MWP – 2016/05

Max Weber Programme

Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and

Violence

Author
Rogers Author
Brubaker
and Author Author
European University Institute
Max Weber Programme

Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

Rogers Brubaker

Max Weber Lecture No. 2016/05

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© Rogers Brubaker, 2016

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Abstract
How should we understand the religious dimensions of political conflict and political violence? One
view sees religiously grounded conflict and violence as sui generis, with a distinctive logic or causal
texture. The alternative view subsumes them under political conflict and violence in general, or under
the rubric of politicized ethnicity. I seek to highlight both the distinctiveness of religiously informed
political conflict and the ways in which many conflicts involving religiously identified claimants are
fundamentally similar in structure and dynamics to conflicts involving other culturally or ethnically
defined claimants. I identify the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed
by distinctively religious understandings of right order. And I specify six violence-enabling
modalities and mechanisms (though all can also enable nonviolent solidaristic or humanitarian social
action): (1) the social production of hyper-committed selves; (2) the cognitive and affective
construction of extreme otherhood and urgent threat; (3) the mobilization of rewards, sanctions,
justifications, and obligations; (4) the experience of profanation; (5) the translocal expandability of
conflict; and (6) the incentives generated by decentralized and hyper-competitive religious
fields. None of these violence-enabling modalities and mechanisms is uniquely religious; yet
religious beliefs, practices, structures, and processes provide an important and distinctively rich matrix
of such modalities and mechanisms.

Keywords
Religiously informed political conflict, religious stakes in political conflict, violence-enabling
modalities and mechanisms.

The lecture was delivered on 15 June 2016. The talk draws freely on Brubaker 2015b.

Rogers Brubaker
University of California (UCLA)
I’m deeply honored to have been asked to deliver one of your Max Weber lectures. I became a
sociologist by struggling to come to terms with Weber’s work, which remains as rich, difficult, and
compelling today as it was a century ago. One of the very first things I was assigned to read as a
college student was the dense and difficult section on the “Types of legitimate domination” from Part
One of Economy and Society, rendered more difficult still by the fact that we were using the less than
felicitous translation of A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. I found the section impenetrable yet
somehow also compelling; I underlined every word; and I was hooked. I ended up writing my
undergraduate senior thesis, which eventually became my first book, on the idea of rationality in
Weber’s work; and though I never took a sociology class in college, I decided to attend graduate
school in sociology.
Religion, conflict, and violence: few themes, taken separately, were more central to Weber’s
work than these. The themes come together at certain points in his work. Conflict and struggle were
central to Weber’s sociology of religion, as they were to all his work; and Weber’s compendium on
the sociology of religion in Economy and Society touched briefly on the development across religious
traditions of the notion of holy war. Violence was of course for Weber the “specific means” of
politics; and in "Politics as a Vocation," Weber memorably wrote that “whoever “contracts with
violent means for whatever ends – and every politician does – is exposed to its specific consequences.
This holds especially,” Weber continued, “for the Crusader, religious and revolutionary alike” (1946:
124-25). In another famous passage from that lecture, Weber explored the “ethical paradoxes” (125)
arising from the experience of what he called the “ethical irrationality of the world”; he commented on
the tendency for a believer in an ethic of ultimate ends – religious or secular – to turn into a chiliastic
prophet, willing to employ violence “one last time” in order to bring about a world without violence
(122). More generally, Weber’s theory of charisma as the “specifically revolutionary force” in history
also brought together religion, politics, and violence.
But the question of the religious dimensions of political conflict and violence is of course
posed in different terms for us today. Indeed the question is hard to escape these days. Political
scientists – who were long strikingly uninterested in religious phenomena – have "found religion” with
a vengeance in the last decade or so, while sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of religion, as
well as others in the field of religious studies, have become increasingly interested in political conflict
and violence. The reasons for this dual development are obvious : in general terms, the resurgence of
"public religion" – politically active and contentious forms of religious engagement – in a range of
settings in which religion had been prevailingly understood as a private matter; and, more specifically,
the shock of the Iranian revolution, the rise of politically active fundamentalist movements in all major
religious traditions, and the prominent implication of religion in a spate of civil wars and terrorist
campaigns. The question of the religious dimensions of political conflict and violence continues to
insist itself into relevance, brought into focus by the headlines with depressing regularity, including of
course the headlines from Orlando on Sunday.
So how should we understand the religious dimensions of political conflict and political
violence? There are two broad ways of thinking about this. One view – I’ll call this the particularizing
view – sees religiously grounded conflict and violence as sui generis, with a distinctive logic or causal
texture. This view takes religious claims seriously – perhaps too seriously. The alternative,
generalizing view is that what appears to be religiously inspired conflict and violence are best
subsumed under political conflict and violence in general, or under the abstract rubric of politicized
ethnicity. On this view, religious claims may mask other, more important causal factors; religion is at
best incidental to the logic or causal texture of the conflict or violence.
In my view, these stances need not be mutually exclusive. We can bring into analytical focus
both the distinctiveness of religiously informed political conflict and the ways in which many conflicts
involving religiously identified claimants are fundamentally similar in structure and dynamics to
conflicts involving other culturally or ethnically defined claimants.

