Sovereignty, Confessionalism and the Moral Foundations of Political Rule
In her important book “Before the West”, Ayse Zarakol discusses the phenomenon of confessionalism and its relationship with political centralized sovereignty. The relationship may at first appear paradoxical since historically the establishment of this kind of sovereignty (NB: there are conceivably other decentralized forms of sovereignty, but IR is mostly concerned with transitions into the centralized type) was marked precisely by the submission of religious authorities to secular power. This makes sense since for most of human history the main check on absolute political power came from independent religious authority, from which law making (or at least interpreting) flowed. Zarakol’s success is to show that this process actually took place in the Eurasian ‘East’ throughout the 13th-15th centuries following the Mongol conquest, well before the actual ‘revolution of sovereignty’ in 16th century Europe. Yet Zarakol also highlights that the relationship between political and religious ...