International Politics and Religion: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

In recent decades there has been an increase in interest in religion in the field of international relations. This interest is not avoided even in the academic sphere, where there is more and more papers being published on this topic. This thesis is a part of that trend, since it examines three actors from the transnational Christian network and the relationships among them. Specifically, it is the Catholic Church and two non-governmental organizations: A Rocha and Christian Aid. The aim of this thesis is to find out whether the whole transnational network works as a whole, or whether non-governmental organizations have their own autonomous approach, which differs from the approach of the Catholic Church. The researched framework is thematically limited to the actors' approach to sustainable development topics, namely the Sustainable Development Goals, which were defined by the UN in The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The thesis is based on the theory of constructivism, while it uses its methodology of critical discourse analysis, which is applied to the texts from all three actors. The analysis shows that the actors partially show interest in the same topics, but not completely. NGOs do not fully embrace the agenda set by Catholic Church, but they do not oppose it either. They mostly choose topics, which coincide with it, but in some cases they expand its scope and deal with other topics that are not important for the Catholic Church. The choice of the same topics may thus indicate the interconnectedness of the whole transnational Christian network, but it may also be a purely coincidental agreement.