Menchik Speaks in Toronto on Missionaries in World Politics
Assistant Professor Jeremy Menchik presented chapters of his book project, The Missionary Impulse in World Politics at a book workshop cosponsored by the Department of Political Science, IR Workshop Series, and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto on March 6, 2020. Menchik’s research compares missionary projects within the religious traditions of Christianity and Islam in order to help explain liberalism’s travels.
From the project:
What are the origins of the missionary impulse—the desire to proselytize and convert others to one’s way of life? How can the study of Christian and Muslim missionaries help us to understand the practices and pathologies of other missionizing traditions such as liberalism? Using original archival research, in-depth interviews, and extensive primary source material to unite scholarship on religious missions and liberalism, this book’s aims are twofold: to make liberal missionizing strange in order to better explore its origins and practices, and to make religious missionaries familiar to scholars who struggle to explain the political power of religion in contemporary international affairs. By doing so, the book highlights shared origins and structural similarities between traditions that are typically considered distinct, and elucidates an aspect of liberalism and contemporary world politics that is usually overlooked. Further, at a time when the liberal world order is in crisis, the book draws on the comparative study of missionaries to aid scholars and policymakers who seek to spread liberal democracy.
Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and faculty affiliate in Political Science and Religious Studies. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. His most recent article, “Moderate Muslims and Democratic Breakdown in Indonesia” appeared in the Asian Studies Review in 2019.