Sharing a new framework for engaging religion in foreign affairs with students and practitioners around the world.

Erin Wilson (Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society)

Open Research objectives/practices

Making the outputs of research, including publications, data, software and other research materials freely accessible

Introduction

In 2022, I published a book with Routledge called "Religion and World Politics: Connecting Theory with Practice". The book offered a new approach for understanding religion's importance in foreign affairs and insights for how to engage religion in security, development and human rights.

Motivation

I have been working in the area of religion and foreign affairs for over 20 years. Throughout that time, little progress has been made in terms of deepening knowledge of different kinds of religions, different ways that religion intersects with politics, across diverse contexts around the world. Despite extensive research to the contrary, most scholars and practitioners outside religious studies continue to assume that all religions are the same, that they are all either simply a good or bad influence in politics or a central or marginal factor to take into consideration. For many scholars engaging with practice, we were seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again, sometimes with catastrophic consequences, yet no shift in the underlying core erroneous assumptions that were producing these mistakes.

Through this book, I was able to present a more nuanced, critical, balanced approach to religion and international relations to help policymakers and project designers avoid these mistakes. The "Lived Religion" approach puts context first, breaks down what religion means and the different ways it intersects with politics. The book presents this approach in a straightforward manner, with images and diagrams, and was made freely accessible for non-academics, students and professionals through open access publishing. It was extremely important to me that this book be readily accessible and available to as many people as possible all over the world, so that this alternative, more comprehensive approach to religion and world politics could begin to penetrate more deeply into how people think about this crucial area of policy and society.

Lessons learned

The Open Access publication of this book was made possible through the support of the Knowledge Unlatched Foundation. My publisher nominated my book for this funding. Having a publisher who looks out for such opportunities and a foundation that supports making science available for all is a huge benefit. Knowing about such opportunities, I will now pursue them for other publications and recommend them to others. As a result of the Open Access publication, so many more people have read the book. I have met diplomats, civil servants, students, civil society practitioners who have read my book and are implementing the recommended approach in their policymaking and using it in training programs for diplomats within their own foreign ministry. As a result of this open access book, I have also been invited to give talks for a number of different foreign ministry, including the UK, the EU, Australia and the Netherlands. Other academics in both religious studies and International Relations use it with their students. While they value the clarity of the content, the fact that the electronic version of the book is available for free makes it even more useful and accessible. Open Access publishing makes it so much easier for research to have impact and to make changes in the field. At the same time, it is also challenging because the usual metrics for assessing the impact of a publication (number of reads or downloads) are not available for an electronic book (at least not through Routledge) so I only have anecdotal evidence for the impact of the book. This is a challenge for future research assessment exercises and for demonstrating impact in grant applications, for example.

URLs, references and further information

Last modified:

11 November 2024 1.26 p.m.