¹ The multiple, at times competing ideas of secularity in the ‘postmodern’ context, are usefully reviewed in Prosman, Hank-Jan, The Postmodern Condition and the Meaning of Secularity (Utrecht: Ars Disputandi, 2011), pp. 14–18, available at: {http://adss.library.uu.nl/index.html}Google Scholar.

² Even those who seek to integrate religion more effectively into the study of International Relations, are more comfortable doing so within confines of IR theorising than the larger horizons offered in postsecular writings. See, for example, Sheikh, Mona Kanwal, ‘How Does Religion Matter? Pathways to religion in International relations’, Review of International Studies, 38:2 (April 2012), pp. 365–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The diverse meanings attributed to the term ‘postsecular’ are emphatically described though not always as clearly delineated in Beckford, James A., ‘SSSR Presidential Address – Public Religions and the Postsecular: Critical Reflections’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51:1 (March 2012), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Highly instructive in this context is the return of religion to academic discourse in American higher education. The re-emergence of religion in diverse disciplines – from art and music to English, history, philosophy, politics, sociology, social work and medicine, to name a few – has been accompanied by the remarkable growth of religious professional associations, centres, institutes, and philanthropic foundations. See John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen Mahoney, ‘Religion and Knowledge in the Postsecular Academy’, Social Science Research Council Working Papers (February 2008).

⁵ See Berger, Peter's analysis of this dichotomy in ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’, in Berger, Peter L. (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

⁶ Eduardo Mendieta, ‘A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society’, An Interview with Jürgen Habermas, SSRC Blog, The Immanent Frame, available at: {http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/02/03/a-postsecular-world-society/} accessed 28 August 2011).

⁷ The trend has been noted by numerous scholars over a span of more than twenty years. One of the earlier expositions was offered by Kepel, Gilles, La Revanche de Dieu: Chrétiens, Juifs et Musulmans à la Reconquête du Monde (2nd edn, Paris: Seuil, 2003 [orig. pub. 1993])Google Scholar. See also Thomas, Scott M., The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Westerlund, David (ed.), Questioning the Secular State: the Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics (London: S. Hurst & Co., 2002)Google Scholar.

⁸ This reactionary shift is primarily associated with but by no means confined to fundamentalist religious movements. See Lawrence, Bruce B., Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989)Google Scholar; Armstrong, Karen, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001)Google Scholar; Brasher, Brenda E., The Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar; Almond, Gabriel A., Appleby, R. Scott, and Sivan, Emmanuel, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Ruthven, Malise, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁹ See Pahl, John, ‘Violence from Religious Groups’, International Handbook of Violence Research, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 32–8Google Scholar.

¹⁰ This is not a novel observation. Hurd's The Politics of Secularism is a telling demonstration of this defect and one of the few effective attempts in the international relations literature to remedy it. See also Robert Keohane, ‘The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and the “Liberalism of Fear”’, available at: {http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/keohane2.htm} accessed 15 August 2011. The strategic and diplomatic communities have not been immune to this apparent failure to grasp the nature and implications of religion's renewed presence on the international stage; see Brooks, David, ‘Kicking the Secularist Habit’, Atlantic Monthly, 291:2 (2003), pp. 26–8Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Werbner, P., ‘The Place which is Diaspora: Citizenship, Religion and Gender in the Making of Chaordic Transnationalism’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28:1 (2002) , pp. 119–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vertovec, Religion and Diaspora’, in Antes, Armin, Geertz, W., and Warne, Randi R. (eds), New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹² The most easily recognisable interpretation of the secular, from a religious vantage point, is the one which centres on the distinction between two spheres: the religious and the temporal, the sacred and the profane. Here secularism is perceived as a cultural-political project committed to marginalising the religious or sacred by relegating its expression to a purely private sphere. Aleksandr Kyrlezhev offers a sharper variation on this theme, arguing that secularisation rejects the very duality of the religious and profane, and seeks instead to establish the secular as a fully autonomous, self-sufficient and all encompassing sphere, in which religion is rendered ‘superfluous’ or ‘non-essential’. Religious theory and practice are thereby deprived of the capacity to relate to, let alone influence, the non-religious. Secularisation, understood as the ‘desacralisation of politics’, sees the reversal of roles we associate with the pre-modern Christian world. Secularisation thus becomes a cultural project which determines the character and function of religion in society, while it itself acquires sacral characteristics. See Kyrlezhev, Aleksandr, ‘The Postsecular Age: Religion and Culture Today’, Religion, State and Society, 36:1 (2008), pp. 21–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 506Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Ibid,, p. 507.

