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Analyses of religion and international politics routinely concern the persistence of religion as a critical element in world affairs. However, they tend to neglect the constitutive interconnections between religion and political life. Consequently, religion is treated as exceptional to mainstream politics. In response, recent works focus on the relational dimensions of religion and international politics. This article advances an “entangled history” approach that emphasizes the constitutive, relational, and historical dimensions of religion — as a practice, discursive formation, and analytical category. It argues that these public dimensions of religion share their conditions of possibility and intelligibility in a political order that crystallized over the long 19th century. The neglect of this period has enabled International Relations to treat religion with a sense of closure at odds with the realities of religious political behavior and how it is understood. Refocusing on religion’s historical entanglements recovers the concept as a means of explaining international relations by “recognizing” how it is constituted as a category of social life. Beyond questions of the religious and political, this article speaks to renewed debates about the role of history in International Relations, proposing entanglement as a productive framing for international politics more generally.

The July 2011 independence of the new Republic of South Sudan marks the successful outcome of a long-time struggle, encompassing a wide spectrum of local and international activities. Included among them is a variety of UNsupported peace and relief operations like the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)-led peace process, the UN-led Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the UN Advance Mission, the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), and, following independence, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Nevertheless, deep-rooted Southern animosities quickly upended the internal peace on which secession relied, troubling both international and local efforts toward sustainable peace and security. Early post-independence eruptions of violence exposed the precariousness of the new state. By 2014, the potential of a South Sudanese civil war came to fruition with the

It is necessary to move beyond the marginalization of the global South towards a perspective that takes it as a relational, generative, and agentive site within world politics. Indonesia is an instructive case in this regard: its participation in various multilateral peace projects constitutes a narrative of Southern agency that runs counter to dominant accounts of contemporary global governance. The dominant methodologies of peacekeeping, worked out through various iterations into a project of liberal governance, have been deeply implicated in many sets of illiberal relations. This illiberal side to the 'liberal peace' can be seen in the ways particular North -South relations have been structured into peace governance, as well as its instrumentalization by powerful domestic elements of Southern states. This is well exemplified by the Indonesian case, whose postcolonial transitions have been caught up in problematic civil -military relations, with both its governments and armed forces deriving various types of support from the international community at various times. Following the Cold War, and especially post-Suharto, these have intertwined with matters of ethno-religious violence, military authority, democratization, and the rise of political Islam. Indonesia's participation in global liberal governance interventions raises questions about peace operations as a world-ordering technology.Analyses of Southern states in global governance remain largely undeveloped, especially regarding their roles in security relations. 1 Dominant accounts treat the global North -South in binary rather than relational terms, obscuring the many complex agencies that underpin international

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