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Religion is a reoccurring theme within international law, as both an external phenomenon that confronts the profession and an internal dynamic that influences the logic and sensibility of the profession. A key concept within theological belief and study is 'eschatology', which addresses the end of days and how believers might orient their lives accordingly. While scholars engaged in global governance discourse often analyse the relationship between theology and law, there is a tendency to neglect and avoid any rigorous study towards the specific content of religious doctrine. In this paper, our goal is to provide a concise analysis of the theological variations of eschatology and how they map onto international legal argument and more generally Western philosophical 'modernity' in relation to governance. The argument is not that theological eschatology provides a 'deep structure' to the logic of the discipline, but that these fields conceptually overlap in provocative ways, which raise questions about the secular and universal character of law and politics.

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of "hellfire and brimstone." The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the "left" nor on the "right," and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.

This article is an ethnographic dissection of ideas pertaining to
eschatology in a Shi'a Muslim tribal area in Iran that reveals the syncretistic
possibilities in lived Islam, the generosity of the local culture regarding matters
of religion, and individuals' motivations for selecting certain possibilities to
think about death and the afterlife. A common theme is for people to look at
religious tenets as they pertain to this-worldly relations and can be approached
with empirical experiences, all within the general frame of a regulated universe
created by a merciful, understanding God. Research for this discussion stretched
across 50 years in Iran.

Der Aufsatz behandelt ein Bild des sogenannten "Katalanischen Atlasses," der aus der Werkstatt des jüdischen Illuminators und Kartographen Elisha ben Abraham Cresques stammt (Mallorca, 1375). Das behandelte Bild hat eschatologische Motive zum Inhalt, die eine doppelschichtige Bildsprache aufweisen: einerseits sprechen sie den Auftraggeber (Peter IV von Aragon) an, andererseits weist es mehrere Elemente auf, die nur vor dem Hintergrund spezifisch jüdischer eschatologischer Vorstellungen zu verstehen sind.

Abstract
The article studies the Iranian political society, starting from the analysis of the Iranian Constitution, the only one in the world characterized by "eschatological" components. The authors retrace the history of the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is fundamental to ensure an interpretation of the politics of that country that takes into account religious and cultural factors and clarifies possible future developments. Furthermore, they address the problem relative to the symbolic system on which the configuration of the Iranian Republic theoretically rests, which must necessarily come to terms with pragmatic reality. In fact, to have a following in his revolutionary project, Khomeini used the "symbolic spring", in which the politics of Iran in these years have demonstrated the necessity of realism with a parallel with the concept of agnosticism, which thus becomes natural, in opposition to theories that are often more subjective than objective. Finally, the authors go so far as to say that today is the time for a change, even if in a country like Iran, everything proceeds slowly. Young Iranians will have to obtain a role, reorganize and rekindle from below. The involvement of the young people themselves can increase hope in a process that promises to be complex and articulated, which sees the theocratic model as opposed to the model of Muslim politics in a purely eschatological context, which to most, especially in the West, appears anachronistic, but this is not always the case.

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to "religion" for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being "historical," i.e. "historicity," requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern "regime of historicity," the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of "prime mover." History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven "secularization" that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into "dogma" and "belief," both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely "revealed" texts and the divinely "inspired" thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.