Throughout this book we focus upon and evaluate the extent that religion influences international relations. Our general argument is that religion has been ignored by international relations scholars for a variety of reasons even though it plays an important role. One of the most important of these reasons is that international relations tend to be Western-centric. That is, the major scholars of international relations theory have been Westerners who focused mostly on the West. The discipline has its origins in the Western experience of the Enlightenment and the belief that religion is becoming an epiphenon. The major theories of international relations and many of the methodologies for testing them also have not included religion.