated by current understandings of religion? In other words, to what and whom does the concept of religion refer, what does the use of it as a concept do, and how do these dynamics change? In the chapters to come, I argue that we should turn away from triumphant calls from scholars, practitioners, and institutions to recognize, restore, and incorporate religion and religious actors into global politics. Rather, I suggest we shift our focus towards the politics inherent in struggles over recognition – that is, understanding who exactly comprises the entity that is recognized as ‘religious’ and why it matters. In other words, I argue for a fundamental shift in perspective and present a critically new argument about the conditions of recognition itself.

On a theoretical level, I argue that the recognition of religion has two sides and that the more problematic side, what I refer to as ‘costs’, of recognizing religion in global politics has been understudied. I suggest that the arguments in favour of recognizing religion ignore its conceptual history and epistemological and historiographical politics. Instead, they conceive of religion as something that is easily identifiable and differentiable from that which it is not considered as such. They formulate religion as something that can be included or excluded, governed, managed, and engaged with. Thereby these arguments slip from analytically critiquing the problems of sidelining religion to normatively arguing for increased engagement. However, a critique of exclusion, which has structured much, if not most, international scholarship on religion, does not lead to, or legitimate, an argument for inclusion. Rather than enabling the engagement with a broader range of actors, ideas, and forms of knowledge, these arguments restrain it. I suggest that these approaches risk becoming stuck in a loop of legibility, assuming and reproducing religious difference, empowering the existing associations and meanings of religion, and strengthening the social and political hierarchies and investments attached to existing associations. In the end, these approaches do more to sediment social and political division than to overcome it.

In order to remain attentive to the costs of recognition and to avoid the risks of looping legibility, reification, marginalization, and the deepening of social division, we must turn our focus away from arguments in favour of recognizing religion in global politics and international political theory and instead address the arguments and struggles that emerge over the recognition of religion itself. This means emphasizing a critical engagement with the processes and politics that let ‘religion’ emerge as an autonomous object of knowledge. Rather than focusing on recognizing religion, per se, I thus argue for an analysis of how religion became recognizable in the first place – that is, a study of its global epistemological politics.

Empirically, I illustrate what such an approach looks like by examining two separate but entangled cases: first, British India and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; second, Mandate Palestine and the founding of the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel. Here, I show how the quest for statehood, the definition and governance of minorities, organizing principles of racial hierarchy, political representation, and international border-making shaped and were shaped by concepts, agents, and identities associated with religion that broke through the threshold of epistemic recognition to establish themselves as taken-for-granted political entities on the global stage. Through these cases, I illustrate how claims for the recognition of religion are intimately connected to colonial epistemological politics and ask: how was the conceptual apparatus of religion used to describe minorities, borders, and conflicts? How was it featured in negotiations over claims for independence and ideas about sovereignty? How did it structure the analysis of conflicts and expectations over how those conflicts would develop? And in what ways did it structure struggles over authority, legitimacy, and political order?

In this study, I demonstrate that religion is a space, concept, and realm of social and political life rather than an entity that exists separately 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 is a constructive way of gaining insight into the political structures and orders that characterize a particular time and place. Studying the politics of religion through the birth of two states that were claimed and recognized along the lines of religious difference provides us with important resources for understanding contemporary dynamics of global political order.

The Global Politics of Religion and the Costs of Recognition

Propelled into prominence by international violence and conflict in the early 2000s, religion’s public return to global politics spurred an interest in and craving for ‘knowledge about religion’ among public media, policymakers, and intellectuals alike. With the exponential rise in interest in religion and politics during this time, a debate moved centre stage regarding the secular foundations of the liberal political (international) order.Footnote ⁸ The debate outlined and critiqued various secularist assumptions about political order and legitimate authority that explicitly framed religion as outside of both. Religion, in this sense defined the limits of the political and the public.Footnote ⁹ According to emerging critiques, however, religion was not as easily separated from politics as had been assumed, and liberal secularity as we know it today was now argued by prominent theorists to be the result of a particular set of assumptions from a specific historical period.Footnote ¹⁰ These assumptions were, however, neither universal nor neutral, and the fact that they had been nearly universalized via the institution of the liberal state did not make the exclusion of religion from the public/political space a necessary condition of liberal democracy. According to this position, the secularism(s) underlying the Western liberal political order had a history and a genealogy that should be studied in detail rather than used as a measurement for democratic development.Footnote ¹¹ This critique of secularism was premised on what I refer to as ‘narratives of exclusion’ – scholarly assertions that the exclusion of religion from international relations has created a problem to be solved.

