Introduction
The 21st century has been called a ‘God-fearing time for international geopolitics’.Footnote 1 Religion’s de-privatisation and growing public role in – and consequences for – international order,Footnote 2 has made it ‘one of the major voices of resistance and provided the frame for a radical critique against the globalisation of a Western-centric and liberal order’.Footnote 3 As an important ideational factor, religion has the capacity to shape culture, identity, attitudes, and foreign policy preferences,Footnote 4 influencing how states define their national interestsFootnote 5 and how they behave on the international stage.Footnote 6 And, like any normative structure, religion may serve as soft power, used as a tool by religious and secular, state and non-state actorsFootnote 7 and exploited for legitimating domestic and foreign policies. Through the use of religion’s narrative and symbolic dimensions, states can deploy what Bettiza refers to as sacred capital.Footnote 8 This can be understood as the accumulated symbolic, cultural, and network resources in the religious domain, from holy cities to educational centres, used to shape global perceptions, influence transnational religious communities, and exercise political influence.
While the ‘return’ of religion has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny, analyses of sacred capital have chiefly focused on two aspects: how state-majority religions are used as resources in soft power strategiesFootnote 9 and how Islam in particular has been used in security discourses that seek to undermine Islamist extremist movements post-9/11.Footnote 10 In the context of geopolitical contestation, however, we are seeing an increasing use of non-majority religions as forms of sacred capital, specifically in the use of Islam as a soft power resource in the great power competitions between China, Russia, and the United States.
This article aims to contribute to the literature on the use of religion as soft power by considering how three great powers, China, Russia, and the US, use Islam, a minority religion domestically, as a foreign policy resource in their soft power strategies. These states were selected for their global reach, ideological divergence, and increasing engagement with Muslim-majority countries through strategic alliances, trade, and normative contestation. Their distinct domestic religious environments and geopolitical orientations make them analytically rich cases for exploring the use of Islam in foreign policy. While Muslims make up significant minorities in all three countries, in their self-presentation on the world stage, each state either is officially atheist, as in China, or officially secular with a strong emphasis on Christianity, as in Russia and the United States. Nevertheless, each has employed Islam as a foreign policy tool to reach out and influence Muslim communities and states elsewhere in the world, to greater or lesser success. For this reason, we argue that the use of Islam as soft power by non-Muslim majority states requires a much greater focus.
The analytical lens used in the present research centres on narrative construction, representations, and the framing of events, identities, policies, and values. The study uses key cases to identify, describe, and explain how religious narratives are employed within broader contexts of great power competition, analysing a range of events, strategic documents, laws, media, and expert commentary. Rather than formal discourse analysis or systematic coding, the paper adopts a qualitative interpretative approach,Footnote 11 integrating Nye’s concept of soft powerFootnote 12 and the notion of soft disempowerment proposed by Brannagan and GiulianottiFootnote 13 to explore how Islam is strategically invoked by China, Russia, and the United States as a tool to legitimise their authority, justify foreign policies, enhance their global influence, and undermine competitors.
This article seeks to address the following research question: how do great powers employ Islam in their soft power strategies? To do this, the article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss how religion may be analysed in the context of geopolitics and the concept of religious soft power, before moving on to discuss how China, Russia, and the US have deployed Islam to present positive self-images on the international stage as Islam-friendly. We then consider how competitor powers seek to exploit legitimacy deficits through negative-other strategies and soft disempowerment. We conclude by arguing that the use of Islam by non-Muslim great powers is a potentially dangerous game. While instrumentalising Islam may provide immediate benefits, it also opens the possibility for critique, particularly around perceived inconsistencies between domestic religious practices of a state and its internationally promoted narratives. These tensions can invite accusations of illegitimacy and hypocrisy, especially when leveraged by competitors or transnational religious actors (TRAs).
Religion, international relations, and soft power
Post-secular International Relations (IR) has challenged the dichotomy between secular and religious, leading to different approaches to conceptualising religion in IR analyses. Tristan Sturm distinguishes between ‘the geopolitics of religion’, which refers to conflicts over theological representations of an ideal world, and ‘religious geopolitics’, which relates to the ways secular actors employ theological discourse to achieve their aims.Footnote 14 Within this second perspective, Mona Kanwal Sheikh offers three approaches to analysing religion in IR,Footnote 15 considering it as: a belief community, focusing on behaviour-oriented analysis and the connections between religious identity and actions; as power and a strategic asset, where legitimacy-oriented analysis is the focus; and as a speech act, linking it to securitisation theory and conflict analysis. Our interest in this article is in religious geopolitics and the complex functionality of religion in foreign policy making, and we locate our analysis within Sheikh’s second approach, viewing religion as power that can provide legitimacy, authority, and rationality for foreign policy actions and approaches. The concept of soft power is particularly useful for understanding religion through this framework.
Joseph Nye proposed the idea of soft power as one way that states may affect the behaviour of other states in order to achieve desired foreign policy outcomes. If power is the ability to get what one wants, then this can be achieved in three main ways: through ‘sticks’ (threats of coercion); through ‘carrots’ (inducements and payments); and through ‘co-option’, which allows states to set the agenda and persuade others to want what it wants. The latter of these he terms soft power, the ability to persuade others through the attractive power of a country’s values, which encourages others to emulate it.Footnote 16 Nye argues that state soft power emerges primarily from three resources: culture, political values, and foreign policies. When all three are seen as legitimate, attractive, and imbued with moral authority, a state can wield soft power as a resource to encourage other states to follow its lead in international relations.Footnote 17 The power of attraction lies in the currency of a state’s cultural, social, and political resources and affects the extent to which it is perceived as a role model by others and viewed in favourable ways. One way that states can achieve this is through ‘nation branding’ strategies, which present a particular image of a state designed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of foreign publics through public diplomacy and political moves that aim to secure power in competition with other states.Footnote 18
Understanding religion as power and building our argumentation on Nye’s notion of soft power, we also draw on the concept of soft disempowerment which refers to states’ efforts to erode the legitimacy or symbolic capital of an adversary. Brannagan and Giulianotti write ‘just as soft power rests on shared notions of “attraction” and “credibility”, so too soft disempowerment depends on collective understandings of “unattractiveness” or “illegitimacy”’.Footnote 19 This aligns with broader constructivist perspectives on norm contestation and strategic framing, which is essential in the context of great power competition. This conceptual move aims to broaden our analytical focus on how religion operates not just as a source of power, but also as a source through which international actors seek to discredit or diminish rivals in the realm of ideas and norms.
