Delivered. If the expression “return of the religious” has been in vogue for several decades, it implies that this referent would have disappeared from public debate for a while before arousing renewed interest. However, there is nothing more false, explains the professor of political science Delphine Allès, in her last work devoted to the relation between religion and politics in the world space: the sacred has always been there.
Director of the international relations department at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco), in Paris, the young researcher addresses one of the most sensitive subjects of the moment: the place of religion in the world, or more exactly in the architecture of international relations.
If, even today, religion fascinates as much as it worries public opinion, Delphine Allès prefers to decipher, explain and open up new perspectives of understanding, even of cohabitation, between the political and the religious. Why cohabitation? Because, contrary to what most of his contemporaries seem to assert, the religious referent has never been erased from the international game by politics. Whereas, since the middle of the XVIIe century, the Westphalian system had for finality to impose the secularism and the victory of the State (thus of the political one) on the confessionalism and the religion in the world space, the academic demonstrates, primarily through the example of Indonesia, that it is not.
Multiplex complex
It is not the religious who is back on the front of the world stage in the XXIe century, but it is international relations that have become decentralized and, in this extension linked to a strong push of globalization, religion – present at the highest level through multilateral structures, such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and at lower in the folds of secularization of the world order – takes its ease and occupies more and more space.
This reaffirmation not only proves that religion has always retained real autonomy, even at the height of institutional atheism, but that, in addition, it is through the southern hemisphere that the world can reinvent peace. Disciple of sociologist Bertrand Badie, his thesis director, Delphine Allès follows in her footsteps when she mentions the existence of a multiplex world (like a multiplex cinema where moviegoers have the opportunity to see more than eight films to choose from in the same structure). The world would therefore not be multipolar but multiplex, an integrated and unique world with different spheres and new forms of complexities which coexist more or less well.
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