Armed with the Sacred: Blocpolitik and the Coming World (Dis)Order

Dominant paradigms in international relations fail to explain how contemporary states integrate religion into territorial expansion and regional hegemony. This article proposes blocpolitik as a robust analytical framework to conceptualize the instrumentalization of the sacred not as a pre-modern vestige, but as a structural component of the emerging multipolar constellation. Rather than signaling the decline of the nation-state, multipolarity reinforces sovereign authority through the strategic mobilization of “sacred capital.” At the macro level, this capital is deployed through state-led civilizational narratives, while at the micro level it operates via performative rituals and localized networks that lock in transnational civic loyalty. By examining Russia, Turkey, the United States, and China, we map how diverse state actors deploy these assets to delineate civilizational spheres of influence. However, this systemic transition produces the “twin fractures” of theopolitical blocpolitik: a systemic fracture that erodes multilateral institutions and positive international law, and a spiritual fracture that drives a top-down secularization, stripping religious institutions of doctrinal autonomy and displacing theological substance with ethnopolitical signaling. Ultimately, religion emerges as a sophisticated instrument of modern secularism, replacing international legal consensus with uncompromisable “sacred missions” and testing the constitutive limits of global stability.