This ‘secularism debate’ continued throughout the 2010s, deconstructing the discipline’s alleged secular ontology, thereby clearing space for a new form of engagement with religion in both scholarship and policy circles.Footnote ¹² I focus here on the scholarship side in order to show the conditions under which ‘religion’ returned as a topic of relevance to the study of international order dynamics. In an attempt to reread international political history and theory after the critique of secularism, IR theorist Daniel Philpott saw religion as constitutive of the current Westphalian international order of sovereign states, since this order would never have emerged were it not for the way in which the Reformation and Protestant ideas of political authority shaped the states’ interests in sovereign statehood.Footnote ¹³ ‘No Reformation, no Westphalia’ is the short version of the argument.Footnote ¹⁴ Scott Thomas then argued that assumptions about a secular Westphalian international system that had relegated religious conflict to the inner life of states skewed the understanding of the present ‘resurgence of religion’ in the Global South – regions where religion had never lost its political and social salience.Footnote ¹⁵ In this sense, when scholars retained Westphalia as a symbol for secularized international relations, the global resurgence of religion came to look like an internationalization of a private matter that threatened the international order.Footnote ¹⁶ Following Thomas in an effort to de-securitize religion, William Cavanaugh argued against what he called the ‘secular myth of religious violence’.Footnote ¹⁷ He pointed to the ways in which the emerging early modern state established a discourse of religious violence and the perceived necessity of removing religion from the public sphere in order to shift loyalties from the religiously constructed identity of a community to the new territorial claim to power and authority of the state.

Following this deconstruction, scholars from different backgrounds began seeing religion as potentially embodying the move to a cultural and epistemic diversification in the field. In undoing the knowledge–power regime of secularism, IR scholars expected to broaden the range of actors, arguments, ideas, institutions, and forms of knowledge, opening up to ‘otherwise neglected forms of being, becoming and knowing’.Footnote ¹⁸ This can be identified as the ‘restoration narrative’.Footnote ¹⁹ It included such efforts as expanding the ‘hermeneutic register’ to reach localized cultural markers or vernaculars,Footnote ²⁰ as well as establishing an ‘open hermeneutic margin’ for non-Western actors to widen the resources of negotiation.Footnote ²¹ In other words, it enabled scholars to pursue an ‘ethos of engagement’ with a plurality of previously untapped moral resources or alternative ontologies,Footnote ²² which became a value in and of itself. The value of diversity and plurality was particularly emphasized in relation to the decolonialization or provincialization of an otherwise Eurocentric framework of global politics. ‘Taking views of other worlds seriously’, Erin Wilson writes, ‘requires that we do not attempt to relate different ontologies to one another through language and concepts that belong to only one of them’.Footnote ²³ Following the post-secular account of Jürgen Habermas, Mariano Barbato argued that the semantic figures of religious communities might offer ‘resources for fueling deliberation processes with notions of arguing beyond narrow concepts of self-interest’,Footnote ²⁴ thus broadening the range of ethical possibilities that the instrumental reason of a secular system of thought would be unable to respond to.Footnote ²⁵

Moving from an analytical critique of the exclusion of religion from international political thought and scholarship to a normative argument for ‘its’ inclusion is, so I suggest, a mistake. Assuming an intrinsic value in religious alterity, worldviews, sensibilities, ideas, values, and ontologies reproduce the conditions of separation that the original exclusion rested on. Further, investing in religion as a marker of identity, a line of conflict, or a mode of rationality is problematic. It contributes to an understanding of identity, conflict lines, and rationalities as singular and mutually exclusive, thus undermining the possibilities of conflict solutions built on cross-cutting modes of solidarity. Making religion into an object of international politics – tracing its ‘impact’ – misses out on the critical understanding of the political structures and hierarchies that the existing meanings of religion enable and authorize. Further, it misses out on the performative power nested in arguments for recognition.