Religion does not feature prominently in Nye’s understanding of soft power. Although culture is a key arena for the projection of soft power, his focus is on education, popular culture, media, and art. Yet, as Baycar and Rakipoglu have noted, organised religious movements have wielded soft power for centuries, attracting people to want what they want through persuasion rather than coercion.Footnote 20 At the international level, scholars have pointed to the importance of religio-cultural instruments of power, including the power conferred through the control of religious sites such as Mecca and MedinaFootnote 21 and Jerusalem,Footnote 22 which may be leveraged for geopolitical goals and used in cultural diplomacy on the international stage.Footnote 23 As an element of persuasion, sacred capital and the moral authority that religious soft power imbues can be powerful influences on the views of both domestic and foreign publics.
Much of the literature on religious soft power has focused on how states employ the state-majority religion, sponsoring a particular interpretation of that religion to uphold the authority of the state in question. For example, Saudi Arabia’s cultural and symbolic power, generated through its custodianship of the holy sites of Islam, has been noted in terms of the prestige this generates amongst Muslims and its consequent self-articulation as a leader on Muslim affairs.Footnote 24 Both Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have wielded their counterterrorism credentials through positioning themselves via religious soft power as ‘moderate Islamic’ states and crucial partners in the global security nexus.Footnote 25 State-majority religions are also used to exert religious soft power in democratic and secular states. For example, Indonesia’s Islamic brand was used as part of its cultural diplomacy during the war on terror and its positioning as the largest Muslim majority democracy in the world and therefore a state with which the US could work.Footnote 26 Turkey’s turn to neo-Ottomanism under President Erdoğan draws partly on Islamic soft power to establish cultural proximity to other nations,Footnote 27 and India increasingly uses yoga and Hindu spiritual traditions as part of its efforts to promote ‘soft Hindutva’ and position itself as a benign force in global affairs.Footnote 28
Great powers have also increasingly drawn on religious soft power resources to project global leadership. Russia’s expansion of the role of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) under Putin demonstrates how religion may be employed as cultural-symbolic power by states to entrench the authority of particular political projects. As HenneFootnote 29 has noted, Putin has increased funding to the ROC and connected Russia’s security apparatus with the church, allowing him to draw on the church’s resources of moral authority in his foreign policy.Footnote 30 The Communist Party of China (CPC) under Xi Jinping has similarly used Buddhism, both to lend its policies moral authority and to project its cultural-symbolic power as inheritor of a great civilisation, through the lending of relics, the funding of Buddhist temple building, and the institution of conferences and Buddhist friendship associations in Asian countries and in the West.Footnote 31
Studies of religious soft power have enabled the field to incorporate a broader view of the role of religion in influencing international relations, demonstrating the power of religion in international politics. However, while the literature on how countries use religion as a resource in international relations is rich and diverse, it focuses largely on how states employ the majority or state religion in their project of soft power (as in Saudi Arabia’s use of Islam, Russia’s use of Orthodox Christianity, or India’s use of Hinduism). There is comparatively little research on how states employ minority religions in soft power competitions.
Although several studies have noted that the cultural-symbolic power of Islam has been harnessed by non-Muslim states in their foreign policies towards the Middle East,Footnote 32 these have focused on Islamist security threats and how states have constructed a ‘good’ Islam that suits their domestic policies. For example, Saudi relationships with both Russia and China have been noted by Hoffman as coalitions that serve the interests of Saudi Arabia (enabling it to denounce state-unacceptable expressions of Islam as ‘terrorism’),Footnote 33 as well as the economic and foreign policy interests of Russia (as protector of religious minorities threatened by Islamist ‘extremism’),Footnote 34 and China (whose Belt and Road Initiative relies on mutual political trust and economic integration in Eurasia).Footnote 35 The United States’ relationships in the region serve similar purposes, working particularly with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to focus public diplomacy, funding and resources on encouraging the ‘right’ kind of Islamic identity in order to undermine political Islamist movements through countering violent extremism (CVE) policies.Footnote 36
When considering how non-Muslim states employ Islam, however, this focus on security misses important aspects of the use of religious soft power in the post–war on terror world. The deployment of discourse on Islam has become increasingly apparent in great power competitions in ways that are not fully captured by focusing on international security and/or domestic economic interests. This article aims to contribute to the literature on the use of religion as soft power by considering how three ‘great powers’, China, Russia, and the United States, use Islam as a foreign policy resource in their soft power strategies. While Muslims make up significant minorities in all three countries, in their self-presentation on the world stage each state is officially atheist (China) or officially secular with strong Christian influences (Russia and the United States). Each state has, however, employed Islam as a soft power tool to influence Muslim communities and states elsewhere in the world, and to undermine competitor states’ legitimacy. The following section discusses how Islam is used by non-Muslim majority great powers in religious geopolitics.
Religious geopolitics
Islam in China’s faith diplomacy
After its foundation in 1949, the People’s Republic of China promoted atheism, yet it always acknowledged the strategic importance of religion in domestic affairs. Its State Religious Affairs Bureau was created in 1951, and national religious associations were founded within a few years after. Since establishing the China Committee on Religion and Peace (1994) and the China Religious Culture Communication Association (2005), the country’s religious politics has been rapidly systematised and institutionalised. China considers its faith diplomacy an issue of political, as well as homeland and cultural security.Footnote 37 The central doctrine of the Chinese Communist Party considers it necessary for religion to be localised with Chinese culture and remain independent from foreign influence.Footnote 38 The specific attitude towards religions led to dramatic restrictions of religious freedom during the period of Chairman Mao Zedong and later under the rule of Xi Jinping, from 2012.Footnote 39
While four communities have experienced religious persecution in China – Hui and Uyghur Muslims, Protestant Christians, and Tibetan BuddhistsFootnote 40 – the Muslim case is different for several reasons. Muslims make up large ethnic minority groups (Hui, Uyghur, and others), unlike Christians, for example. Populations are concentrated in the Ningxia and Xinjiang regions, the latter being a border region which is perceived as vulnerable to separatism. In addition, for Beijing, Islam is considered an imported religion (unlike Buddhism), containing less ‘Chineseness’.Footnote 41 Despite widespread criticism of the Chinese Communist Party regarding its human rights violations and suppression of ethnoreligious minorities,Footnote 42 Beijing has managed to maintain good relations with Muslim-majority countries, mainly due to China’s attractive economic policy and multifaceted use of religious soft power.
