In: European political science: EPS ; serving the political science community ; a journal of the European Consortium for Political Research, Band 9, Heft 4, S. 515-523
A review essay on a book by William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Although violence by religious believers is often explained by reference to 'fundamentalism,' this is an unsatisfactory analytic category. The term derives from a specific episode in American Protestantism & is often misconstrued as synonymous with beliefs based on the literal reading of texts. Religiously driven violence is often less a matter of beliefs than of ritualistic activity, similar to Juergensmeyer's 'performance violence.' The potentially violent believer must situate him/herself with reference to religious authorities who can legitimate action & an 'other' against whom violence can be directed. The presence of both legitimators & loci of evil allows the playing out of apocalyptic 'scripts,' in the expectation that violent acts will precipitate millennial transformation. Adapted from the source document.
In exploring anti-civilian violence and alleged plots undertaken in the UK by small groups often termed 'salafi-jihadi' and popularly called 'terrorists', the essay attempts to present alternative routes of analysis. The violent events or plots seen recently in the UK present a political and sociological form that is different to state-centric and transnational migrant politics, including political Islam and communitarian Muslim identity politics. The discussion of events in the UK extends to an analysis of a systematic pattern of association between youths in the UK and Pakistani militias operating in Kashmir. The origins and ideologies of the militias are explored and the dynamics of the militia movements in relation to UK events are considered.
AbstractHow do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.