As we will see in the first section of the book, attempts to include religion or ‘bring it back’ in international political history, theory, and analysis have not only identified new perspectives and increased the range of relevant actors, institutions, and epistemologies; they have also been productive in defining who and what would count as belonging to the category of religion and thereby be worthy of recognizing. In various ways but in a similar manner, both the narratives of exclusion tracing what has been lost due to the secularist marginalization of religion and the restorative arguments and policies regarding what needs to be ‘brought back in’ rely on and reproduce particular notions of what counts as ‘religious’ and what does not.Footnote ²⁶ I argue that the various arguments for bringing religion into the centre of international politics remain blind to the accompanying cost of doing so. Because there are costs inherent in the process of recognizing religion, it remains essential to study the complex processes that produce those costs. In other words, since the recognition of religion depends on religion being recognizable, it is essential to study the processes by which individuals and groups, conflicts and institutions, arguments and values became recognizable as religious.Footnote ²⁷

If global politics are to be read through the category of religion – aiming to solve ‘religious’ conflicts, engage with ‘religious’ actors, and protect ‘religious’ freedom – it will incentivize association accordingly.Footnote ²⁸ I agree with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd that this form of engagement with religion ‘funnels individuals into discrete faith communities, empowers those communities and their spokespersons, and marginalizes other modes of solidarity’.Footnote ²⁹ The risk of emphasizing the ‘role of religion’, then, is that boundaries between groups are made more salient, creating new forms of social friction defined by religious difference.Footnote ³⁰ Responding to and governing religious difference further ‘puts pressure on nonestablished, unorthodox, [or] nonconforming’ forms of religious life to yield to the recognizable versions thereof or risk being rendered invisible.Footnote ³¹ The burden of normalization is thereby thrown onto those who find themselves outside the realms of the intelligible, compelled to shape themselves in a manner that does not render them imperceptible to the various available regimes of recognition and empowerment. The anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli writes in this vein regarding the recognition of the Indigenous Australian population, noting that they are ‘called on to perform an authentic difference’ and to ‘transport [their] ancient prenational meanings and practices to the present in whatever language and moral framework prevails at the time of enunciation’.Footnote ³² In order to be recognized, in other words, one has to be recognizable, and if they are not, they need to become so. To accept a process of recognition, as Sara Ahmed puts it, is to ‘value those who can “be heard and act” under its name’.Footnote ³³ Or, as Justin Richland argues, respond to a demand for legibility.Footnote ³⁴

Subjects in global politics, therefore, do not only exist by virtue of being recognized but do so in a prior sense by having become recognizable.Footnote ³⁵ International organizations, governmental foreign policies, local administration, and international law shape the global politics of religion that defines the criteria of what it means to be recognizably religious. They have therefore, as Hurd shows, created new categories of actors in world politics.Footnote ³⁶ Recognition as an actor depends on a prior establishment of the criteria of recognizability that one can either successfully meet or fail to attain.Footnote ³⁷ In this way, both the new and never-conceived become tied to that which is already recognized.Footnote ³⁸

In a paper published at the height of international scholarship’s engagement with religion, Robert M. Bosco described this move to ‘capture the “global resurgence” of religion’ as a persistent Orientalist discourse inhabiting the ability to ‘seamlessly appropriate new phenomena into received representations’ while continuously overlooking the politics of the definition of religion.Footnote ³⁹ The assumption that it is possible to engage with religions in a neutral manner masks the epistemic politics interwoven into the concept and its history.Footnote ⁴⁰ While I agree with Bosco that the integration of religion into IR scholarship has been defined by the appropriation of predetermined conceptions of what religion is supposed to be and do, I go further in arguing that the engagement with religion did not simply reproduce the existing conceptions of the term and the political orders and hierarchies it served; it reflects a more basic problem with recognition.

The work by Bosco, Hurd, and a growing critical group of scholars is not a random example of the productive and reifying power entailed in the recognition of religion in global politics and beyond. Rather, the problem of recognizing religion reflects a more general issue with the conditions of recognition, namely that recognition presupposes the prior identification of entities and subjects ready to be recognized.Footnote ⁴¹ The act of recognition, in other words, depends on an established ‘fact’ of recognizability. It assumes a subject that can be known and differentiated from that which it is not prior to the act of recognition itself. In other words, political, legal, and moral recognition depend on a prior form of epistemic recognition.Footnote ⁴² In order to understand how religion became available as an object of knowledge that was possible to recognize and further understand how it became the marker of differentiation between subjects claiming recognition, we must know more about the ways in which religion became recognizable as distinct, identifiable, and somehow different from politics, law, or culture. Once we have a better grasp on how religion became intelligible in this way, we will be able to assess the consequences that accompanied those processes and how the costs of recognition were distributed.

