Three Theories of Religious Activism and Violence: Social Movements,Fundamentalists, and Apocalyptic Warriors

Numerous scholars have investigated religiously motivated violence, particularly in the wake of September 11, including discussions on the role of modernity in triggering religious violence, the increasing presence of religion in politics, the violence-prone nature of certain religions, and religion's correlation with ethnicity and other conflict-intensifying variables. However, religious activism and violence are not new phenomena. Few theories have been advanced that move across time and space and, broadly, seek to explain the conditions under which religion becomes involved in activism and violence. This article argues that three broad causal arguments for religious activism—social movements, fundamentalism, and apocalyptic warriors—help explain the conditions under which religiously motivated violence occurs across time and space. These three causal arguments offer a spectrum of goals within religious activism, ranging from challenging social practices and government policies, to defending specific interpretations and practices of the faith, to hastening the apocalypse. Furthermore, each of these theories proposes different ways that religion becomes involved in social, political, and religious activism and the conditions under which groups use violence to further their goals. The article concludes by suggesting countermeasures for each type of religious activism.     

Religion,state, and terrorism: A global analysis

ABSTRACT

This article investigates two ways in which state involvement in religion—minority and majority restriction—generates terrorism. Using a time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 174 countries from 1991–2009, this study finds that when religiously devout people find themselves marginalized through either form of religious restriction, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers.     

The unhealthy divide: how the secular-faith binary potentially limits GBV prevention and response

ABSTRACT

While progress has been made in creating conversations between the secular and faith actors involved in developmental issues, a distinct binary still exists. This could potentially be limiting a holistic response to gender-based violence, a global public health, development, humanitarian, and human rights issue. This article explores how perceptions of this binary – faith versus secular – are understood to impact GBV prevention and response efforts. Drawing on interviews conducted during a scoping study, the opinions and experiences of actors from faith-based organisations and academic institutions are used to shed light on how the faith-secular binary is being upheld and challenged, and how it is perceived to be impacting holistic GBV prevention and response.     

Too many enemies: Mobilization,marginalization, and political violence

Over the past decades, a pattern has emerged across the Islamic world of secular actors struggling to build sustainable social movements while Islamists show a higher success rate in doing so—a dynamic often accompanied by high levels of violence and little space for dialogue between actors from across the political spectrum. In this article, we illustrate the utility of social movement theory (SMT) in explaining the ability of some movements to mobilize en masse, while others become marginalized. Furthermore, we suggest that SMT is useful in understanding the processes that produce socio-political dynamics conducive to violent rather than non-violent tactics. Through a case study of Bangladesh, where in 2013 the secular Shahbag mobilization was derailed by a massive Islamist counter-mobilization, this article shows how movements not only capitalize on, but actually contribute to, shifts in cultural discourse through political maneuvering and long-term socialization. By anchoring their ideology in pre-existing religio-cultural imagery, Islamists have been successful in casting themselves as “authentic” defenders of Islam and their secular opponents as “atheists.” In such a socio-political context, the space for dialogue among the various political actors is severely limited and the impetus to employ violent tactics strong.     

The Party Paradox: a Comment Nicolas van de Walle (Cornell) February 20, 2018

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes several stylized facts and implications concerning intra-party violence developed in the other articles of this special issue on intra-party violence in African electoral systems. It then turns more specifically to the implications of intra-party violence for democratic consolidation in the region, and argues that paradoxically, though parties are centrally important to democratic politics, the degree to which they are internally inclusive and participatory may not have much importance, or may indeed undermine democracy. Though they are perhaps the key actor on the path to a consolidated democracy, they tend to work best when they themselves are not internally democratic.     

When do people pay attention? Violence and non-violence in political movements and the differential media attention provided

Media can dictate what people see, but an individual’s choice in media consumption can also determine what stories the media report. This paper demonstrates that people show a greater interest in large-scale protests when the use of violence is employed, though this trend does not strongly hold in every case. Google search Trend data are analysed across five recent political movements to determine at which points in a movement media attention peaks. The data are compared to the timelines of these protests with a specific emphasis on when major violent events occurred. The level of violence that occurs in a movement is potentially correlated with how many times the region experiencing the movement is searched. Some movements however do a good job at generating attention without violence, and violence does not guarantee a large audience. The Google Trend data provide valuable information about what causes people to pay attention to world events and can be used to analyse political movements and potentially make predictions about violent and non-violent conflict.     

Rethinking the Relationship between Inclusive Institutions and Political Violence

Abstract

In this paper we empirically reexamine the debate over the conflict reducing properties of inclusive political institutions. We examine the purported violence reducing effects of proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, parliamentarism, and federalism, conditioning their effects on ethnic fractionalization and whether a country is conflict prone. In other words, are these institutions more effective in countries that have already experienced major conflict or are they more effective in preventing conflict in countries that have not experienced major conflict? Using a data set that includes a sample of 81 countries and 2488 observations from 1973 to 2018, we test the conditional effects of proportional representation electoral systems, parliamentarism and federalism conditioning these by ethnicity and whether the country has experienced a major conflict (i.e., civil war). We find that these institutions have little effect on reducing the number of riots or political deaths, but PR electoral systems reduces ethnic violence when ethnic fractionalization is high. On the other hand PR electoral systems and parliamentarism reduce ethnic violence in conflict prone countries, but federalism increases the likelihood of ethnic violence. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to arguments regarding inclusive power sharing arrangements and violence in post conflict environments.     