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 Rogers Brubaker

I’ll begin with the generalizing stance. But I’ll devote most of my lecture to specifying some
distinctive ways in which religion is implicated in political conflict and violence. I do so not because I
think the particularizing approach is superior, but because it is less well developed. The generalizing
stance is clear and well defined; the particularizing stance is not. And the strongest and clearest
particularizing statements – those that propose the strongest forms of religious exceptionalism – are
simply untenable.1 The challenge is to develop a more nuanced account of the distinctive ways in
which religion can enter into political conflict and violence.
A potential objection to this analytical strategy is that “religion” and “religious” are hopelessly
inadequate as analytical categories. They are better understood as essentially contested categories of
practice. On this understanding, “religion” per se does not exist. What exists – and what may sustain,
enable, or justify political violence in certain contexts – are particular practices, discourses, and
structures that are understood by practitioners as "religious," though in some cases their religious
legitimacy may be vehemently denied by others claiming religious authority.
I am sympathetic to this position. A fuller and more rigorous treatment would have to forego
the use of “religion” or “religious” as categories of analysis, or at least be much more self-reflexive
about defining and using these categories. Yet given the exploratory nature of this discussion, I am
willing to work here with a relatively casual and imprecise notion of “religion,” as long as we keep in
mind that this designates not a unitary "thing" but a loosely related set of practices, discourses, and
structures for which religious sanction is claimed.

The generalizing stance: religion as a form of ethnicity

So let me begin with the generalizing stance that treats religion as simply one of a number of
functionally equivalent bases of identity and mobilization. This stance developed in the context of the
study of ethnicity. Two strands of work can be distinguished. The first goes back to the late Fredrik
Barth’s influential Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries a half century ago, Barth called for
redirecting attention from observable patterns of shared culture to the categorical distinctions that
organize and channel social interaction. The nature and dynamics of such boundaries could be studied
without regard to what Barth rather dismissively – and to his later regret2 – referred to as the “cultural
stuff,” that is, patterns of cultural similarity and difference. In Barth’s words, "The critical focus of
investigation… becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it
encloses”.
The second strand of work emerged from efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to make sense of the
surge of political mobilization on the basis of putatively "primordial" identities – language, race,
religion, caste, tribe, or indigeneity.3 Ethnicity was constituted as an object of study in this line of
work by abstracting from the specificities of language, religion, and other ascriptive markers such as
phenotype, region of origin, and customary mode of livelihood, and by reducing these to their
common denominator as markers of identity and difference and bases of solidarity.
Joseph Rothschild was one of the most sophisticated proponents of this line of work. (He was
also, of course, one of the most sophisticated analysts of East central European society and politics.)
According to Rothschild, it would be pointless to “separate out the notion of ethnic consciousness,
solidarity, and assertiveness from religious, linguistic, racial, and other so-called primordial foci of
consciousness, solidarity, and assertiveness.” If this were to be done, he continued, “it is difficult to

1
See Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu’s (2013: 196-7) cogent critique of sweeping arguments about the connection between
monotheism and violence and still more sweeping arguments about the intrinsic connections between religion per se and
violence.
2
Looking back on his 1969 piece a quarter century later, Barth suggested that “the issue of cultural content versus boundary,
as it was formulated, unintentionally served to mislead” (1994:17).
3
Many variants of modernization theory, it should be noted, were considerably more sophisticated than their critics allowed.
Far from being baffled by politicized ethnicity, sophisticated modernization theorists such as Karl Deutsch, Ernest
Gellner, and especially the young Clifford Geertz developed powerful if incomplete explanations of it. For a brief re-
appraisal, see Brubaker 2015a, Chapter 7.