As I will show in detail, the costs of recognizing religion in IR are epistemic in the assumption that there are identifiable and differentiable subjects that recognition can be extended to, for example religious minorities, religious arguments, institutions or organizations, religious doctrines, ideas, norms, or identities. Thereby, those outside this schema of legibility are either forced to claw their way back into intelligibility by any means at their disposal or risk remaining unrecognizable. The costs are also context-dependent and particular to each case, referring, for example, to the reification of social and legal structures and institutions, the heightening of conflict fault lines, the marginalization of unrecognizable groups, and more. I tend to the question of the costs of recognition in detail in Chapter 3 and continue to illustrate examples in the last section by examining state-building efforts in South Asia (Chapters 4 and 5).

The Grammar of Recognition and Religion

Before I proceed, I need to clarify my use of the concepts ‘recognition’ and ‘religion’. Recognition, as we will see in Chapter 3, is a multifaceted and complex concept, used by IR scholars to refer to political, legal, and moral recognition, often without much differentiation.Footnote ⁴³ While political recognition purports to show what and who counts as a relevant actor in international politics and how these actors come to hold their standing in the international system by virtue of being recognized by others, legal and moral recognition build on political recognition in order to identify either membership (legal) or identity constitution (moral).Footnote ⁴⁴ I will go into the details of this in Chapter 3, but important here is to note that my argument is about the primacy of the epistemic aspect of all three forms of recognition.

In order to understand the politics of recognizing religion, then, I focus on the epistemic processes enabling political, legal, and moral recognition of religious minorities, religious institutions, and international borders defined by religious difference.Footnote ⁴⁵ One example I return to in Chapters 4 and 5 is how the terms ‘religion’ and ‘Muslim nation’ came to form part of a transnational vocabulary describing minorities, borders, and conflicts in the case of the governance of British India and the movement towards Pakistani independence. As I have shown elsewhere, the British, Indian, and Pakistani state-building projects were grounded in a shared assumption that a political and epistemic mastery of ‘religion’ was essential to the working of political and legal governance.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Chapters 4 and 5, I look at how a ‘Muslim subject’ became recognizable to local communities, national policymakers, and international organizations, as well as how this recognizability was intertwined with the emergence of a ‘Jewish subject’ in Mandate Palestine that was able to carry the weight of a state. This text asks how the conceptual apparatus of religion developed to describe minorities and new international borders, and it explores how that apparatus was put to use in negotiating claims for autonomy and various visions of statehood. In addition, I ask how this apparatus has structured the analysis of conflicts and logics of violence, as well as how it has featured in struggles about authority and order. In short, what were the conditions, consequences, and costs of employing the vocabulary of religion?

A close study of the epistemic politics of religion throughout the book shows what I refer to as a two-faced, or Janus-faced, dynamic. In the case of Indian Muslims and their resistance to British colonial rule, for example, it was necessary to identify as an ‘Indian Muslim’ in order to be recognizable as a political subject formulating a critique against the prevailing colonial order, as viable alternatives to the colonial state depended on colonial subjects remaining legible to it. Those who resisted the state thus still had to align themselves along the unified categories of race and religion in order to be recognizable to and recognized by the state. In other words, imperial recognition of the Indian Muslim was Janus-faced in that it worked both as a condition for government and power as well as a resource for challenging and opposing it. In this sense, then, even acts of resistance against local and colonial elites helped reinforce the idea of a unified ‘Muslim’ subject.Footnote ⁴⁷ This unified Muslim subject – as well as its codification in law and representation in politics – would thus become a key node in the anti-colonial resistance movement and claims to independence.