Beijing’s Islamic diplomacy is based on censoring sensitive information and constructing a religion-friendly image of China. As part of its strategy, China invites official delegations from Muslim-majority countries to areas with high Muslim populations like Xinjiang and shows the so-called ‘vocational education and training centres’,Footnote 43 the key purpose of which is to present an ‘innovative counter-terrorism strategy’, ‘Muslim-friendly’ domestic politics, and compliance with the human and civil rights of ethnoreligious minorities. Inviting sympathetic public figures to Xinjiang has become a primary approach for combating the narrative on violations of the rights of Muslim minorities, and China organises state-led tourism initiatives, deconstructing and Sinicising Uyghur heritage sites in Xinjiang to influence public attitudes and reshape collective memory towards the Uyghur issue.Footnote 44
The Sinicisation of Islam in Chinese domestic policy relies on purging it of ‘foreign’ influence and localises Islamic danger as emerging from specific Muslim groups, particularly the Uyghurs. As Akbarzadeh et al. have noted, soft power for Chinese scholars and policy analysts is considered not only in international relations but also in the context of domestic governance.Footnote 45 For China, soft power is built domestically through micro-securitisation, a strategy which localises security threats by framing specific Muslim groups as discrete dangers rather than treating Islam itself as a monolithic, global security challenge. In this way, China localises the threat of ‘bad’ Islam, while those ‘good’ Muslims who can represent Sinicised Islam on the world stage are employed as symbolic resources for foreign soft power building. The ‘success’ of this approach is demonstrated by the relative absence of condemnation of China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority from Muslim-majority states. For instance, a 2019 joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council defending (and even praising) China’s policies in Xinjiang was signed by more than 40 countries, including several Muslim-majority states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Egypt.Footnote 46 This public support appeared in contrast to the condemnation expressed by nearly two dozen Western countries around the same time.Footnote 47
Another dimension of Chinese use of Islamic soft power relates to its organisation of and participation in relevant international events and frameworks. China participates in Hajj diplomacy, although it strictly controls the number of pilgrimages permitted. It develops religious exchanges and cultural programmes with Muslim-majority countries, through cultural festivals, exchanging Muslim leaders and artists, and translating Chinese media content into Arabic. It also hosts international events, for example, the China International Muslim Business Summit. In 2024, China hosted the International Congress on ‘China and the Islamic World: Cultural Encounters and Mutual Learning’, organised with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Some events, such as one in 2021 focused on Islam and social development, are hosted by the China Islamic Association. Finally, the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum, established in 2004, presents a high-level formal framework for multilateral engagement with Arab countries.
In addition to this, China conducts religious soft power abroad. Its ambassadors visit foreign mosques and meet Muslim communities in Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries to promote a positive image of China. Beijing engages with international religious organisations, such as the OIC, which even adopted a resolution supporting China’s efforts in ‘providing care to its Muslim citizens’.Footnote 48 Beijing collaborated with OIC representatives after the unrest in Xinjiang in 2009, and, along with the condemnation of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq by the Islamic Association of China, this exemplifies how China uses Islam for crisis communication.Footnote 49 The latest example of such communication shows that China is also seeking the role of peacebuilder and mediator. In November 2023, China welcomed foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Indonesia as part of its initiative to end the Israel–Gaza war, which concluded with the July 2024 Beijing Declaration, where Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement to form a government together. As Aboudouh argues, China seeks to position itself as fostering Palestinian unity, contrasting with the US, which is seen as implicitly supporting Israeli efforts to maintain division.Footnote 50
Since China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the role of religion and especially Islam in its foreign policy has grown substantially. BRI covers tens of Muslim-majority countries and has to be organised in an attractive and adaptable way. And Beijing does so. Today, China is expanding its presence in international halal food markets, primarily in the Arab world, and transforming Ningxia’s autonomous region into a halal hub. El Bernoussi and Belkziz note that in 2021, China became a leader in exporting halal goods to Muslim countries, with a trade value reaching $40.4 billion, and, despite the Chinese halal industry facing a legitimacy crisis following pork scandals, it is creating an industrial food cluster with the United Arab Emirates.Footnote 51
Beijing positions the Belt and Road Initiative as a renaissance of Muslim and Chinese cooperation and perhaps even as a step towards an Asia-centric world incorporating Islamic finance and banking into BRI investment projects. For example, China is exploring the potential of Islamic bonds (known as ‘Sukuk’), and in January 2024 the Islamic Development Bank and the Bank of China discussed how to attract Chinese investors to relevant opportunities.Footnote 52 During the 2010s, interest in the field of Islamic finance was also shown by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.Footnote 53 Erie notes that though there are notable aspirations regarding the implementation of Islamic finance in the Chinese banking industry, it remains embryonic.Footnote 54 Nevertheless, the high potential of introducing Islamic finance into BRI infrastructure means that, if China has the political will, the situation may rapidly change.Footnote 55
It is important to offer a few observations and contextual additions here. First, China has wielded religious soft power with increasing support from the Muslim world, despite violations of the rights of Muslims in China. This can be explained by the specific ideational framework of non-interference that China exports and applies to its relations with Muslim-majority countries which focuses on mutual prosperity and promises win-win cooperation and development. Second, if Beijing’s Islamic diplomacy previously pursued the cultivation of a better Chinese image among Muslim publics, it now also aims to contribute to foreign economic policy by adjusting the BRI project to Muslim legal frameworks in banking and trade, by introducing Islamic investment practices, developing its share in the global halal industry, and combining bilateral and multilateral relations through state and private businesses. Third, China promotes Xi Jinping’s Global Civilisation Initiative, which stands on a civilisational vision of the world order and recognises the diversity of civilisations with no imposition of universal values.Footnote 56 This is an attempt to contest the ideational assumptions of the Western liberal order, but it is also attractive for rising powers and the Global South, offering the prospect of reorganisation of power distribution and the ideological framework of the international system. At the same time, China’s religious diplomacy is widely perceived as lacking authenticity. As Zhang notes, the primary reason for this is that Beijing treats religion not as sacred, but rather in a utilitarian sense, as a useful cultural and political resource.Footnote 57
Russia: Fitting Islam into the grand strategy
By the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika, Soviet (and later Russian) authorities changed their attitude towards religion, considering it an ally and ‘custodian of moral values’ rather than an opponent.Footnote 58 At the same time, in its modern history, Russia has undertaken two wars in Muslim-majority Chechnya and faced several Islamist terrorist attacks. Malashenko notes that the renaissance of Islam in Russia was quite different from that of Orthodoxy – it was quickly politicised and became a vehicle for social and political protest, fuelling nationalist sentiments in Russian Muslim-majority regions, and as a result emerged as a security concern for the state.Footnote 59 However, as Galeeva writes, after defeating separatists in the North Caucasus, Putin’s regime reframed Islam from a threat to a soft power resource.Footnote 60
To do this, Russia applied the ‘good’/‘bad’ division, where local, so-called traditional Islam was constructed as ‘good’ and foreign ‘extreme’ versions of Islam were constructed as ‘bad’. In other words, Russia’s approach has consisted chiefly of attempts to securitise foreign influence on domestic Islam. Aitamurto notes that appealing to the concept of traditional Islam as a kind of ‘secularised Islam loyal to the state’ contradicts the transnational nature of religions and creates a dichotomy, which in turn leads to the othering of Muslims, through the construction of hierarchies and following challenges to the authority of Russian Islamic leaders.Footnote 61 However, this approach was quite beneficial for Russian foreign affairs in the 2000s, since it aligned well with the US-led war on terror.
