The Reasons of Neglecting Religion in International Relations; a Critical Analysis

Since the establishment of International Relations as an academic discipline, religion has been neglected and marginalized by scholars and theorists in a way that we can consider IR as the most secular sub branch of social sciences. Scholars usually offer some reasons and justifications why to neglect religion and consider it irrelevant to international relations namely: the implications of modernity in western societies, the spread of secularism as an established principle, the Westphalian order of international system, the dominance of rationalist meta-theory, and the materialistic essence of IR mainstream. This article rejects such reasons and offers this hypothesis that nowadays in the aftermath of new developments such as the emergence of post secularization and post Westphalian process, the demise of positivism which put an end to the monopoly and dominance of the mainstream and the creation of a pluralistic context in IR, the marginalization of religion in the discipline in no longer logical and acceptable and taking this important issue area into consideration in quite possible and even necessary for understanding and making sense of global environment. As a result, continuous neglecting religion in IR, leads to inefficiency in understanding and explaining new events and phenomena in the world.