¹⁵ Ibid,, p. 512.

¹⁶ Believers in this form of Christianity, who are said to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit and have ecstatic experiences (for example, speaking in tongues, healing, prophesying), are now estimated to number well in excess of 500 million. Pentecostalism has been described as ‘one of the great success stories of the current era of cultural globalisation’. See Robbins, Joel, ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), pp. 17–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Taylor, The Secular Age, p. 517.

¹⁸ Alessandro Ferrara attaches the label political secularism to the first meaning and social secularism to the second, arguing that the key to the secularisation thesis is the expectation that political secularism would in due course give way to social secularism. Ferrara, Alessandro, ‘The Separation of Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular Society’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35:1–2 (2009), pp. 77–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 1.

²⁰ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3.

²¹ Ibid., p. 531, emphasis added.

²² Ibid., pp. 532, 714.

²³ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 571.

²⁴ Calhoun, ‘Rethinking Secularism’, p. 457.

²⁵ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 510.

²⁶ Taylor, Charles, ‘The Meaning of Secularism’, The Hedgehog Review, 12:3 (2010), p. 25Google Scholar.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Prepolitical Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?’, in Habermas, J. and Ratzinger, J., The Dialectics of Secularization (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 43Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 44–5.

³⁰ Harrington, Austin, ‘Habermas and the “Post-Secular Society”’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10:4 (2007), p. 544CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Habermas, Jürgen, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pp. 114–48Google Scholar.

³² Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14:1 (2006), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Ibid., p. 10.

³⁴ Habermas, Rusconi suggests, sets three conditions for religion to be able to participate in the democratic process: it must renounce ‘the monopoly of truth’, accept ‘the authority of science’, and respect ‘the public primacy of lay/secular law’. See Gian Enrico Rusconi, ‘Three-Way (German) Dialogue on Post-Secularism’, Reset Dialogues on Civilizations (18 September 2007), available at: {http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000000529} accessed 26 August 2011.

³⁵ Barbato and Kratochwil refer to two interpretations of Habermas – one strong and the other weak – to highlight the tensions in the recent Habermasian attempt to grapple with ‘the semantic potential of religious language for public discourses’. Barbato, Mariano and Kratochwil, Friedrich, ‘Towards a Postsecular Order?’, European Political Science Review, 1:3 (2009), p. 336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ For a discussion of the complexities of what might be or might not be permissible by way of religious intervention in the formal public sphere (in the context of the positions advocated by Habermas as distinct from those of John Rawls), see Ferrara, ‘The Separation of Religion and Politics’, pp. 81–6.

³⁷ Another important contributor has been William Connolly who has advocated a conception of pluralism premised on the inseparability of politics and metaphysics. As part of his ‘politics of becoming’ he envisages a plural network of constituencies in which each strives for ‘generosity’ towards others and a form of public engagement which respects a variety of religious and secular beliefs: see Connolly, W. E., Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 39Google Scholar. It is also worth noting in this context that a number of French philosophers and cultural theorists, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, have played a key role in evaluating ‘the return of religion’ to recent Western thought. One of the most important outcomes of their collective contribution has been to reopen the debate on the role and nature of religion in the political domain, and its relationship to the secular. For a useful review of this contribution see Barker, Victoria, ‘“After the Death of God”: Postsecularity?’, Journal of Religious History, 33:1 (2009), pp. 82–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Caputo, John D., On Religion (London, Routledge, 2001), pp. 60–1Google Scholar.