After Putin’s anti-Western turn, ‘radical Islam’, together with the secular West, became the two main threats portrayed in Russian religious narratives.Footnote 62 This change in the Kremlin’s rhetoric happened simultaneously with the continuous autocratic push. Previously, Russian Muslim authorities had instrumentalised the traditionalism paradigm, attempting to embody a national ‘church for Islam’ and become valuable allies for the state. However, by 2014, as Sibgatullina shows, the Kremlin had reduced its need to legitimise domestic and foreign political decisions through muftiates.Footnote 63 This was partly because the growing centralisation of power and tighter control over securitised narratives made religious endorsement less necessary for the regime. In this environment, religious leaders were not in a position to voice disagreement or act as independent political voices. Nevertheless, Moscow continued using the discourse on international terrorism, particularly when justifying its intervention in Syria.
Islam in Russia’s foreign policy has been realised through its general soft power instruments. Moscow launched the RT media outlet in Arabic in 2007 and opened Russian diaspora centres across the Middle East and North Africa, intensifying formal and informal contacts with Muslim-majority countries. The Russian Association of Muslim Entrepreneurs revitalised business relations with the Islamic world and opened offices in Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East. The ‘Russia–Islamic World’ economic forum has taken place annually since 2009, and in 2023, Putin signed an order making it a federal-level event. In August that year, Russia started the introduction of Islamic banking in Dagestan, Chechnya, Bashkiria, and Tatarstan via Russian Federal Law No. 417-FZ, although some private initiatives had been implemented earlier. Cultural ties, as well as political and interfaith dialogue between Russia and the Islamic world, have been coordinated by the ‘Russia–Islamic World’ Group of Strategic Vision, created in 2006.
Russia has developed its image in Muslim countries, reopening the Moscow Cathedral Mosque with the participation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mahmoud Abbas in 2015, and building one of the largest mosques in Europe in Shali (Chechnya) in 2019. To provide Islamic education based on an understanding of the so-called traditional Islam, the Bulgarian Islamic Academy was established in Tatarstan in 2017. Nevertheless, the actual situation for Russian Muslims is ambiguous. Wearing hijabs and niqabs is banned in some regions, the capital, with a population of 13 million, has only four mosques, and Islamophobia and anti-migrant attitudes abound in official discourse.Footnote 64
Today’s Russian foreign policy focuses on the ongoing war in Ukraine and building a network of allies in different parts of the world to manage sanctions, import weapons, and handle political pressure from the US and Europe. In the macropolitical context, Moscow strives to contest the current US-led liberal order and promote its own interpretation of a new world order. These conditions substantially increase the importance of non-Western countries for the Kremlin, and potential support from Muslim-majority countries has become of significant value, creating new momentum for using Islam in Russia’s foreign policy. And the Kremlin has several assets which it can draw upon to do this, including a large Muslim population, observer status in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and strong ties with the League of Arab states and Muslim-majority state leaders.
Recent Russian cooperation with the Muslim world has been focused on trade and symbolic political support. For instance, Turkey and Central Asian republics have become key chains in what Moscow officials call ‘parallel import’, unauthorised and grey trade to circumvent sanctions, while Iran has provided Russia with weapons, including drones and ballistic missiles. Several countries, including Algeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, and Sudan, abstained from condemning the war in Ukraine when voting on UN General Assembly resolution (ES-11/1) in March 2022. In addition, the 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan has taken place in an expanded form, with Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran (together with Ethiopia) officially joining the bloc. Saudi Arabia is considering joining BRICS, while Turkey and Azerbaijan have already submitted their applications. As Baunov notes, BRICS has become a more anti-Western bloc, and Moscow is interpreting its expansion as evidence of the Global South’s support of Russia’s vision of a new world order.Footnote 65 As we can see, the Muslim-majority countries are at the centre of this growing support.