The Deterrent Effects of the International Criminal Court: Evidence from Libya

ABSTRACT

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was designed to try the worst war criminals for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other instances of mass human suffering. By providing a permanent, international mechanism to hold perpetrators of mass human rights abuse accountable, the ICC is also meant to be a deterrent—to prevent potential genocidaires from committing systematic human rights abuses in the first place. But what if the effect is actually quite the opposite? While advocates of international justice have made conjectures about the effect of the ICC on stopping human rights abuses, the existing scholarship does not empirically test assumptions about the relationship between international criminal justice and violence. This article outlines the causal mechanisms by which the ICC could affect ongoing violence and tests these assumptions using event count models of the relationship between the ICC and the level of violence against civilians in Libya during the 2011 crisis. These analyses suggest that the ICC’s involvement in conflict does have a dampening effect on the level of mass atrocities committed. The results also call for a broad and sustained research agenda on the effect of international accountability efforts on ongoing violence.     

The Islamic State and the New Tribalism

This article focuses on the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the Islamic State through the lens of what we call the New Tribalism. It finds that IS emerged from the Al Qaeda (AQ) milieu, but soon split with AQ as the messianic excitement surrounding Al-Baghdadi and his teachings grew. In common with previous millennial/messianic movements in all three “Peoples of the Book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—IS soon evolved beyond the laws of the normative faith (antinomianism). We hold that for this reason, despite its claims of faith and fealty, IS has left the Islamic Umah behind, becoming a malign sectarian group of its own whose dynamism and successes are attracting a global audience and support from Muslims in almost every country. This helps to explain such abhorrent practices as forced conversion, sexual servitude, the destruction of historic artifacts, and mass executions. We find that the American invasion of Iraq was the vital first step in a series of events, which gave birth to IS. A thorough review of IS history and political culture traces these historic moments in time.     

Maritime security in the United States: Latent threats and latent vulnerabilities

Americans and their government are seemingly unconcerned about the possibility that maritime facilities and personnel might be at risk to armed violence. Not only are current maritime security efforts minimal, they feature a curious dichotomy: one thrust is directed toward occasional acts of terrorism, the other toward coastal defense in wartime. Despite a manifestly more interactive world marked by the ready availability of powerful, mobile weapons, no serious efforts have been directed toward protecting maritime facilities and personnel in the United States against special operations or unconventional warfare. This indifference reflects the prevalence of the Clausewitzian paradigm in America's attitude toward war and the country's historical experience with coastal defense in the wars of this century. The fragmented structure of civil and military protection available to protect ports and other facilities suggests that protection could not be quickly upgraded in the face of a rapidly‐developing threat.     

Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events

ABSTRACT

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of “common sense” characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell.     

Reduction of socio‐economic injustice: Four scenarios to the year 2001

This empirical study is a continuation of the Limits‐to‐Violence project started in 1975 by the Canadian Peace Research Institute. The LIV project sought to model three kinds of violence‐civil war, international war, and socio‐economic injustice‐in an effort to limit global violence in the future.

The research reported here is concerned with reducing socio‐economic injustice, or so‐called “structural” violence. Four scenarios are calculated for the years 1973–2001. No. 1 is a “Status quo” model based on a slow growth or stagnant world economy, where in addition no attempt is made to reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations of the world. Scenarios Nos. 2–4 are different variations of a swords‐into‐ploughshares program where steady global disarmament and massive foreign aid proceed together over the 1982–2001 period. Four Tables and six Figures help to illustrate what is possible.     

Who Can Keep the Peace? Insurgent Organizational Control of Collective Violence

Every armed organization seeks the ability to turn violence on and off by getting fighters to fight when ordered and to stop fighting when similarly ordered. This ability is a defining feature of what makes organized violence, in fact, organized. While state militaries develop clear hierarchies and disciplinary procedures to accomplish this goal, the complexity of civil war makes the task more difficult for insurgent groups. I argue that the leaders of insurgent organizations are able to turn violence on and off when they have deliberately established resource control through the direct, and exclusive, distribution of resources to their followers and those followers are socially embedded, meaning that members are united by strong horizontal ties and group norms. In contrast to existing approaches, I argue that material and social endowments do not predetermine whether leaders can establish resource control or embeddedness. Further, laying out the precise organizational mechanisms that determine when organizations can turn violence on and off challenges the utility of conceptions such as “fragmentation” or “cohesion” for explaining insurgent behavior and conflict outcomes. I test the theory by examining variation in behavior over time in two organizations facing different structural contexts—Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq and the Viet Minh in Vietnam—and find strong support for my argument while casting doubt on existing explanations.     

