Abstract:
The Author maintains that there is a role for religions to play in the international realm that goes beyond pure Westphalian and state-centred categories, without characterizing religions as mere ‘global faith-based NGOs’. Religions have a say in world politics but they cannot be portrayed reductively as lobbies or constituencies. They operate in a public sphere, which doesn’t overlap completely with the international political sphere. Another important marker is the alternative between an approach to religion as a general ‘category of the spirit’, and concrete religions as a vast phenomenology of human religious needs. Is it the plural form, ‘religions’, that is relevant for world politics.