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 Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

see what precisely would be… meant by the residual notion of ethnicity and ethnic groups.”
(Rothschild 1981:9). Whether political entrepreneurs mobilize along the lines of religion or language
or race, Rothschild went on, “is intrinsically irrelevant, since any and every one of them can be
sacralized into a symbolic focus of ethnic mobilization and politicization, and this process is more or
less the same whichever marker-criterion is selected" (ibid.: 98 emphasis added).
The Barthian study of ethnic boundaries and the political science study of politicized ethnicity
developed independently of one another, though they have subsequently converged. Barth and his
immediate followers were concerned with social organization, while the political scientists were
concerned with political mobilization and claims-making. But both lines of work treated ethnicity as a
culturally "empty" form. Both lines of work discounted culture: what mattered was not how
difference and identity were culturally construed, but how they were socially organized and politically
expressed.
One might trace the generalizing strategy back still further to Max Weber’s fragmentary but
powerful observations on social closure. For Weber, the recurrent process of closure, involving the
monopolization of material and ideal opportunities, is independent of the substantive cultural content
of insider or outsider groupings. As Weber put it, “some externally identifiable characteristic of a
subset of the (actual or potential) competitors – race, language, religion, geographic or social origin,
descent, place of residence, etc. – is taken by the others as the occasion for seeking to exclude them
from competing. What characteristic this is in individual cases is irrelevant: whatever most readily
presents itself is utilized.” 4
There is a certain irony here: Weber's monumental analyses of religion were particularizing,
not generalizing; they took seriously both the distinctive content of religious ideas and the distinctive
forms of religious organization. Yet Weber's notion of social closure as a culturally empty social form
had much in common with Barth’s emphasis on boundaries rather than cultural content; and Weber’s
writings on closure also served as an inspiration for more recent generalizing treatments of politicized
ethnicity such as that of Andreas Wimmer (2013), as well as for Charles Tilly’s (1998) generalizing
theory of categorical inequality.
Be that as it may, work in this generalizing tradition subsumes religion – along with race,
caste, kinship, region, language, indigeneity, and nationality – under the abstract, culturally empty
rubric of ethnicity.
Religion never comes into analytical focus in this tradition. This work does not start with
politicized religion, and then make a case for subsuming it under a broader conceptual or theoretical
rubric. Rather, it starts with ethnicity, which it defines broadly enough to embrace religion. Religion
is never at the center of analytical attention.
In the remainder of my lecture, I will start from politicized religion rather than from
politicized ethnicity; and I will consider some possibly distinctive ways in which religion can inform
and inflect political conflict. I consider first how religion can define the stakes of conflict, and
second how it can shape the modalities and mechanisms of conflict.

Stakes: the substantive regulation of public life

So let me start with the stakes of conflict. Conflicts involving religiously identified parties or
claimants need not involve religiously defined stakes. They may be conflicts over political power,
economic resources, symbolic recognition, cultural reproduction, or national self-determination. This
is what makes it possible and fruitful to subsume religion, for certain purposes, under the rubric of
politicized ethnicity. In Northern Ireland, for example, the parties to the conflict are often identified as
"Catholics" and "Protestants." But the stakes of the conflict are not religious. The same holds for the
conflict between "Muslims," Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats in the former Yugoslavia. To a
considerable extent, this holds also for the contemporary conflicts between “Shiites” and “Sunnis” in
Iraq and elsewhere, or between “Alawites” and “Sunnis” in Syria, though these contemporary cases
involve both ethnopolitical conflicts over “who owns the state” – as my former colleagues Andreas

