SSP Wednesday Seminar with speaker Peter Henne, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Vermont. The talk will be broadcast live on the MIT Security Studies Program Youtube channel.

Summary/abstract: Many policymakers have attempted to use appeals to religion as a tool in power politics in the hope that they—like Monty Python's holy hand grenade—would solve seemingly intractable problems. Drawing on his new book, Religious Appeals in Power Politics, Peter Henne will demonstrate that these religious appeals do affect power politics, but—again like a holy hand grenade—not in the way their wielders hoped. These findings push conventional security studies to take religion more seriously, while also challenging the study of religion and international relations to allow for a more complex effect of religion on the world.