**6. Religion and "Human Security"—How Fruitful for the Future of IR Can the "Mesopotamian Turn" Prove?**

The "Mesopotamian turn" allows IR to take account of the presence and role of religion, which ensure that the Middle East falls outside the "Westphalian presumption", and at the same time undermine any claim to universality on the part of the latter, thereby posing a serious challenge to the entire discipline. The application of multi-level analysis in this case hails back to the 1959 claim from Kenneth Waltz that: "All three images are a part of nature. So fundamental are men, the state, and the state system in any attempt to understand international relations that seldom does an analyst, however wedded to one image, entirely overlook the other two" (Waltz 1959, p. 160). Reflexive modernity would seem to incline the IR researcher to rectify the oversight that involves certain dimensions to international relations being ignored, with the main thrusts to contemporary research now encroached upon by a holistic, multi-level concept that also takes account of the human being. The "Mesopotamian turn" only serves to confirm how this kind of approach conveys the reality under study so much better. Also inherent within it is the potential for action that can assist with the solving of societal problems characteristic of the new millennium. This is then an idea for a new IR identity and a mission for it to pursue in the era of globalization and cultural diversity.

A reflection of the above trend is the human security concept that challenges IR's most important category—security—as associated traditionally with hard power. James K. Wellman stresses that "( ... ) scholars and policy-makers are increasingly more willing and able to 'see' not just the instruments of states' power, but also what's on the ground: People struggling to build lives, less interested in national security in the traditional sense than in the simple welfare of their families, tribes, towns, and cities" (Wellman 2013, p. 194).

The concept of human security has, in fact, been under development within the UN system since the 1990s, and is gaining greater and greater scope and recognition for itself (Marczuk 2014). It is founded on the conviction that threats may look di fferent from the point of view of the person, as opposed to the state or the international system. To account for that, the literature often invokes the 1941 "Four Freedoms" concept after President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In line with that, everyone "everywhere in the world" should enjoy (and have guaranteed) freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. Thus, the international system arising after World War II under UN leadership was not merely to keep the peace, but also to make sure that e ffect was given to the said freedoms, with the reflection of this being UN activity in the name of both the protection of human rights and global socioeconomic development and progress.

Roosevelt's concept, in fact, had its origin in America's social gospel movement (led by Walter Rauschenbusch)—which also inspired President Woodrow Wilson, who, inter alia, postulated the establishment of the League of Nations (Wellman 2013, p. 195). However, this actually religious

provenance was forgotten about in the Cold War era, with what mattered in inter-state relations then being hard power. That left the adopted concept for development founded firmly upon economic growth as the answer to all of the needs of state and society alike.

Notwithstanding a developed system of human-rights protection, the level of analysis relating to the individual human being had actually been forgotten about—this way of seeing things would only, in fact, begin to change once more in the 1990s. The failures characterizing successive UN "decades of development" combined with changes to the world order to ensure that development studies began to be re-evaluated. Evidence of that came with the first (1990) Human Development Report, which showed that the goal of all e fforts made to achieve further development should in fact be the human being. However, while it focused in on seven material dimensions to development, the Report saw no need for religion to be referred to.

It was a later report on human development (1994) that gave rise to the concept of human security, as based on convictions regarding the integrated nature of two of the freedom dimensions, i.e., freedom from fear and freedom from want (Marczuk 2014, p. 41). The Commission on Human Security established several years later came out with a 2003 report, in which we read: "Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms—freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means using processes that build on people's strengths and aspirations. It means creating political, social, environmental, economic, military, and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood, and dignity" (Commission on Human Security 2003, p. 4).

Let us then note that this kind of understanding of human security as a safeguarding of freedoms that constitute the "essence of life" for people, and as a reference to their "strengths and aspirations", leads to an IR incorporating the previously abandoned level of analysis relating to the individual human being. It also opens a double gate to the inclusion of religion. On the one hand, this occurs via a return to Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" (given that one of the fundamental freedoms guaranteeing the "essence of life" is freedom of religion), while, on the other, there is the emphasis on "creating cultural systems" that secure dignity, whose basis in practice through most of the non-Western world tends to be religion. We can also see that the human security idea comes into contact with the "Mesopotamian turn" and allows IR to incorporate the religion present at every level of IR analysis in the Middle East.

So what can the IR researcher learn from the "Mesopotamian turn", i.e., the inclusion within his/her research of study in the Middle East region? While the Arab Human Development Report of 2009 (entirely devoted to human security) o ffers only marginal treatment of religion, the latter may not be ignored, as the above considerations make clear. Precise analysis of the needs and expectations of people in the Middle East compels us to account for the role of religion as we consider international relations. Notwithstanding the changes religiousness in this region has been undergoing (be this individualization, post-Islamism, the return of traditional forms, or the so-called "radicalization"—in a reactionary direction), this is and will remain longer-term one of the most important aspects to relations pertaining in the region. This fact is noted by a further report devoted to Arab young people in the wake of the Arab Spring events (2016). In some sense now rectifying earlier mistakes, this report regards religion as a crucial point of reference see (AHDR 2016, pp. 34–35).

Religion, and especially an Islam undergoing change, o ffers a basis for the emancipation of people that have been marginalized in the international relations, i.e., all those participating in the Westphalian system while never having played any part in developing its principles. Through analysis of religion's presence in international relations in the Middle East, researchers are in a position to re-evaluate—and presumably downplay—the Westphalian synthesis and presumption. In turn, the UN system's development of the concept of human security leaves space for the breaking of "the rule of secularism" in IR, with the discipline thus being o ffered a chance to head back to social reality.

At the end, it is worth returning to the initial idea and following the maxim of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who once noted that the lives lived out tomorrow in the squares and the streets will depend on the thinking going on today in the universities. Thus, engagemen<sup>t</sup> in academic reflection as to the role of religion in the lives of individuals, groups, and states is important not only in the way it o ffers a better understanding of the world around us and the development of IR, but also in line with the major role that can be played in the evolution of today's social order at all levels, up to and including the international. The Middle East o ffers proof of the fact that ongoing pursuit of research in this direction is a must.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