4
Weber 1964 [1922] 260; cf. Weber 1978: 342. (As the translation is misleading, I have provided my own.)

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 Rogers Brubaker

Wimmer (1997) put it – and conflicts with distinctively religious stakes, pitting some religiously
militant Sunnis against other Sunnis as well as against Shiites and Alawites.
Yet in other contexts, one can’t assimilate religious to ethnopolitical conflict. Here it is
important to distinguish the boundary-defining or group-constituting aspect of religion from the
normative ordering power intrinsic to many forms of religious life. The boundary-defining aspect
allows religion to be treated, for certain purposes, as a form of (politicized) ethnicity. But the
normative ordering power of religion points to the distinctively religious stakes of certain political
conflicts.
Let me say a word about this normative ordering power and how it can generate distinctively
religious stakes of political conflicts. Religious understandings of right order exist at personal,
familial, communal, societal, and cosmic levels. In many traditions of serious or demanding
religiosity,5 forms of right order (or disorder) at these various levels are understood to be closely
interconnected. Common to "fundamentalisms" in many religious traditions, for example, is the
argument that disorder in the family (which may be attributed to feminism, unregulated sexuality,
divorce, or lack of respect for paternal or husbandly authority) contributes to disorder in wider
communal, societal, and political spheres (Friedland 2002; Hawley 1994). This explains the priority
accorded in these traditions to restoring right order in the sphere of family and sexuality.
Political claims arising from distinctively religious understandings of right order cannot be
subsumed under a paradigm of politicized ethnicity. This is not because of the intensity of the
conflict; ethnic and nationalist conflicts can be just as intense. It’s because conflict turns on the
question of how we should live, not just on questions of the questions of recognition, resources, and
opportunities for cultural reproduction that are central to politicized ethnicity. Ethnic identities may
be as deeply felt as religious identities; but they are normatively thin, with few implications for the
substantive regulation of public life.
Today, the most salient religiously driven political conflicts over the substantive regulation of
public life turn on claims for the implementation of shari‘a, which have been central to political
contestation throughout much of the Muslim world since the 1970s. What Robert Hefner has called
“Shari‘a politics” – that is, struggles over the “place and authority of the shari‘a in society” – assume
widely varying forms, as do understandings of what shari‘a means in contemporary contexts. But the
regulation of gender, sexuality, and family is almost always at stake in such conflicts, as are questions
of religious freedom and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims (Hefner 2011: 22).
Outside the Muslim world, religiously driven political conflicts likewise pivot on the
regulation of gender, sexuality, and the family (Friedland 2002). Conflicts over the substantive
regulation of public life in the United States, for example, arise from the Christian right’s efforts to
ban abortion, prohibit gay marriage, restrict access to contraception, restore school prayer, and require
the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in school. Similar conflicts arise from ultra-orthodox
Jewish claims in Israel that public buses not operate on Saturdays; that sex segregation be observed in
public spaces in their neighborhoods; that sex-segregated bus lines serve their communities; and that
sex segregation be preserved at the Western Wall.
Religion is of course not the only source of claims about the right ordering of public life. The
exhaustion of communism and fascism has reduced the salience of conflict driven by comprehensive
secular ideological commitments, but moral crusades, social movements, and other forms of political
contestation continue to be driven by secular as well as religiously informed moral commitments and
understandings of right order (Jasper 1997). Still, religion is a distinctively comprehensive and durable
source of politically relevant understandings of right order; and this potent normative ordering power
is what distinguishes political conflict with distinctively religious stakes from ethnopolitical and
ethnonational conflict between parties who are identified in religious terms.

5
I don't mean here particular religions, but particular forms of all major religious traditions.

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 Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