³⁹ Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 25Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Asad, Talal, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’, in de Vries, Hent and Sullivan, Lawrence (eds), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 508Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Asad, Talal, ‘Thinking about Terrorism and Just War’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Ibid., p. 19.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 5.

⁴⁴ See Saba Mahmood's interview with Talal Asad, ‘Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Traditions’ (27 February 1996), available at: {http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1/text/asad.html} accessed 25 August 2011.

⁴⁵ Marilyn Booth, Review of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity, Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 4(2) (2004), available at: {http://www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/Summer2004/Asad.html} accessed 20 August 2011.

⁴⁶ This characterisation of Asad's notion of secularism is carefully developed in Bangstad, Sindre, ‘Contesting Secularism/s: Secularism and Islam in the Work of Talal Asad’, Anthropological Theory, 9:2 (2009), pp. 189–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 191Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Salvatore, Armando, ‘Power and Authority within European secularity: From the Enlightenment of Religion to the Contemporary Presence of Islam’, The Muslim World, 96:4 (2006), p. 553CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Particularly instructive in this context is Salvatore's exposition of Vico's conception of political society and the multiple interests and identities which it represents (Salvatore, ‘Power and Authority’, pp. 549–50).

⁵⁰ See Jacobsen, Trudy, Sampford, Charles, and Thakur, Ramesh (eds), Re-envisioning Sovereignty: The End of Westphalia? (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Salvatore, ‘Power and Authority’, p. 556.

⁵² The tensions that have surfaced in Europe are, as Mavelli argues, in part a function of the limitations of the established secular narratives. See Mavelli, Luca, Europe's Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

⁵³ William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, pp. 38–9, 57.

⁵⁴ Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 181–204.

⁵⁵ Mendieta, ‘An Interview with Jürgen Habermas’, pp. 11–12.

⁵⁶ The evolving multi-spatial context of governance is elaborated at length in Camilleri, Joseph A. and Falk, Jim, Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009), pp. 158–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Jürgen Habermas, ‘A “Post-Secular” Society – What Does that Mean?’, ResetDOC (16 September 2008), available at: {http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000000926} accessed 22 August 2011.

⁵⁸ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 1.

⁵⁹ Mendieta, ‘An Interview with Jürgen Habermas’, p. 6.

⁶⁰ Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 807–8.

⁶¹ See Bangstad, ‘Contesting Secularism/s’, pp. 192–6.

⁶² See Matthew Hulbert, Prem Mahadevan, Daniel Möckli, and Roland Popp, ‘Strategic Trends 2011: Key Developments in Global Affairs’, Center for Security Studies, available at: {http://www.sta.ethz.ch/Strategic-Trends-2011} accessed 20 September 2011.

⁶³ Camilleri, Joseph A., ‘The “War on Terror”: Reassessing Rationale and Efficacy’, in Köchler, Hans (ed.), The ‘Global War on Terror’ and the Question of World Order, Studies in International Relations XXX (Vienna: International Progress Organisation, 2008), pp. 58–84Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ See Connolly, William, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Eisenberg, Avigail and Spinner-Halev, Jeff (eds), Minorities Within Minorities: Equality, Rights, and Diversity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alcoff, Linda (ed.), Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁶ Keppel, G., The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, trans. Braley, Alan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 192Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ See Barber, Benjamin R., Jihad Vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996)Google Scholar; Bauman, Zygmunt, Globalization: the Human Consequences (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Karner, Christian and Aldridge, Alan, ‘Theorizing Religion in a Globalizing World’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 18:1–2 (2004), pp. 5–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁹ See Sheffer, Gabriel, Diaspora Politics: At Home and Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 9–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ A number of writers do acknowledge that the shift to post-secularity may in some way reflect or connect with the shift to post-modernity (see Kyrlezhev, ‘The Postsecular Age’, p. 24), but few attempt to tease out the connection or to analyse the implications of the limits to modernity for the postsecular understanding of culture and politics.

