Component Leaders: Dean Lisa Anderson and Professor Jack Snyder

The faculty seminar will meet during the spring semesters to debate and clarify the very terms of reference of a project on religion and international affairs and to foster new networks among Columbia’s faculty in the areas of toleration, religion, and democracy.

The Faculty Seminar participants will include some of Columbia’s leading experts on the world’s religions, some of our leading scholars in international affairs, and some major outside public actors. Both “religion” and “international affairs” are complex and contested notions among most actors in both fields. This overdue dialogue will unpack embedded assumptions in both terms and tackle challenges to incorporating religion as a key variable in the research, teaching and practice of international affairs. Key topics include questions of empirical analysis, historical lessons, and practical diplomacy, including:

• To what extent should religion be treated as an independent variable in global affairs research?
• Does “religion” refer to the world’s major faiths, or to the cultures and civilizations, political ideologies, or ethnic identities many associate with different religions? Which actors and disciplines are using which definitions? How and why do they change?
• To what extent do misleading ideas about religion preclude the use of normal foreign policy mechanisms in conflict situations? How are religious vocabularies being deployed to describe and challenge local and global power structures, and what does this mean for diplomacy and pubic policy?
• How and why did religious wars in Europe begin and end? Why did some political/ religious movements survive while others waned? How have recent historical forces, such as the mid-century welfare state, the Cold War, neo-liberalism, and globalization shaped “opportunity structures” for religious expression, affiliation, and activism?