Islam was also exploited to justify the war in Ukraine for Russian and foreign Muslims. On 16 March 2022, leaders of Islamic organisations in Russia made a joint statement supporting the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and accepted a fatwa recognising those killed while participating in this operation as shahids who died while fulfilling their religious commandment.Footnote 66 Islamic discourse was used to present the war in Ukraine as jihad and Ukrainian combatants as shaitans (evil spirits in Muslim theology). Such sacralisation of war through Islamic discourse has been essential in recruiting soldiers and increasing loyalty, if not support for the war, among Muslims, especially in border regions like the Caucasus or foreign Central Asian republics like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
In the macropolitical dimension, Russia promotes a narrative based on civilisationalism, anti-colonial contestation of Western liberal values, and contrasting the West and the ‘majority Rest’. This approach to international affairs forms a dichotomy of Western (liberal) godless consumerist civilisation and other civilisations that preserve traditional values. In November 2022, Putin introduced Presidential Decree No. 809 on ‘Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values’, to strengthen traditional spiritual and moral values. One of its aims is to construct an international image of Russia as the ‘custodian and protector’ of traditional values, and Russia has developed this discourse in the Muslim world. For example, in 2023, billboards picturing President Putin holding a copy of the Quran, with the inscription ‘Guardian and protector of religions’, appeared on roads in LebanonFootnote 67 and the 2023 meeting of the ‘Russia–Islamic World’ Group of Strategic Vision had as its main topic the spiritual and moral values and civilisational heritage of Russian and Islamic nations, while the latest meeting held in May 2024 focused on the agenda of a fair multipolar world order.
Articulation of non-interventionism is becoming an important tool in Russia’s soft power politics with Muslim countries. The most apparent example of this is the Kremlin’s politics in Afghanistan. Although the Taliban had been recognised in Russia as a terrorist organisation, and despite international concerns over its human rights violations, Moscow accredited its diplomat to the new Afghan government. Furthermore, Russia’s latest Foreign Policy Concept mentions Afghanistan’s possible integration into ‘the Eurasian space for cooperation’, indicating new prospects for Islamic civilisation to become an independent centre of world development.Footnote 68
Such an approach, contrasting to that of the West, gives a clear message to the Global South that in the coming world order, their sovereignty will be respected despite domestic political practices. Moscow allocates a place for Muslim civilisation in its constructed image of a reordered world. And indeed, many Muslim countries seem to support Russia, refusing to follow the West’s lead in isolating it. But what stands behind this? The Islamic world has been cautious regarding the war in Ukraine, however; as Laruelle argues, the position of Muslim countries is ‘explainable more by resentment toward the West than by a pro-Russian position per se’.Footnote 69 Thus, the effectiveness of the Islamic aspect of Russia’s foreign policy is arguably proportional to the failure of Western foreign policy in the Muslim world.
Islam and the US religious foreign policy regimes
Throughout the last decades, the role of Islam in US foreign policy has changed under certain political and legal frameworks, which Bettiza refers to as religious foreign policy regimes.Footnote 70 The first regime, under the Clinton administration, emerged with the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 and focused on monitoring violations of religious freedom around the globe and responding via soft and hard power tools. In 2001, Bush introduced a second regime prioritising Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, generally strengthening the conservative agenda of Protestant Evangelicals while leaving Islam outside of US foreign policy. However, after 11 September 2001, American decision-makers considered ‘America’s national security as deeply dependent on the internal dynamics of Islam and the Muslim world’.Footnote 71 This saw a new Muslim and Islamic interventions regime come into being, in which Bush’s war on terror emerged as a macro-securitisation policy, framing American interests and security priorities. After the threat deficit of the post–Cold War world, the war on terror operated as an ideational resource legitimising US leadership in the security order.Footnote 72 But in a more practical sense, the counterterrorism strategy of that period justified military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s and underpinned the war on ideas, which attempted to reform Islam to align it with ‘universal’ values.
While the war on terror and Bush’s interventionist approach led to distrust from Muslim-majority countries, the Obama administration sought to reset relations between the US and the Islamic world, notably through the 2009 speech at Al Azhar University.Footnote 73 Though Obama rhetorically promoted non-coercive means, US interventions continued after the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. The democratisation of these states found a more central place in Obama’s vision of US foreign policy,Footnote 74 as well as a rethinking of the US approach to Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.Footnote 75 Obama’s second term introduced the 2013 National Strategy for Religious Engagement and amendments to the International Religious Freedom Act in 2015. These events marked the Religious Engagement policy regime,Footnote 76 which aimed to instrumentalise religion and include religious sentiments in post-secular discourse. Obama stated in 2015: ‘Ideologies are not defeated with guns’,Footnote 77 exemplifying the soft power approach that became a priority in US foreign policy related to Islam and the Muslim world at that period.
Although less formalised than China’s and Russia’s efforts, the US has also engaged with Islamic cultural diplomacy through various soft power initiatives. Arabic-language media outlets such as Alhurra and Radio Sawa were launched to broadcast news and cultural content to audiences in the Middle East, and educational and cultural exchange programs, such as the Youth Exchange and Study initiative, brought thousands of high school students from Muslim-majority countries, among others, to live and study in the United States. Additionally, in 2009, the Department of State established a new position of US Representative to Muslim Communities to enhance outreach and dialogue with global Muslim populations, signalling an institutional commitment to religious and cultural engagement.
The regimes associated with the (first) Trump and Biden presidencies may be understood as micro-securitisation and a policy of positive ignorance, respectively. The first framework is rooted in Trump’s exploitation of the refugee agenda in his election campaign. In 2017, as promised, Trump signed the Executive Order on ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’, banning people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, and his presidency was marked by anti-Muslim rhetoric, the appointment of Islamophobes in the White House, and ‘extreme vetting’ (a kind of ideological check) of Muslim travellers to the country.Footnote 78
Internationally, Trump urged Muslim nations to take responsibility for combating terrorism. His 2017 speech at the Arab Islamic American Summit to the leaders of more than 50 Muslim-majority countries underscored this stance and announced the establishment of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology. Generally, the vision of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam was consistently used by Trump. However, its aim was now different. While US policy regimes coexist and are not mutually exclusive, in the case of the first Trump administration, we witnessed a move from the framing of Islam as a broad security concern tied to world order to a micro-securitisation of Islam through nationalism, protectionism, and foreign-policy isolationism. In particular, supreme importance was given to reconsidering US leadership ambitions, focusing on ‘fortressing’ the US borders and implementing non-interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East – though, at the same time, Trump relocated the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, inflaming tensions in the Muslim world. The Trump administration’s selective engagement with other states clearly defined allies (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar) and enemies (e.g. Iran, Syria, China) and also utilised the soft disempowerment potential of religion by, for example, condemning abuses against Muslim minority groups in China and sanctioning their officials.
Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House marked the end of the post-9/11 era. The war on terror and the securitisation of Muslims were removed from the domestic and foreign policy agenda, and the war in Afghanistan was finally ended.Footnote 79 In international affairs, the US concentrated on China and Russia, with a more apathetic approach to the Middle East. Biden revoked the ‘Muslim Ban’ and appointed a few Muslims to his administration, taking some measures to counter Islamophobia, including assessment of violent threats faced by Muslims, funding initiatives addressing hate crimes, and supporting faith-based organisations.Footnote 80
Nevertheless, Biden’s relevant foreign policy largely continued Trump’s approach. As Esposito mentions, ‘Biden has kept the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem; he has not reversed Trump’s recognition of Israel’s claimed sovereignty over Syria’s occupied Golan Heights, and he continues to enforce his predecessor’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against Iran’.Footnote 81 Facing one of the most severe stages of the Israel–Palestine conflict from November 2023, Biden’s administration was unable to de-escalate the Israel–Gaza War. The US priorities in this conflict were to support Israel, protect Palestinian civilians, and prevent the extension of the conflict,Footnote 82 but meeting all three proved impossible.
During his second presidential term, Trump has radically revised the US approach to soft power itself, freezing and defunding various soft power programmes, including the US Agency for International Development and cultural and educational diplomacy organisations, and deprioritising democracy promotion as a direction for US international policy. Trump’s general scepticism towards multilateral institutions and global development means that soft power itself appears to be dramatically receding in priority under his leadership, and Trump has favoured short-term strategic gains over long-term global influence.
Such a shift in US foreign policy has significant implications in relation to Islam and the ‘Muslim world’. The current US approach repeats a pattern of securitising Islam, wherein the religion is understood primarily as a security threat rather than as a geopolitical resource that necessitates engagement for more effective foreign policy. The micro-securitisation of Islam begun by Trump in 2017 is being rekindled, but, in the context of forming a post-liberal new world order, the US appears to have no grand strategy related to Islam and the Muslim world, as it has (although controversially) in South-East Asia or Europe. Retaining its previous strategy, Trump’s administration has been preparing a revised ‘Muslim ban’, and, despite the US’s peacemaker role in the Israel–Palestine conflict, Trump’s plans to take control of Gaza and relocate Palestinians have caused consternation among Muslim-majority states.Footnote 83 Trump seeks to maintain strong bilateral relations with Muslim-majority allies from the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia or UAE, but these ties are based not on an image of the US as Islam-friendly, but on the image of the US as strong and reliable partner, omitting the religious factor.
The dichotomy of moderate Islam and radical Islamism used by the Trump administration is the same as that utilised by China and Russia, and its repudiation of soft power in general means that Islam is increasingly either micro-securitised or ignored as irrelevant in great power politics. Within the adopted realpolitik approach, Washington’s engagement with Muslim-majority countries is determined by strategic security concerns and economic benefits. The question is whether the US under Trump will retain soft disempowerment strategies as it turns away from soft power itself. The radical departure from the US soft power diplomatic tradition in favour of securitisation and isolationism carries long-term risks. By ignoring Islam as a cultural and political resource, the US is in danger of losing Muslim hearts and minds in global affairs, and thus giving way to competitor powers that are in the process of exploiting these resources in their geopolitical positioning.
Discussion
The geopolitical orientation of each country studied here impacts on the ways Islam is used in state soft power strategies, the audiences to which these are directed, and the success (or otherwise) of these strategies to legitimise foreign and domestic policies. The analysis indicates that all three states used Islam as an instrumental resource in soft power competition, in order to place themselves in a better position vis-à-vis one another. While great powers may, perhaps unwittingly, intervene in the geopolitics of religion by way of their material sponsorship and discursive support of particular states (and therefore particular theological traditions), Islam has chiefly been used in religious geopolitics as a strategic asset and as a tool of securitisation.
By wielding sacred symbolic capital, leaders make claims about religious statuses, identities, or roles which are viewed as authoritative for the purposes of managing international perceptions and for domestic political projects. Bettiza’s work stresses these operations in relation to a country’s own religious tradition, where narratives of resistance and resilience are rooted in religious language to delegitimise outsiders.Footnote 84 We have shown here how these same strategies are used by states seeking to legitimise themselves and delegitimise competitor great powers. Religion becomes a resource instrumentalised by non-Muslim-majority states on the global stage, where Islamic soft power may be used to enable states to align themselves with, rather than bear, religious resources. Islamic sacred symbolic capital may thus be used to legitimise particular foreign policies at the same time as constraining or undermining competitor powers. But a puzzle remains: how can non-Muslim states capture, draw upon, and utilise these resources of sacred symbolic capital to legitimise themselves and undermine competitor powers, at the same time as dividing good from bad Muslims domestically, and frequently repressing the latter?
All three states have employed a dualistic inside/outside binary approach to Islam, which aims to secure the domestic inside by disciplining the foreign outside. We see this most clearly in China, where Islam is internally repressed to mould it in ways that are domestically acceptable. The lack of condemnation of Chinese treatment of Uyghur minorities from Muslim-majority states indicates this has been successful, and while this may partly be explained by the quid pro quo implied by China’s non-interventionist stance, it is also related to the fact that the good/bad Muslim binary that drives state co-option of ‘moderate’ Muslim practices helpful to the regime, and the simultaneous repression of (potentially) troublesome groups, is consistent with the approaches taken in autocratic Muslim majority states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia.Footnote 85 China’s closeness to these regimes and their religious resources thus confers legitimacy internally and externally, enabling projection of an Islam-friendly image on the international stage even while violently repressing Muslims within the state.
In all three cases, the domestic treatment of Muslims through the good/bad binary is aligned with the Saudi–Egypt–UAE axis’s understanding of Islamic danger, allowing great powers to draw on these states’ spiritual resources to underpin their credentials as Muslim-friendly. The US has pivoted away from the reform narratives that sought to align Muslims inside and outside the US with universal values, but the damage done to relations with Muslim states by the war on terror has enabled both Russia and China to position themselves as attractive partners and bring Muslim-majority countries on board with their macropolitical visions of a new world order. While Russia positions itself as protector of Islamic values in the face of a godless secular Western world order that disrespects tradition, China presents itself as an honest broker through its anti-colonial and non-interference policies. The differences in approach in these states pertain to the rationales behind the use of Islam in the foreign policies of each at a time of hegemonic contestation. While the US is withdrawing from soft power competition, both China and Russia are pursuing de-hegemonisation by presenting themselves as alternative leaders of a new global order through narrative alliance, non-interventionism, and civilisationism.
