Acknowledgments xi
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1
CHAPTER TWO: Varieties of Secularism 23
CHAPTER THREE: Secularism and Islam 46
CHAPTER FOUR: Contested Secularisms in Turkey and Iran 65
CHAPTER FIVE: The European Union and Turkey 84
CHAPTER SIX: The United States and Iran 102
CHAPTER SEVEN: Political Islam 116
CHAPTER EIGHT: Religious Resurgence 134
CHAPTER NINE: Conclusion 147
Notes 155
Select Bibliography 213
Index 237

Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey.
The Politics of Secularism in International Relations develops a new approach to religion and international relations that challenges realist, liberal, and constructivist assumptions that religion has been excluded from politics in the West. The first book to consider secularism as a form of political authority in its own right, it describes two forms of secularism and their far-reaching global consequences.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University.