Young Afghans in ‘transition’: towards Afghanisation,exit or violence?

This article (re)examines Afghan youth within the post-Taliban nation-building process through a close review of the growing academic literature on the nexus of development and conflict, as well as the author's personal, in-country interactions with Afghans over the past decade. It argues that when people believe in development, they view inequalities as a particular stage that they must pass through to emerge on the other side. Yet, when a country's people lose faith in the promise of development, they begin to view inequalities without the hope that reaching the other side is simply a matter of time and patience. When this ‘loss of faith’ occurs one option is to try to exit to a better place. The second option is violence—to break through to the ‘other side’ through force. This article argues that with the decade long failure of development in Afghanistan such trends are increasingly visible among Afghan youth, and suggests the need for a critical paradigm shift in the way that we view the country and the context of development there.     

Fragmentation,Conflict, and Competition: Islamist Anti-civilian Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

In spite of the shared high profile of recent Islamist attacks on civilians in sub-Saharan Africa, patterns of anti-civilian violence differ across and within violent Islamist groups, and the countries in which they are active. This research seeks to explain this variation by situating Islamist violence within the sub-national spaces in which such groups operate, and the wider conflict environment in which they choose to use, or limit the use of, anti-civilian violence. Drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset, the research finds that violent Islamist groups are more likely to target civilians where they are the most active conflict agent, even when other conflict agents are active in the same spaces; but less likely to do so when they are relatively weak and in competition with other non-state armed groups. Anti-civilian violence is thus deployed strategically by violent Islamist groups, while its function as a signalling or retributive policing tool depends on the relative strength of groups in relation to actors in the wider conflict arena.     

Sporting Relations: Diplomacy,Small States,and Germany’s Post-war Return to International Sport

ABSTRACT

Germany’s post-war return to international sport was not uniform across all federations. The nature of each sport—summer versus winter, team versus individual—influenced the speed with which each international sport federation dealt with the issue of Germany’s return. Some federations allowed German participation even before they formally re-admitted the country to federation membership. However, sporting relations were not the only issue considered by international federations. The historical political relations between Germany and its smaller European neighbours were as important. The combination of the historical relationship amongst European states—especially memories of the Second World War—and internal sport federation dynamics affected state relations within the broader international system. The actions taken by the international sport federations provided examples—in areas that would not result in another world war or destroy Western alliances—of how Germany could return as a full member of the international community. The debates regarding Germany’s return across a number of international sport federations reveal the complex interaction among memory, politics, and practical matters.     

Faith and palliative care: a partnership of care in low- and middle-income countries

ABSTRACT

The provision of holistic palliative care has been identified by WHO as a human right, important for all people, at all ages, with all life-limiting illnesses. When faced with death and dying, issues of meaning and relationships with others, the world, and with the sacred are intensified even more in communities where faith and spiritual beliefs have a significant place. Being able to understand the significance of dying and interpreting the experience and period of living with life-limiting illness, presents an important challenge for palliative care. This article sets out the contribution that faith communities have made in understanding the significance of spiritual issues in health and in delivering palliative care in lower to middle-income contexts where palliative care has been prioritised.     

A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

Global diffusion,policy flexibility,and inflation targeting

ABSTRACT

A diverse group of over 30 countries located all over the world—such as the UK, Colombia, and Ghana—introduced inflation targeting, which is a monetary policy that seeks to control inflation through a pre-announced target. Fully institutionalized democracies adopted the policy first because the core features of inflation targeting are consistent with the principles of a liberal democracy. But why was inflation targeting also introduced by less-democratic countries? This article develops the argument that decision makers of less-democratic countries became more likely to adopt inflation targeting when they observed that nearby countries increased the flexibility of the policy. The statistical analysis of data from 76 countries between 1989 and 2013 supports this hypothesis. The finding that the change of a policy toward a more flexible framework drives its global spread addresses a blind spot in the more recent policy diffusion literature.     

New Event Data in Conflict Research

This paper first presents an overview of data on 390 international crises, which incorporate 826 foreign policy crises, from the end of 1918 to the end of 1988.

A set of crisis profiles is then constructed for the two superpowers of the post‐World War II era, and for three regional systems, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The data on international crises are presented in terms of a common format for the regional profiles, with slight modifications for the superpowers, in order to facilitate comparisons: time and space; duration; onset; threat; behavior; severity of violence; US/USSR activity; global organization involvement; and outcome. Within these categories, distributions are noted for each of the polarity structures—multipolarity (1918–39), bipolarity (1945–62), and polycentrism (1963–1988). Thereafter, comparisons are made between US and USSR crises (after World War II), and among the three regional profiles.

The central thrust of the findings from these profiles is clear: they focus attention on the dual characteristics of twentieth century crises, their pervasiveness and diversity. These traits, in turn, make much more difficult the task of constructing a theory that provides a systematic explanation of interstate crisis from onset to termination. Complex reality imposes an intolerable burden on the search for necessary and sufficient conditions of crisis. In positive terms, it leads to a shift in focus, from ‘necessary and sufficient’ to the “most likely” conditions as the most credible path to theory.