Connecting political power to one’s recognizability as a religious minority cuts both ways. As Iza Hussin notes, at ‘the level of legal and political discourse, the ability to make claims on behalf of a Muslim interest required an acceptance of the space within which Islam had been assigned, thereby often undermining the logic and power of the claim itself’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In The Politics of Islamic Law, Hussin shows how the realm of Islamic law became intelligible as a separate category of law in Muslim societies under British imperial rule. Colonial encounters both subjugated Islamic law – detaching it from public politics and restricting it to the private realm of family law – and, through its reification, codification, and textualization, gave Muslims concrete and legible references for litigation, appeal, and reform in courts and in society more generally. This made Islamic law a powerful tool for articulating alternatives and challenges to the authority of the colonial state.Footnote ⁴⁹ By compartmentalizing religion into various domains and ceding those domains to the local elite, the ‘colonial state in fact helped constitute the private domain that Indian nationalists later cherished as free from colonial interference’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Similarly, processes of minoritization – such as giving a ‘Muslim minority’ exclusive electorates – brought both access to power and subjugation to it. It granted access to power by making the members of a population recognizable as political actors. Yet the condition of that access to power was subjugation or subjection to the particular form of knowledge that grants access – meaning, in this example, becoming legible to the apparatus of the state. This, then, is what I mean by the ‘two faces’ of recognition: the conditions of empowerment are simultaneously the conditions of control.

Recognition brings with it access to power, but it also has costs. The British colonial state separated Islamic law and the Muslim subjectivities connected to it from public political power. At the same time, the unification, codification, and reification of Islamic law opened up space for anti-colonial actors to draw on those highly specified codes and rules in order to articulate an alternative to British rule. Similarly, the recognition of British Indian Muslims as a minority created a unified actor with political access. Yet it limited that access to those who were recognizably Muslim in the eyes of the colonial state and the technologies of categorization it used to visualize its subjects (such as the census or the law). The form of power expressed through the regimes of recognition thus both simultaneously established the subject and subjected it to the existing form of government. In addition, these twin dynamics were an international affair, spanning the Indian subcontinent and reaching the length of the British Empire into the heart of the Middle East.

Arguments and Contributions

In this book, I ask how segments and sections of social and political life become recognizable as religious while others do not. What are the processes by which that characterization emerges and what is at stake? More importantly, what are the consequences and who do they affect? I argue that international scholarship has failed to consider the manner in which the process of recognition both presupposes and reproduces already recognizable subjects, as well as the epistemic frameworks within which they are found. Arguments for recognition are not only productive of that which they seek to recognize; they assume that the object of recognition can be known and differentiated from that which it is not. Arguments for the recognition of religion in international affairs, in this case, assume that religion is always an already present and intelligible category of political thought and action. Throughout the book, I continue to demonstrate how this tendency is inherent in the grammar of international recognition more broadly, and I argue that it is a part of the cost of being recognized. Indeed, I argue that there are costs involved in recognizing religion in global politics that are neither sufficiently understood nor appropriately evaluated.

The conditions for recognition are, I suggest, fundamentally bound up with its costs. If arguments for recognition both presuppose and reproduce a differentiated social logic – that is to say, a logic which assumes an identifiable and differentiated subject – the pre-existing, latent subject acts as a benchmark for understanding whether or not a process of recognition has been successful. It depends on a prior establishment of the criteria of recognizability that one can either successfully meet or fail to meet. IR scholarship on recognition predominantly sees recognition as something to be gained or at least fought for. It is considered a source of change in regard to hierarchies and orders and, not least, as a means through which to actualize a potential self, whether it be as a state, a nation, a minority, or an individual. However, the question remains: from where does the potential subject emerge on behalf of which recognition can be claimed (or denied)? How does one traverse the threshold of recognizability?

Instead of recognizing religion in global politics, I argue for centring the epistemic politics of religion in international political scholarship and analyses of international order dynamics, as well as in conflict research, diplomatic practices, aid assessments, institution-building, democracy promotion, global health policy development, minority governance, gender sensitivity training, and state-building analysis. It is an argument for changing our focus from struggles for recognition to studying the struggles over recognition (i.e., struggles to define the conditions for the possibility of recognition and the epistemic frameworks of legibility).Footnote ⁵¹ By studying the processes by which religion becomes recognizable, we can start understanding the costs that accompany these processes and start making more informed choices regarding the consequences of recognizing religion. Specifically, we will be able to assess whether we are prepared to carry the costs of recognition in terms of reified identities, marginalized minorities, and heightened lines of conflict.

