The magical battle of Britain: The spatialities of occult geopolitics

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian and Steve Pile; individual chapters, the contributors. Where the geography of religion and political geography meet, a productive range of writings have emerged around the theme of religious geopolitics (see Dijkink 2006; Dittmer 2007, 2009; Dittmer and Sturm 2010; Megoran 2010). In his agenda setting piece on this conjunction, Sturm (2013) sets out a distinction between ‘the geopolitics of religion’ and ‘religious geopolitics’. The former refers to actors who view the geopolitical map of the world through theological spatial divisions and religious discourses of valued significance; here one may cite the contrasting contemporary examples of Daesh’s self-declared caliphate or the Dali Lama’s vision of Tibet as a regional ‘zone of peace’ facilitating a ‘scalar jump’ to world peace (McConnell 2013: 164). On the other hand, ‘religious geopolitics’ demarcates how manifestly secular geopolitical discourse often deploys and is organised through religiously inspired ideas, languages and practices; here one might mention the Christian Right in the USA whose policies, both foreign and domestic, are often framed or underpinned by Evangelical readings of Scripture. Sitting somewhere between these demarcations, one could also look to debates over postsecularism and its (re)configuration of state and religious relations and practices, to see further intersections between religion and (geo)politics (Cloke 2010, 2011)