Berkley Center

In recent years we have witnessed a growing trend of states aspiring to regional and global power incorporating religion and religious outreach activities into their external relations. This new geopolitics of religion has an increasingly prominent Asian dimension centered on the activities of China and India. Transnational religious actors play on the chord of religious ideas and doctrine as a form of soft power—and sometimes also “sharp power”—influence, utilizing them to achieve their political interests. Asia serves as a geopolitical epicenter for global growth and transnational connections, marking it as an increasingly strategically important region.

This thematic series, which grows out of a partnership between the Berkley Center’s Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power project and the United States Institute of Peace, with collaboration from Nanyang Technological University, explores the motivations, effectiveness, and impact of various geopolitical actors attempting to influence local, regional, and international affairs across Asia. The contributors address a wide range of themes: the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva, the role of Christianity as a bridge and barrier within the Korean peninsula, rising extremism, and the myth of the role of “foreign forces” in Xinjiang. 

Together, these papers demonstrate how the new geopolitics of religion and culture in Asia emerged out of the global war on terror. Though that war ended, the religious ideas, organizations, actors and beliefs mobilized across the world remain, only adapted to new purposes to meet the multipolar moment. In this geopolitical order, religion is not only a form of soft power, but is power itself—a contested space of political conflict.