The book builds on and develops interdisciplinary critical scholarship on religion and politics exemplified throughout the text through conversations with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Iza Hussin, Winnifred Sullivan, Nadia Marzouki, An Yountae, Brent Crosson, and many others who have been central in carving out a space for the conceptual study of religion.Footnote ⁵² This book takes the cue from their critiques of the assumption that there is epistemic autonomy of the concept and follows their lead into the depths and myriad constitutive processes of law, politics, and historiography. It extends their arguments on the constitutive power of discourses and practices on religious freedom, the politics of law, and secularist knowledge regimes by showing how these discourses and practices resonate with performative arguments for recognition that cannot escape the assertion and assumption of a pre-existing ‘religious’ subject against which it can measure success or failure. By developing these concepts, I suggest that the looping legibility of recognizing the recognizable is one of the most central costs of recognition.

Regarding the place of religion in the study of global politics, I suggest that the concept of religion is not a useful analytical category. The problems associated with a deliberate or accidental marginalization of religion in international political theory and practice are not solved by a recognition of its importance and centrality to global political dynamics. A first reason for this is that the recognition of religion extends acknowledgement and empowerment to that or those who are already recognizable as religious. The recognition of religion thereby confirms the claims of powerful actors to represent religion, religious groups, and religious truths. It marginalizes those who do not resonate at the register of the recognizably religious, writing out of the picture an entire range of possibilities and leaving those who remain unrecognized to struggle to achieve a place on the public register of recognition. This strengthens the voices of conventional and established religion and further hardens the boundary between those in power and those who are not. Telling the story of the marginalization of religion does not simply describe a matter of fact; it crafts space for a particular kind of voice to be able to enter in its place.

A second reason to question the recognition of religion in the theory and practice of global politics, as I noted throughout this Introduction, is recognition’s double nature: it both constitutes and empowers subjects of global politics while, at the same time, incorporating them into a particular form of governance. It thus reproduces the structures of domination and subordination. It is only through understanding the two faces of recognition – in addition to the ‘loop of legibility’ – that we can properly evaluate the consequences of choosing to recognize religion and religious difference in world politics. As I show in Chapter 3, this is particularly important to note for non-essentialist recognition, that is, recognition that does not assume reified subjectivities but sees subjectivities as performatively constituted. Even here, we see how performative accounts of recognition are dependent on the categories of intelligibility, including religion.

The last principal argument I put forward in this text concerns the colonial legacy of cultural categories in international politics, theory, and history. In Chapters 4 and 5, I show how colonial governmental logics that structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and Palestinian Jews shaped the nation states that came to replace them, as well as the decades-long violent conflicts that followed. The book thereby challenges current scholarship that connects, on the one hand, religion with violence and conflict and, on the other hand, peace and state-building.Footnote ⁵³ It does so by historicizing and contextualizing the categories on which such connections are built.

As the book is a bird’s-eye view on a modern conceptual and epistemological puzzle involving the politics of representation and its limits, costs, and consequences as applied to religion and religious difference, there are certain things the book does not do. The book does not engage with lived religious practices; it does not weigh in on textual or other interpretative debates within religious communities as recognized or constituted politically or discursively; and it does not suggest ‘new and improved’ ways of governing religious difference or overcoming the double bind of the politics of recognition. Further, while the book uses the examples of British India and Mandate Palestine to illustrate the interactions of actors and structures of recognizability, it draws on studies of the practices of Indian and Palestinian populations and communities rather than contributes with ethnographic or sociological detail.Footnote ⁵⁴ As I show in Chapter 5, the terminology of religion had in both cases been abstracted from the practices and creed of the population it has come to represent. The book therefore presents a conceptual and theoretical framework that places these abstractions and other constitutive measures in a larger context of transnational governance. While the arguments regarding the costs of recognizing religion can be useful to those seeking recognition and who bear the humanitarian and institutional costs, the stronger focus of the book is on the one hand how recognition arguments and logics remain a problem for IR scholars and their fields, as an analytical problem with conceptual and policy implications. On the other hand, the book identifies the costs of recognition as a problem for the international system and its institutions where the costs affect the functioning of the system and inflect its functioning with a particular kind of political and epistemic violence.