Micro-securitisation and the localisation of Islamic danger serves to project an us/them binary at the micro-level (where ‘problematic’ domestic Muslim populations are marked as outside the nation) for all three states, and this is also employed in novel ways at a macro-level. As Mandaville and Hoffman have noted, ‘as we shift toward a “post-Western” world, some states are able to leverage other sources of soft power – and religion in particular – as a means of building and sustaining geopolitically valuable relationships with diverse publics around the world’.Footnote 86 In this sense, religious soft power has been used by the three powers to encourage Muslim-majority states to identify with ‘us’ as Islam-friendly and dissociate from ‘them’, variously constructed as secular, godless, interventionist, repressive of Muslim communities. The fact that all three states rely on dualistic ambivalence towards Islam means that the narrative on domestic treatment of Muslims must be firmly controlled through positive-self and negative-other representations. Each state attempts to manage perceptions of the treatment of their domestic Muslim populations on the international stage through courting Muslim public opinion via perception management, rhetoric, material resources, and alignment with the Saudi–Egypt–UAE axis and the moral authority generated through these relationships. At the same time, the treatment of Muslims in other states is used as a means of driving wedges between Muslim-majority states and competitor powers. Russia’s positioning of itself as a defender of traditional religious values vis-à-vis the secular and immoral US-led Western world order, the US’s statements and sanctioning of China as a persecutor of Muslims in Xinjiang, and China’s criticism of US favouring of Israel over Palestinians in the context of the ongoing war in Gaza are all examples of how negative-other representation on the world stage draws specifically on Islam as a resource in great power competition.
Positive self-representation thus emerges in China through non-interventionism and in Russia through illiberal soft-power based on conservative values that are projected as aligning with those non-liberal Muslim-majority countries.Footnote 87 The US, partly because of the inconsistency of foreign policy generated by its liberal democratic electoral system, and partly because of the long shadow that the war on terror has cast on its relations with Muslim-majority states, has found itself in a less comfortable position in terms of positive-self representation but has drawn on its history as protector of religious freedom to present itself in a positive light to the global Muslim community.
The success of these strategies, as with all soft power approaches, depends on the extent to which the use of Islam is viewed as legitimate by others. As Steiner notes, if values are viewed as hypocritical, soft power will repel, rather than attract,Footnote 88 and this is particularly important when it comes to religious soft power, when something sacred is at stake. Brannagan and Giulianotti’s soft disempowerment framework is useful to understand the success or otherwise of these strategies.Footnote 89 They note that just as soft power depends on the attractiveness and credibility of a particular state in terms of the way it positions itself, soft disempowerment can take place when states, along with non-state actors such as intergovernmental organisations, the media, and civil society, draw attention to immoral or illegitimate actions in order to publicly shame and criticise competitor states. The impact of soft disempowerment strategies therefore depends not only on their content, but also on their visibility and acceptability to target audiences, and on whether those audiences are receptive to them. Success in using Islam as a soft power asset thus relies on swerving accusations of illegitimacy, and retaining attractiveness and credibility.
In the present environment of great power competition, all three states are involved in undermining the attractiveness, credibility, and legitimacy of one another in relation to Islam and Muslims through employing soft disempowerment strategies and negative-other representations. For example, in 2021 US officials (from both the Trump and the Biden administrations) labelled China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims genocide,Footnote 90 and later that year Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which included import bans on supply chain products manufactured in Xianyang.Footnote 91 Biden’s March 2023 Ramadan message explicitly expressed positive-self representation by aligning US-led liberal world order with Islam, noting that: ‘Today especially, we remember the universal human right to practice, pray, and preach our faiths peacefully and openly’, at the same time as employing negative-other representations through expressing US ‘solidarity with Muslims who continue to face oppression, including Uyghurs in the People’s Republic of China’.Footnote 92
The connection to Western universalism enfolded Islam into a discourse of religious protection, tapping into a long-established principle in US foreign policy and soft power. China’s soft disempowerment strategies have responded to such attempts to highlight the treatment of Uyghurs by underlining the hypocrisy of the US, exemplified in Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s January 2022 remarks that ‘if ever there was a “detention camp” that holds Muslims, it would be Guantanamo Bay’.Footnote 93 And Russia has used religion to undermine Western leverage in states facing Western pressure. Solik and Baar note the common vision developed by the ROC and the Russian state to unite opposition to Western values via three themes: LGBTQ+ rights, religious minorities, and the influence of Western institutions.Footnote 94 By targeting conservative majority-Muslim states with these same discourses, the Russian articulation of itself as a bastion of conservativism and an alternative civilisation employs Islam as a key resource in its soft disempowerment strategies to undermine US leverage in Muslim-majority states that find themselves the target of Western pressure.
Each state attempts to manage perceptions of domestic Muslim populations on the international stage through courting Muslim public opinion, through providing material resources to Muslims, and through non-intervention in the domestic affairs of Muslim-majority states. At the same time, soft disempowerment strategies are used to emphasise the poor treatment of Muslims in other states to drive wedges between Muslim-majority states and competitor powers. The US under Trump’s second term seems to be an exception here. In its first 100 days, the administration has wound up soft power more broadly and apparently views material power as central to its foreign policy with Muslim-majority states. While the pivot to non-intervention may yield short-term benefits, the US’s repudiation of soft power has opened up an ideational deficit, from which its geopolitical competitors stand to gain. Through their use of Islamic soft power, both China and Russia are well positioned to benefit from the US’s self-soft-disempowerment. And, at a time of world order contestation, the sacrifice of any form of power is a dangerous gamble.
