Bloody, Intense, and Durable: The Politics of 'Religious Conflict'

Abstract

A growing number of scholars argues that we are witnessing a resurgenceof religion in world politics, accompanied by an increasein religiously inspired conflict. Empirical studies demonstrate thatreligious conflicts are more violent, more intense, more durable, andmore difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements than theirsecular counterparts. In this paper, we argue that these conclusionsare unreliable, because they fail to provide convincing criteria forseparating religious conflicts from non-religious ones. Our mainconcern is with the categorization problem. What characteristics orfactors make a conflict party, conflict issue, or identity religious, andwhat characteristics or factors frame a conflict party, conflict issue,or identity as non-religious? A basic assumption behind much of thisresearch is the contested idea that religion is a universal phenomenonembodied in various forms such as Islam and Christianity. The majorityof scholars simply assume a sharp division between religion andthe secular without problematizing or justifying such a distinction. Inthis article, we argue that religious conflict is an ideologically chargedconcept, and that the study of the religion-conflict nexus reinforcesthe neoliberal status quo and current systems of power.