Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century
Douglas Johnston is a military and diplomatic strategist. Instead of approaching religion as a problem in global crises, he is modeling a new kind of diplomacy. In places like Pakistan, Iran, and Sudan, he is successfully engaging religious leaders and passions to combat the causes ? not just the symptoms ? of violent religious extremism.
In the mid-1990s I attended a regional Council on Foreign Relations meeting at which Douglas Johnston spoke about his research on religion as a "missing dimension" of effective statecraft. Many of the attendees, raised in a Cold War world dominated by secular power politics between nation-states, were openly scornful of the idea that religion should have any place at all in a legitimate foreign policy discussion.
Johnston was then COO and executive vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the top foreign policy think tanks in Washington, D.C. And well before September 11, 2001, he saw that as the Cold War division of the world unraveled, potential conflicts would again be ethnically and regionally driven, with religious dynamics front and center. At the same time, he had compiled case studies around the globe where religious actors helped mediate and end conflicts that traditional diplomacy could not. He believed that understanding and working with religious people and passions could be key to "preventive diplomacy."
In 1999, Douglas Johnston left CSIS to create the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. History proceeded to bear out his sense of religion's centrality in the foreign affairs of the future in ways he would never have wished for.
Douglas Johnston is the kind of person I love to put on the air ? unclassifiable by religious stereotype or the handy categories of America's culture wars. He is neither a liberal, nor is he a hawk. An Annapolis graduate and former submarine commander, he is quick to note that his kind of faith-based, preventive diplomacy cannot negate the fact that sometimes "brutality must be met by brutality." He is an Evangelical Protestant who has created a center with a multi-religious staff; personally he's most involved these days in crises with an Islamic interface. He is also a staunch advocate of the U.S. tradition of separation of church and state. Yet he adds that Americans have used it in recent decades as a crutch not to do our homework on the different role religion has in cultures with which we must learn, as a matter of self-interest, to relate respectfully.
The experiences Douglas Johnston describes in this program reveal pragmatic human possibilities that headlines of global crisis simply obscure. His primary and most active contribution to world affairs in recent years has come through initiatives of "Track-II", or unofficial diplomacy. He has, for example, orchestrated some of the highest level contacts that have taken place between religious and political leaders in Iran and the United States in recent years, in an era of hostile impasse in the official diplomatic relationship between the two countries. I decided that it was finally time to interview him when I read a thought-provoking and helpful memo he crafted last year titled, "What Iranians Want Americans to Know About Iran."
Among the most hopeful images Douglas Johnston leaves me with, perhaps, are his stories of the unprecedented work he and his center are doing in Pakistan to help reform and modernize madrassas ? religious schools which U.S. officials have cited as frequent breeding grounds for terrorism. His pictures from that project, posted on our Web site, are astonishing in themselves. Pakistani religious and educational leaders ? including "hard-line" Wahhabi and Deobandi sects ? have taken him as a trusted partner because of his expertise and his respectful, faith-based approach to cultural engagement and diplomacy. At the very least, he says, this is a worthwhile investment in the children of Pakistan.
And this effort at the source of current global violence, Johnston argues, is as pragmatic a use of resources as the money we're spending upping security at airports to catch the symptoms of full-blown militancy. In that sense his work is an investment in the future of all of our children, one I'll keep following.
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Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
edited by Douglas Johnston
This most recent book of Douglas Johnston provides an introduction to the paradigm shift he sees as necessary ? and is pioneering ? for the world we inhabit now. On our Web site you'll also find his center's occasional updates on work in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere ? to which you can also subscribe.
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Comments: 8
The subject of this article, Mr. Johnston, is only doing what effective diplomats have done since the invention of diplomacy -- learning about the culture of the countries and peoples with whom he is dealing.
This requires no faith or piety on the part of the diplomat -- just a commitment to dialogue, observance of cultural cues and mores, and a keen understanding that your culture often matters not to the country with whom you are dealing.
In my opinion, religion has created significant problems between peoples, particularly proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam, since the goal of their movements is to convert or squash all non-believers. As a basis for political discussion, this is NOT a good place to begin, and certainly not a good place to end.
Good article, but would like to see more examples and discussion than simply links elsewhere.
As long as we refuse to address dangers of our own creating, and continue look to a God to fix it all for us - we will hand all these problems to our children.