Chapter Outline

Before I introduce the individual chapters, I want to suggest two distinct ways to read the book. The first is directed at readers interested in IR scholarship and international political theory, as well as practitioners interested in the global politics of religion. Here, I suggest a conventional reading of the book, from beginning to end. The two first chapters provide a theoretical context for the study of recognition and religion and illustrate the problems entailed in the grammar of recognition, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The last two chapters, Chapters 4 and 5, then illustrate what an alternative approach to religion in IR looks like by studying the macro- and micro-dynamics of state-building in Pakistan and Israel.

The second reading is directed at IR scholars with a particular interest in religion and global politics, scholars of international political sociology and critical theory, political scientists interested in conceptual politics and genealogy, historians of South Asia and the Middle East, anthropologists, and sociologists of religion. For these readers, I suggest starting with the empirical chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), which provide a new perspective on religion in relation to the dynamics of the international political order and the constitution and change of authority and legitimacy. These chapters also address the circulation of concepts, governmental techniques, representational politics, demographical governance, and cartographical markers for border commissions. A close reading of Chapter 3 provides the theoretical umbrella under which these various processes are conceptualized, namely as ambiguous dynamics of recognition that enable both platforms for independence and agency and the conditions under which independence movements, arguments, and subjects have to become recognizable and intelligible in order to work. In this reading, Chapters 1 and 2 provide additional resources for understanding how the tension and ambiguity of recognition play out in current IR scholarship.

Exploring the development of what became known as the secularism debate, I begin Chapter 1 by showing how the critique of liberal secularism from the late 1990s onwards fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up possibilities to engage with religion in new ways. The re-evaluation of the secular foundations of liberal thought and liberal politics catalysed significant quantities of research on religion and global politics. However, despite efforts to the contrary, attempts to rehabilitate the concept of religion ontologically closed it, narrowing the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies in IR theory. By looking closer at the history and particular intellectual legacy of the secularism debate, we see how these problems emerged and how they continue to be reproduced in current scholarship.

The scholarship on secularism in the first decade of the 2000s came primarily from two distinct sources, what I will refer to as multiculturalist and genealogical legacies. While this is a gross simplification and does not do justice to the complex and diverse arguments made, the conceptualizations work heuristically to drive home a larger point at hand, namely the fact that the alternatives that emerged from this critique of secularism often reproduced the tension inherent in both these strains of thought. That is, the reification of cultural identities from the scholarship of multiculturalism and the lack of alternatives that genealogical scholarship puts forth in relation to its critique of power hierarchies. By taking a closer look at the internal logics of these two strands of thought, we start seeing how the tension between them emerged and how it has continued to structure current IR scholarship on religion. While the multiculturalist perspective sees a way forward from the deconstruction of IR’s secularist ontology in the recognition of the immanence and value of religion for global politics, it becomes clear in conversation with the genealogical alternative that slipping from an analytical and historical critique of the exclusion of religion to a normative argument for recognition unearths unrecognized costs to these forms of recognition. Understanding this process and these costs is important because the multicultural effort to rehabilitate religion risks reifying the identities, practices, and lines of conflict associated with it.

Chapter 2 is about the concept of religion in IR scholarship, the pitfalls of multiculturalist approaches, and the potential of alternatives centring genealogical care. It argues that this conceptual analysis is necessary in order to understand the endemic ideological and cognitive biases built into the dominant multiculturalist framework on religion in IR, as well as the importance of identifying alternatives for moving forward. This is significant because these biases continue to structure the regulation and governance of religious minorities, the identification and evaluation of ‘religious’ conflict and conflict parties, both scholarship and the political practice of religious freedom, as well as ongoing initiatives for reworking the relationship between religion and politics within international practices and theory. Through a conceptually close reading of Daniel Philpott and Jürgen Habermas, I show how scholars ignore or reject the argument that religion is a contested and contestable concept in need of genealogical care and instead rely on a conventional – and stable – concept of religion that is recognizable to its proponents. This form of conceptual analysis is important for two reasons. First, it debunks the claims to inclusion and diversity sitting at the centre of the move to recognize religion beyond the limits of the state. And second, it shows that efforts to recognize religion without conceptual care and attention to the processes by which religion becomes recognizable risk reproducing structures of power and hierarchy and lose their ability to challenge them. I end the chapter by returning to Iza Hussin’s work, in which she provides an example of how genealogical care for the concept of religion breaks the reproductive and reifying power of epistemic recognition.

