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‘The Sacred Conspiracy’: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism

Abstract The goal of this article is to initiate an interdisciplinary and historical reflection on one of the central preoccupations of our time: the relationship of religion to international order. This current project grows out of my long-standing work on the genealogy of modern internationalism. In my past work, I have argued that internationalists constructed their own disciplines in tandem with their construction of nationalism, to such an extent that modern ‘internationalism’ and modern ‘nationalism’ must be understood in relation to each other; in the present essay, I contend that ‘internationalism’ and ‘religion’ have an equally mutually constitutive relationship. This article seeks to retell the story of international law over the past century through the lens of its relationship to religion – a lens that both overlaps with and differs from that of nationalism. Its historical narrative is rooted in the early twentieth century – a period to which so many of our ‘modern’ cultural conceptions may be traced. Its methodology is broadly interdisciplinary, setting changing international legal conceptions of religion in relation to contemporaneous developments in domains such as sociology, religious studies, and historiography. This is the first piece of a series of projected studies on the construction and contestation of ‘religion’, ‘the secular’, and ‘the international’ over the past century. It is also my first publication associated with the interdisciplinary Religion and Internationalism Project, which I co-direct at Brown University.