Modalities and mechanisms

I’ve suggested that some forms of political conflict involve distinctively religious stakes. For the
remainder of my lecture, I want to suggest some ways in which religiously informed political conflict
and violence – and from here on I'll be focusing on violent conflict – can be sustained by a distinctive
matrix of modalities and mechanisms.
I'll identify and comment briefly on six modalities and mechanisms. I'll itemize them now,
just to give you a roadmap of where I'll be going. The first is the social production of hyper-
committed selves. The second is the cognitive and affective construction of extreme otherhood and
urgent threat. The third is the mobilization of specifically religious rewards, sanctions, justifications,
and obligations. The fourth is the experience of profanation. The fifth is the translocal expandability
of conflict. And the last is the incentives generated by decentralized and hyper-competitive religious
fields. This enumeration is neither systematic nor exhaustive; it is exploratory and illustrative.
Moreover, these are not specific mechanisms; each designates a broad class of modalities,
mechanisms, and processes.
So let me begin with the first mechanism, which is what I call the social production of hyper-
committed selves. By this I mean selves constituted by radical and uncompromising forms of
commitment to a political, moral, or religious cause. The cause is understood as an unconditional and
absolute value, not as one good among others. This stance is what Max Weber called a
Gesinnungsethik, an "ethic of conviction" or "ethic of ultimate ends." The ethic of conviction is
characterized by indifference to the consequences of action, as illustrated by the maxim “the Christian
acts rightly and leaves the outcome to God” (Weber 1978b:82).6
Hyper-commitment need not entail violence; the cause to which one is committed may even
expressly repudiate violence. But there is an affinity between hyper-commitment and intransigence
and violence. The indifference to consequences can facilitate both the suffering and the inflicting of
violence. It does so by suspending ordinary forms of moral accounting, and everyday sensitivity to
risk and harm, in the name of an overriding concern with the one thing that matters. At the limit, this
may entail indifference to the possibility or even certainty of one’s own death, or indifference to the
deaths of others. The discounting of consequences is the source of the extreme moral ambivalence of
hypercommitment, which can enable both self-sacrificing forms of moral heroism and self-righteous
forms of morally sanctified violence.
There is of course nothing uniquely religious about radical and uncompromising commitment
to a cause. The paradigmatic ethic of conviction, for Weber, was religious; but in his great lecture
“Politics as a Vocation,” delivered in January 1919, during the turmoil of the November Revolution,
Weber was more concerned with secular forms, and specifically with revolutionary syndicalism
(1946:120-1). And all high-risk secular collective action requires commitment and the discounting of
risks.
Still, religion’s formidable socializing and world-defining powers make it a distinctively
robust and productive source of hyper-committed selves. The power to shape selves and subjectivities
and to define reality comes into focus most clearly in the case of conversion to a new and more
demanding and integral form of religious engagement.7
Conversion can involve a fundamental shift in identity, a rupture in the way of seeing and
experiencing the world, a relativization and devaluation of existing social ties, and a powerful
cognitive, emotional, moral, and bodily re-socialization. Obviously certain secular organizations and
movements also employ techniques of re-socialization in their efforts to produce highly committed

6
In the analytical idiom of Economy and Society, this involves a purely wertrational or “value-rational” orientation of action
on the basis of a "conscious belief in the unconditional, intrinsic value [Eigenwert] of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or
other form of behavior as such, independently of its consequences”, rather than the weighing of costs and benefits and
likely consequences of alternative lines of action characteristic of zweckrational or instrumentally rational action.
7
By "conversion" I do not mean conversion from one religious affiliation to another, but rather from one mode of religious
engagement to another, more demanding one (Snow and Machalek 1984).

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 Rogers Brubaker

members, and commitment can intensify and crystallize in the course of unfolding struggles. But
religion is a particularly potent matrix of the profound and durable reorganization of the self.8
Conversion, of course, does not always produce a hyper-committed self. Religious
commitment shades over into hyper-commitment only at the extreme endpoint of a continuum. But
the logic of what Weber called "heroic" or "virtuoso" religiosity – premised on an implicitly
comparative and competitive frame within which claims can be made for exceptional status on the
basis of exceptional religious performance – makes hyper-commitment an immanent and ever-
recurring possibility.9 And when hyper-commitment is generated, it can contribute to
uncompromising, high-risk, and sometimes violent forms of political action.
The second mechanism is the construction of extreme otherhood and urgent threat. The
construction of otherhood is of course a general socio-cultural process, not a distinctively religious
one. And while religion is implicated in the construction of otherhood, it is also involved in
transcending divisions and constructing universalistic forms of solidarity (Stamatov 2013). Here again
one sees what R. Scott Appleby (2000) calls the “ambivalence of the sacred.”
Yet religion affords a distinctively potent, flexible, authoritative, renewable, transposable, and
mutually reinforcing set of resources – at once symbolic, discursive, ritual, and organizational – for
constructing extreme forms of otherhood that can facilitate and legitimize violence.
As authoritative systems of classification, many religious traditions contain specifically
religious categories of extreme otherhood: heretic, apostate, infidel, and so on.10 They specify
procedures (such as excommunication or, in the Muslim world, takfir) for placing persons in these
categories.11 And they justify and authorize violence, in certain contexts, against members of these
categories. Of course all religious traditions are internally contradictory, and justifications of violence
stand in tension with other provisions. But categories of religiously legitimated extreme otherhood,
and justifications for violence against such others, remain available as a potent discursive resource.
Religious traditions also contain elaborate and distinctive resources for constructing urgent
threats and mobilizing and legitimizing action against them (Appleby 2000:82). Idioms of
sacralization and profanation, of cosmological good and evil, of divinely sanctioned mission or holy
war, and of imminent catastrophe or millenarian transformation can be enlisted to raise the stakes
(Juergensmeyer 2000; Wessinger 2000). Judgments pronounced by religious authorities can enjoin
action – including violent action – to respond to the threat.
More generally, religious understandings of transcendent reality offer powerful leverage for
radically devaluing the existing social and political order, and for legitimizing programs of radical
reconstruction, which may be understood as requiring violence. Michael Walzer (1965), for example,
famously characterized Puritanism as the template for all forms of social revolution, while Shmuel
Eisenstadt (2005) traced the origin of what he called totalistic or Jacobin forms of radical politics to
the transposition of the transcendental religious visions generated by axial age civilizations from
restricted and marginal spaces into the center of politics. More generally still, the charismatic or
prophetic moment in religion – like charismatic authority in general – is intrinsically disruptive and
even "revolutionary," as Weber argued. (And it is no accident that both Walzer and Eisenstadt were
deeply influenced by Weber.)

