Sunday, March 16, 2014
Committee (Omni Shoreham)
Since the end of the cold war - most notably since 9/11 - scholars of International Relations studies (IR) become more and more interested in the role of religion for studying global political phenomena. In my paper I want to explore how and to what extent Europeans discuss and refer to religion in public debates on wars and military interventions. While conventional wisdom tells us that in secularized Western Europe religion generally belongs to the private realm, I want to verify whether religion still plays an important role in Europe in order to make sense out of ethically sensitive issues such as wars and military interventions.
In the empirical part, I will analyze a large number of newspaper articles from several Western European countries (Germany, UK, France, Ireland and Austria) that deal with wars and military interventions. In order to explore the use of religion in public debates and to trace general patterns of religious expressions and its variations over time, I will use an innovative research method which combines corpus linguistics and content analysis. Besides presenting first empirical results, the paper will furthermore discuss several methodological and empirical challenges when we investigate the presence of religion in the public sphere.