⁷¹ Jim Falk and I have argued that a shift of epochal proportions may be underway, and that the post-1945 period is perhaps best understood as a period of transition in which the ‘simultaneously unifying and polarising impact of financial, commercial, information, demographic and ecological flows’ is producing a geopolitical, geoeconomic and geocultural environment that is radically different from the one we normally associate with the Modern epoch. See Camilleri and Falk, Worlds in Transition, pp. 146–9.

⁷² See Brennan, Teresa, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy (London: Routledge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ See Curry, Patrick, ‘Post-Secular Nature: Principles and Politics’, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology, 11:3 (2007), pp. 284–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ See Chamberlain, Muriel, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ See Camilleri, Joseph A. and Falk, Jim, The End of Sovereignty? Politics in a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Cheltenahm, UK: Edward Elgar 1992)Google Scholar; Bothe, Michael, O'Connell, Mary Ellen, and Ronzitti, Natalino (eds), Redefining Sovereignty: the Use of Force After the End of the Cold War, (New York: Transnational Publishers, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ See Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (New DelhiSage, 1992)Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, ‘Risk and Responsibility’, Modern Law Review, 62:1 (1999), pp. 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ A number of writers, notably Asad, have lucidly articulated the nature of the Islam-West divide as evidenced in Europe (see Asad, Talal, ‘Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?’, in Hallam, Elizabeth and Street, Brian V (eds), Cultural Encounters: Representing “Otherness” (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 209–27Google Scholar). Elizabeth Hurd has pointed to the negative perceptions of Islam as constitutive of ‘European secularity, Identity and Culture’ (Hurd, The Politics of Secularism, pp. 52–3).

⁷⁸ Habermas, ‘A “Post-Secular” Society – What Does it Mean?’ (see fn. 53).

⁷⁹ Thomas, Scott, ‘Of Religion and the Changing Character of International Politics’, in Stackhouse, Max L. and Obenchain, Diane B. (eds), God and Globalization: Christ and the Dominions of Civilization (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), p. 110Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ See Petito, Fabio, ‘In Defence of Dialogue of Civilizations: With a Brief Illustration of the Diverging Agreement between Edward Said and Louis Massignon’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3 (2011), pp. 769–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Dalllmayr, Fred, ‘Diversity Conversation Across Boundaries: Political Theory and Global Diversity’, Journal of International Studies, 30:2 (2001), p. 331Google Scholar.

⁸² Habermas, Jürgen, ‘The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices’, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. Hogengarten, William M. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 115–17Google Scholar.

⁸³ See Diez, Thomas and Steans, Jill, ‘A Useful Dialogue? Habermas and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 127–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸⁵ Linklater, Andrew, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 96Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), p. 347Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Shapcott, Richard, Justice, Community and Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 106–26Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ An exemplar of this line of inquiry is the focus on global poverty in Jordaan, Eduard, ‘Dialogic Cosmopolitanism and Global Justice’, International Studies Review, 11:4 (2009), pp. 736–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ The key dimensions of the emerging governance framework are examined in Camilleri and Falk, Worlds in Transition, pp. 158–69.

⁹⁰ Habermas, Jürgen, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 118Google Scholar.

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⁹² See Fine, Robert and Smith, Will, ‘Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Cosmopolitanism’, Constellations, 10:4 (2003), p. 354CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹³ Connolly, William E., ‘Cross-State Citizen Networks: A Response to Dallmayr’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:2 (2001), p. 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Commenting on Taylor's The Secular Age, Connolly refers to the need for a ‘deep, multidimensional pluralism within and across territorial regimes’ without, however, characterising or explaining the significantly altered physical and social space in which such pluralism is increasingly embedded (See SSRC, The Immanent Frame, available at: {http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/04/17/belief-spirituality-and-time/}.