8
The recruitment of suicide attackers need not require a durable reorganization of self; a temporary reorganization of the self
may suffice.
9
The notion of “virtuoso” religiosity was central to Weber’s sociology of religion: see for example 1978a:538-541.
10
In addition, political otherhood can be intensified by being given a religious gloss: “Crusaders”; “Great Satan”; “axis of
evil,” etc.
11
On the intensely contested category of takfir – a procedure by which one Muslim declares another (nominal) Muslim to be
an unbeliever or infidel, and thereby (in certain circumstances) a legitimate target of violence – see Hafez 2011. On the
Jewish legal category of rodef, referring to a Jew who endangers the life of other Jews, and may therefore legitimately be
killed in certain circumstances – a category implicated in the murder of Prime Minister Rabin by Yigal Amir in 1995 –
see Appleby 2000:81-85 and Pedahzur and Perliger 2009: Chapter 5.

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 Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

Of course, religious understandings of transcendent reality can also be mobilized against

challenges to the existing social and political order; they can be used to legitimize the violent
repression of challenges and challengers.
The third mechanism is the mobilization of rewards, sanctions, justifications, obligations, and
what might be called deep, ultimate, or constitutive meanings. This too is of course a generic social
process. Yet religious entrepreneurs and organizations – or political entrepreneurs who speak the
language of religion – may be able to mobilize an additional layer of rewards, sanctions, justifications,
obligations, and ultimate meanings. This is suggested most clearly by the spectacular surge since 2000
in religiously legitimated or rationalized suicide attacks. As political scientists have noted,
specifically religious rewards and justifications are neither necessary for the recruitment of suicide
attackers (as shown by the antireligious Tamil Tigers’ extensive use of the tactic), nor sufficient (as
shown by the fact that suicide attacks are overwhelmingly concentrated in a small number of theaters
of conflict).
Yet religious justifications can transform such attacks from religiously prohibited “suicide”
into religiously sanctioned “martyrdom,” rewarded in the afterlife, where the sins of the martyr, who
has “die[d] for the sake of God,” will be washed away. Martyrdom, to be sure, has become a secular
category, and in some contexts (notably Israel, the occupied territories, and Lebanon), strong social
support for suicide bombers has led to their celebration as secular heroes. But while suicide bombing
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been intensively studied, that conflict accounts for only 4% of
post-2000 suicide attacks. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where more than 80% of post-2000
attacks have occurred, specifically religious rewards for "martyrdom" would appear to count for more
in recruitment, especially in Pakistan and post-2011 Iraq, where suicide bombing does not involve the
struggle against foreign occupation that political scientists have emphasized (Moghadam 2008).12
Political scientists have tended to discount such religious rewards and justifications (Gill
2011; Berman and Laitin 2008; Pape 2005). For most political scientists, religion provides an ex post
rationalization and justification of conduct that can be explained in non-religious terms. If our aim is
to explain organizational strategies, there is much to be said for such skepticism. But if our aim is to
understand individuals' willingness to volunteer for suicide missions, dismissal of religion is less
persuasive. The rationality and intelligibility of suicide bombing for organizations are one thing; its
rationality and intelligibility for individuals who volunteer to sacrifice themselves are quite another.
The religious legitimations that may serve as ex post rationalizations and justifications for
organizations may operate as ex ante motivations for individuals – or at least as ex ante forms of
sense-making that give suicide missions a larger meaning and purpose. What is opportunistically
employed, or even cynically manipulated, by organizations may be deeply and sincerely felt by
individual recruits.
The fourth mechanism is the experience of profanation. If one takes the categories sacred and
profane in a broad Durkheimian sense, then sacred objects are simply those that are set apart and that
must be treated with special respect. And profanation is simply an experienced or claimed violation of
the required respect. Such "profanation" in the broadest sense – in the form of perceived disrespect
towards special objects, places, or activities – can generate a violent response in many contexts that
are not "substantively" religious.