Chapter 3 is the theoretical centrepiece of the book and argues that scholarship striving to ‘engage’ or ‘recognize’ religion in global politics remains ignorant of the costs involved in doing so. Building on this argument, the chapter asks if the troubles inherent in recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities related to the grammar of recognition itself. Building on the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, James Tully, and Jens Bartelson, this chapter introduces the idea that recognition has two faces and makes the argument that, along with the frequently acknowledged empowering aspect of recognition, it comes with distinct costs. This is significant, as the problems accompanying the ‘engagement’, ‘inclusion’, or ‘recognition’ of religion do not stem from academic ignorance, ideological bias, or conservative politics but rather are part of the very conditions that make recognition possible. My work in this chapter showcases the importance of understanding these conditions, which encompass the epistemological politics of recognizability. I end the chapter by looking forward, asking whether the costs of recognition may influence whether actors will choose to remain politically or even legally unintelligible. If being recognizable as religious means being governable under the instruments and laws regulating religion, becoming unrecognizable or remaining politically or legally unknown may be considered preferable. Addressing the disestablishment of the religious representation of the Pakistani Ahmadiyya, I argue that being attentive to the costs of recognition enables us to better understand choices of unintelligibility and the privileges of invisibility.

Indeed, in order to understand the costs of recognizing religion in global politics, one must study in detail the processes by which religion has become intelligible as such, which I address in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 shows how we can gain a better understanding of the consequences and costs of recognizing religion in IR by tracing the manifold ways in which the concept has become recognizable locally, nationally, and globally. It looks, therefore, at the epistemological politics of religion as illustrated through the partition of British India and Mandate Palestine and the emergence of the Pakistani and Israeli states. It argues that the concepts of ‘religion’ and of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ subjects both gave shape to and were shaped by various claims for independence, resistance efforts against colonial governance, struggles for minority representation, and other forms of recognition.

Throughout the chapter, I ask how 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 – a process that aligned the recognition and formation of a religious minority with the contours of the nation and the state. I address the emergence of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyse the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. I show how emerging modes of political and legal 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 in these two cases, the chapter studies the conditions and consequences following various forms of recognition and religious difference in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of Indian Muslims and Palestinian Jews, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for developing future challenges against them.

In Chapter 5, I look at the global epistemological politics of religion as illustrated through the transnational history of Pakistan and Israel. I argue that the entangled nature of these state-building ventures contributed to the circulation of particular understandings of religion and its relation to the state. Moreover, I show that these understandings structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and the Palestinian Jews in ways that both limited and enabled their claims to the nations and states that came to replace the colonial relationship. Claims for the recognition of religion in international relations, I suggest, are intimately connected to these forms of colonial epistemological politics. They are not separate. In this chapter, I thus study the often overlooked dynamics of intra-imperial relations and the ways in which these intersect with racial ideologies and hierarchies, the colonial and postcolonial sociology of knowledge, and the changing international order. The case studies focus on two individuals at the centre of the Pakistani and Israeli partitions and independence movements, Reginald Coupland and Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. I examine how they, the institutions they represented, and the ideas they carried all circulated, influenced, and changed throughout the last decades before independence. This chapter not only illustrates what a study of the global epistemological politics of religion might look like; it offers additional definition and texture to the argument I make about the double face of recognition.

In the Conclusion, I summarize my arguments for the study of the global politics of religion, international political theory, and the study of colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial politics. In the field of religion and politics, I illustrate the productive power of the exclusion narrative and reconstruct the concept of religion that remains so critical to the rehabilitating narrative of recognition. In the field of IR theory, I emphasize the need to study the costs of recognition and argue for a greater attentiveness to its conditions of possibility, that is to say, the processes through which the subjects and objects of global politics become intelligible, or recognizable, as such. Studying the vulnerability and governability that are bound up with recognition means making visible the forgetting of certain histories, the abandonment of certain practices, the silencing of certain voices, and the privileging of certain forms or regimes of difference over others. It is by critically examining the path to recognizability – that is, the global epistemological politics – of religion that we can begin to understand these costs.