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In this introduction to a special section on the future for research on the topic of religion and geopolitics, some terminological, theoretical, methodological and analytical possibilities are set out. A distinction is drawn between 'religious geopolitics' and the 'geopolitics of religion'. Research published thus far on this intersection has limited thematic and topical scope. I further this critique by suggesting new theoretical and methodological possibilities by pointing out the poverty of thinking in the dualistic terms, religion/secular. I conclude this introduction by providing four analytical approaches to the intersection between religion and geopolitics. The essays in this special section are attempts to present future coherence to this growing literature but also illustrate the many divergent possibilities.

The growth of the study of the geopolitics of religion is welcome after decades of neglect. However, the narrow focus upon right-wing American interpretations of end-times theology writes evangelical Christians as geography's 'repugnant cultural other' who constitute us as the modern, progressive, rational subject. Drawing on parallel debates in the anthropology of religion, this article stresses the importance of attending to other readings of the Apocalypse in other places. Using the examples of Dan Berrigan, William Stringfellow and Allan Boesak, it shows how justice and peace activists have read the Book of Revelation as a radical anti-imperial text and found in it a source of resilience for non-violent resistance in the face of apparently overwhelming odds.

In attending to a religion and a region often overlooked in critical geopolitics, this paper examines the intersections between issues of legitimacy, agency and authority, and the case of Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhist values and political policies are deeply intertwined in the Tibetan case, to the extent that the political philosophy of Tibet – both prior to 1959 and in exile – is chos srid gnyis Idan, or 'religion and politics combined'. Central to this conflation has been the figure of the Dalai Lama who, since 1642, has been the spiritual and political leader of Tibet. However, in March 2011, the current and 14th Dalai Lama declared his retirement from political life and devolution of political power to the directly elected exile Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa). Six months later, His Holiness issued a statement on the future of his own successor, declaring that he has the 'sole legitimate authority' over the reincarnation of the next Dalai Lama. Within days the Chinese Government responded by declaring that 'the title of Dalai Lama is conferred by the central government and is illegal otherwise'. In historically contextualising and critically analysing these recent events, this paper challenges conventional transpositional mappings of secular modernity and religious traditionalism onto the Chinese and Tibetan leadership respectively. It concludes by making the case for a more sustained critical geopolitical engagement with Buddhist communities, leaders and politics.

This paper seeks to examine how Palestinian children's agency integrates Islamic religious idioms in daily life to combat Israeli oppression. While children are often seen as objects that are merely subjected to political and cultural processes, this research shows that children have agency and use their religious expression as a way to further their own political freedom and resist the imposing geopolitical agenda of colonialism. Since the inception of the war on terror that highlighted increased scrutiny and backlash against Islam in Western discourse, resistance through religion has become an integral part of Palestinian children's agency. The narratives of 28 Palestinian children demonstrate the claim that the children have agency in using the expression of Islamic idioms as resistance against Western perceptions and Israeli oppression.

This article argues that gender must be central to our theorisations of emergent religious geopolitics. It does so through an engagement with Butler's reflections upon secular time (Butler J 2008 Secular politics, torture, and secular time The British Journal of Sociology 59 1–23), and the 'cultural reanimation' of Roman Catholic cultural underpinnings of French culture in the defence of the torture and maltreatment of Islamic bodies. Drawing from both the broader, tactical gender geopolitics of the Catholic Church and the embodied experiences of Catholic faithful in Latin America, the paper argues that the concept of cultural reanimation fails to capture the skilful way in which the Holy See asserts a gender theology that transcends the individual faithful body, through to the body of humanity. The ambiguous position of religious institutions in contemporary geopolitics as both cultural and political facilitates the construction of boundaries and territories that transcend and cut through the politics of the state.

Over the last two decades alone, the United States has suffered well over ten thousand religion-motivated hate crimes. While racism and religion-motivated prejudice have received considerable attention following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in deadly violence, there is little systematic scholarship evaluating where and when incidents targeting ethnoreligious minorities by non-state actors are likely to occur. Utilizing the FBI’s reported anti-Semitic hate crime data from 2001–2014, my main theoretical and empirical exercise is to determine which factors best explain where and when American ethnoreligious groups are likely to be targeted. I propose that there are four essential mechanisms necessary to explain variation in minority targeting: “opportunity” (target group concentration), “distinguishability” (target group visibility), “stimuli” (events increasing target group salience) and “organization” (hate group quantity). My models show that variables falling within each of these theoretical concepts significantly explain variation in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Of particular importance for scholars and practitioners alike, Israeli military operations and the number of active hate groups within a state play a major role in explaining anti-Semitic incident variation.

This article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a ‘terrorist’ cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern ‘terrorism’ fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

In the 1920s and 30s, mass conversion movements to \"Russian\" Orthodoxy emerged among Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia and Poland, comprising a new chapter in a continuing saga of conversion which began in the late nineteenth century, in what was then Austria-Hungary. Pre-1914 conversion movements arose in large part due to transatlantic migration - especially return migration - between Austria-Hungary and the Americas. Americanists have generally treated the 1920s and 30s as the era when transnational migration's impact waned owing to US immigration restrictions, while East Europeanists have minimized or ignored the impact of transnational migration upon East European regions. Interwar Catholic-to-Orthodox conversions, however, are not merely attributable to historical legacy: transatlantic migration continued to influence the dynamics of conversion as an active, contemporary force. As had been true prior to World War I, returning migrants and their families comprised the most significant constituency of the movements after the war; migrants remaining in the Americas supported the East European movements with economic and social remittances, and activists on either side of the Orthodox/Catholic divide treated the conversions as transnational phenomena. This essay analyzes the impact of transnational migration upon shifting ethnoreligious identifications, in the context of shifting social, national, and geopolitical circumstances, 1918-1939.