12
According to the CPOST database at the University of Chicago, nearly 3,500 suicide attacks, accounting for more than
35,000 deaths, occurred between 2000 and 2013, compared with 147 between 1982 and 1999. Of the post-2000 attacks,
the overwhelming majority have occurred in conflicts defined in significant part by politicized Islam (the only significant
exception is Sri Lanka, which accounts for less than 2% of the attacks, and less than 2% of the deaths). Iraq accounts for
45% of the post-2000 attacks, Afghanistan 25%, and Pakistan 12%. See http://cpostdata.uchicago.edu/search_new.php.
Of attacks with known perpetrators, the large majority between 2001 and 2007 were carried out by Salafi-Jihadist groups
(Moghadam 2008: 70). Of those with unknown perpetrators, three quarters were carried out in Iraq, where, according to
Moghadam (2008:64), “the vast majority of organizations conducting suicide bombings are known to be Salafi jihadist.”
Pape’s (2005) analysis, discounting the role of religion in suicide bombing, was based on data collected before the spike
of the mid-2000s.

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 Rogers Brubaker

But I'm interested here in profanation in a narrower, more substantively religious sense.
Violence can be provoked by deliberate attempts to desecrate the central symbols of another religion,
such as Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ burning of a Qur’an in March 2011.13 But a religious profanation
can also be experienced without having been intended as such. This need not lead to violence: outrage
at a perceived profanation may be channeled into peaceful protest or institutional politics. But it may
take extra-institutional and violent forms, as in the threats to Salman Rushdie’s life and the bombing
of bookstores after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the riots in response to the cartoons
published by a Danish newspaper in 2005,14 and the Charlie Hebdo massacre of last year.
The fifth mechanism concerns the translocal expandability of violent religious conflict. As a
powerful form of imagined community that cuts across state boundaries, religion can serve as a vector
of conflict expansion. The most spectacular recent instance of this has involved the participation of
substantial numbers of Muslim foreign fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and Syria. Five things
are worth underscoring about this mobilization.15 The first is its global rather than merely regional
nature.16 The second is the bottom-up mobilization of foreign fighters. This distinguishes their
participation from state-led transborder interventions – though of course there is also massive state-led
transborder intervention in Syria. The third is the salience of ideal rather than material interests. At
least in the earlier stages of the Syrian conflict, most foreign fighters were not paid – at least not very
much – and they could not and cannot expect opportunities for looting that have motivated other forms
of transborder military adventurism. The fourth is the discursive framing of transborder fighting as an
individual religious duty by certain influential clerics, invoking the classical distinction in Islamic
jurisprudence between matters that are obligatory for each Muslim individually and those that are
obligatory for the community of believers as a whole. This is of course the position of only a small
minority of Muslim clerics, but it has been an important resource for legitimating the participation of
those who are receptive to the pan-Islamist discourse that highlights the urgent existential threat faced
by the global Muslim ummah. The last aspect of contemporary foreign fighter involvement is the
willingness to fight rather than simply contribute financially at a safe distance. This distinguishes
foreign fighters from ethnic diaspora financial support for distant nationalist movements and
insurgencies, such as the Tamil Tigers, PKK, and IRA.
In short, the contemporary mobilization of foreign fighters draws on a deeply (though of
course unevenly) felt sense of personal religious obligation to defend the global imagined community
of the ummah against a vividly felt existential threat.
The sixth and final mechanism I want to discuss concerns the structure of religious fields.
Decentralized and hyper-competitive religious fields can generate structural incentives for
radicalization that can foster intransigent and sometimes violent religious and political action. This
was true of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion in 16th and 17th century Europe. A similar
dynamic is at work today in the fragmented and hyper-competitive field of contemporary Sunni Islam.
The religious field of Sunni Islam has always been decentralized; but fragmentation and struggles over
authority have intensified in the last half-century as mass education and new media have undermined
the authority of the traditionally educated ulama (legal scholars) and created space for large numbers
of new interpreters to claim the right to speak in the name of Islam (Eickelman and Piscatori
1996:131-132; Anderson 2003; Krämer and Schmidtke 2006; Krämer 2006).

