Religion and the Shaping of States, Policies, and Citizens in Contemporary Asia

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue welcomes original academic papers exploring the role of religions in shaping states, policies, and citizens in contemporary Asia. More specifically, it aims to achieve three inter-related goals. First, each paper in this Special Issue is expected to provide novel empirical information and scholarly insights on how religion makes and shapes politics, diplomacy, international relations, and state–society relations in contemporary Asia. Second, the different papers in this Special Issue will form natural comparisons between different countries, areas, and aspects, illustrating how the roles of religion in shaping states, policies, and citizens are similar or different under various circumstances. Finally, collectively, the papers in this Special Issue will hopefully reveal specific patterns of religion’s political and social functions in contemporary Asia, contributing to the theoretical development in relevant fields.

Religion has always been one of the essential forces that shape politics, diplomacy, international relations, and state–society relations. However, the roles that religion plays in shaping states, policies, and citizens do not always receive the amount of scholarly attention they deserve. For example, the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright (2006, 3), once claimed that ‘to their disadvantage, diplomats have long excluded religion from their expertise’. However, the view of excluding religion from diplomacy is not restricted to professional diplomats, such as Albright. As Fox and Sandler (2004, 1) point out, even though Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisation is a widely discussed thesis among social scientists, ‘the discipline of international relations was not ready for inclusion of the religious variable into the contending paradigms in the discipline’. Practically speaking, for many international relations and diplomacy scholars, the religious variable is notoriously tricky to define, measure, and operationalise (Fox 2001). More fundamentally, secularism in the academic disciplines of international relations and diplomacy has deep historical roots. It is widely regarded that the scholarship and practice of modern diplomacy emerged in the age of enlightenment, a period when leading thinkers and practitioners in the West advocated replacing theological explanations and guidelines for human behaviours with rational analytical and action frameworks (Fox 2001, Philpott 2002).

It should be noted that the negligence of religion is not unique to the field of international relations and diplomacy but a common problem in many areas of social and political enquiries. Therefore, this Special Issue aims to bring religion back to understanding the structures and dynamics of the states, politics, policies, diplomacies, international relations, and state–society relations in contemporary Asia, an empirical setting with empirical diversities and practical importance.

Topics that might be covered in this Special Issue include, but are not limited to,

1. How do contemporary Asian states, political parties, interest groups, citizens, or other players mobilise religious institutions, ideologies, discourses, or symbols to advance their agendas?
2. How do religious organisations and believers participate in the making and shaping of politics and policies in contemporary Asia, either directly or by joining forces with other social and political players?
3. How do religious ideologies and discourses influence international relations or state–society relations in contemporary Asia?

Dr. Yu Tao
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Asia
• church–state relations
• international relations
• policy
• policy process
• political process
• politics
• religion–state relations
• statecraft
• state building
• state–society relations