The use of Islam by non-Muslim-majority states thus presents both opportunities and constraints distinct from those seen when majority religions are employed in foreign policy. While strategies to mobilise state-majority religion typically rest on deep societal embeddedness and are often framed as authentic expressions of national identity, the use of a minority religion requires states to carefully construct and manage narratives of religious and cultural solidarity and sometimes civilisational alliance externally. This becomes particularly challenging when states domestically apply the good/bad Muslim binary and securitise Islam both at micro- and macro- levels. The prospects for favourable outcomes are therefore uneven: while strategies that engage the majority religion as a soft power resource may enjoy deep resonance and legitimacy, deployments of minority religions are vulnerable to accusations of double standards, especially where domestic repression of Muslim populations place in doubt claims of external religious tolerance. While a state may aim at building an Islam-friendly image, its competitors are able to exploit the fragility of these narratives and employ soft disempowerment strategies to undermine its efforts.
Moreover, while majority religion-based soft power tends to emphasise moral authority and religious leadership (as with employment of Orthodox Christianity by Russia or Sunni Islam by Saudi Arabia), the use of Islam by non-Muslim-majority states often draws more on shared values, civilisational proximity, and mutual aims and enemies. In other words, states have projected a clear commonality with Islam – whether articulated through a common struggle against the secular West (Russia), through appeals to shared universal values (US prior to Trump), or through prospects of mutual economic prosperity based on historical ties (China). As the cases of China and Russia suggest, when effectively and consistently executed, these strategies can create geopolitical leverage, particularly in the context of US hegemonic retreat and a shifting global order.
Conclusion
Religion clearly has power in international politics, yet scholars concerned with the role of religion in the soft power competition of great powers have focused almost exclusively on how the majority-religion within a state is employed as a vehicle through which to project power on the international stage. We have argued here that attention must also be given to the role of state minority religions in great power politics and illustrated this through a focus on how China, Russia, and the US have used Islam in the projection of soft power. At a time of hegemonic contestation this is particularly important to note.
Steiner has argued that religious soft power ‘can either deny or reinforce the legitimacy of the world system by either repudiating or affirming the foundational norms, values and institutions on which it is based’.Footnote 95 Islam is deployed in this way by non-Muslim-majority great powers in ways that serve their own visions of world order through their positive-self projections as Islam-friendly, via courting Muslim public opinion, providing material resources to Muslims, and (in the case of Russia and China) non-intervention in the domestic affairs of Muslim-majority states. It is also central to negative-other projections and soft disempowerment strategies, where Islam is used as a resource to undermine the legitimacy of competitor powers. Russia’s positioning of itself as a defender of traditional religious values vis-à-vis the secular and immoral US-led Western world order, the US’s statements and sanctioning of China as a persecutor of Muslims in Xinjiang, and China’s criticism of US favouring of Israel over Palestinians in the context of the ongoing war in Gaza are all examples of how negative-other representation on the world stage draws specifically on Islam as a resource in great power rivalry.
Accusations of hypocrisy are not just incidental reactions to perceived contradictions; they are actively weaponised and should be understood as deliberate practices of soft disempowerment. In contexts where states instrumentalise Islam for soft power gains, these accusations function as strategic interventions aimed at undermining credibility, eroding attractiveness, and delegitimising the normative claims of a competitor. Religion as a soft power asset carries an implicit demand for authenticity and ethical coherence. This makes religious soft power especially vulnerable to counter-narratives that expose inconsistencies between domestic religious practices and relevant foreign policy. In the employment of soft disempowerment, competitor states have exploited audience sensitivity to perceived moral contradictions to gain relative advantages.
Yet the use of minority religions in soft power strategies is a precarious undertaking. Most obviously, these states’ historical and contemporary embedding in different religious traditions means that their use of Islamic soft power is fraught with legitimacy issues, made especially stark when the treatment of Muslim minorities in these states is globally recognised (by Muslims and others) as problematic. Ignoring or glossing over the treatment of Muslims within these states means that the pragmatic and strategic alliances that are rhetorically justified in part through the wielding of Islam are fragile and subject to contestation and accusations of hypocrisy. While other great powers engage in exploiting these cracks for soft disempowerment of competitors and for their own positioning as global hegemons, we should also be aware of the role of transnational religious actors in this broader power struggle.
The use of state-minority religion in foreign policy is distinct from strategies involving majority religion. In both cases, religious resources are wielded to generate soft power through positive-self representation and normative appeals tied to values and traditions. When states mobilise their majority religion, they typically appeal to a culturally embedded discursive repertoire and symbolic resources that draw on broad societal legitimacy, projecting external moral authority through the incorporation of religion as part of an ‘authentic’ expression of national identity. By contrast, invoking a minority religion, particularly one that is securitised or marginalised domestically, requires a more carefully constructed and externally oriented narrative that appeals to shared values, civilisational proximity, or geopolitical convergence. The perceived legitimacy of these strategies depends on the extent to which states can align themselves with the sacred capital of that religion, making them more transactional and open to contestation.
The instrumentalisation of Islam in great power contest has been seen again and again in recent history, from the US support of the Afghan mujahideen in the 1990s, to the rhetorical and material sponsorship of ‘moderate Muslim states’ in the war on terror. TRAs frequently contest these assemblages precisely because of the inauthenticity of the Islamic discourses employed. As Gutowski has noted, religion’s social power lies in its ability to give meaning and value to human action, but this makes it vulnerable to political manipulation at the same time as making it a potent force for global resistance.Footnote 96 Various Islamist movements in the Middle East and Central Asia, both non-violent and violent, have grown on the basis of their criticism of the hypocrisy of Muslim leaders and resistance to the instrumentalisation of Islam in political machinations. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al Qaeda and its offshoots are key examples of this and point to the potentially counterproductive effects of attempting to exploit Islam in Muslim-majority states. When these discourses are used by non-Muslim majority states, the potential for accusations of inauthenticity and hypocrisy – and the potential for violent resistance – is much higher, and future research could explore how TRAs respond to the instrumentalisation of Islam in both positive-self soft power and negative-other soft disempowerment strategies.
This article has demonstrated how religion has been strategically deployed in great power competition. While we make no claims as to the effectiveness of these strategies, there exists a clear agenda for future research to assess how these approaches are received and interpreted by target populations through, for example, analysis of polling or social media data to evaluate their success or otherwise. In emphasising the ways Islam has been used as a resource of soft power and soft disempowerment, our contribution calls attention to the importance of examining how minority religions are increasingly central to the strategic competition of great powers.
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