13
Jones succeeded in provoking a violent response in Afghanistan (though his more intensively publicized plans to burn large
numbers of Qur’ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2010 and 2013 remained unrealized).
14
Occurring many months later, the latter were of course organized, not spontaneous. But the sense of injury and outrage
over such profanation (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 16; Mahmood 2009) – nursed and cultivated by political
entrepreneurs, to be sure, but not created by them – can serve as a potent if volatile political resource.
15
My account here relies primarily on Hegghammer 2010.
16
An estimated 20,000 foreign fighters were involved in Syria at the beginning of 2015, a fifth of them residents or citizens
of Western European countries. (http://icsr.info/2015/01/foreign-fighter-total-syriairaq-now-exceeds-20000-surpasses-
afghanistan-conflict-1980s/ ).

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 Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

In the theoretical language of Pierre Bourdieu, perspective, fields generate incentives for
different kinds of position-taking for those in different positions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:94-
115; Bourdieu 1993). Those who possess little of the most consecrated forms of field-specific capital
– in the field of Sunni Islam, this means those without the deep jurisprudential knowledge of the ulama
– seek to valorize new forms of capital. They are structurally disposed toward heteronomy, that is,
towards opening the religious field to forms of capital and principles of valuation derived from other
fields. These include political or even military capital on the one hand, and the capital of notoriety,
fame, or media exposure on the other. They are also structurally disposed toward strategies of
outbidding, in which they claim to be more truly Islamic than others, and toward strategies of
provocation, intended to gain visibility and recognition.
This mechanism is not a specifically religious one. New entrants to all fields, not just
religious ones, are disposed toward heteronomy, outbidding, and provocation. Precisely because they
lack consecrated forms of field-specific capital, they seek to valorize new forms of capital. But in the
fragmented, hyper-competitive field of Sunni Islam, with no structures in place for the authoritative
regulation or moderation of internal conflict and competition, these general structural tendencies are
greatly accentuated.17
Structural incentives for heteronomy, provocation, and outbidding in the religious field can
align with structural incentives for heteronomy in the political field. 18 This is the case in parts of the
Middle East today, where regimes have been defined by a twofold exclusion, at once religious (on the
part of repressively secularist regimes) and ethnoreligious (on the part of substantively ethnocratic
regimes). Throw into the mix what can be represented as the neo-imperial involvement of "Christian"
powers, and you get strong incentives to “religionize” political competition and conflict. There are
few and ineffective institutional arrangements to protect politics from religion, just as there are few
and ineffective institutional arrangements to protect religion from politics, and specifically from
entanglement in struggles for control over the means of violence.19
So let me conclude. None of the modalities and mechanisms I have discussed is unique to
religion. Yet religion provides a distinctively rich and interlocking matrix of such modalities and
mechanisms. Strong forms of religious exceptionalism are easily rejected; but the strongly
generalizing counter-claim that there is nothing distinctive about religiously informed political conflict
and violence is equally unsatisfactory. Religion can define reality, constitute communities, nurture

17
Kalyvas (2000) and Casanova (2005) have underscored, in differing contexts, the paradoxical political significance of the
contrast between the fragmentation of authority in Sunni Islam and the centralization of authority in Catholicism.
Kalyvas (2000) analyzes the strategic dilemma facing illiberal or non-liberal religious political movements that are poised
to win sweeping electoral mandates in emerging democracies. He compares a Catholic movement in late 19th century
Belgium and an Islamist movement in late 20th century Algeria, each divided between moderates and radicals. In order to
forestall a preemptive move by secular incumbents to exclude them by force from the political game, such movements
must credibly commit to accepting the secular, liberal democratic order; they must credibly signal that they will not seek
to implement their maximalist program. Moderate Catholics in the Belgian the movement were able to do this, with the
decisive help of the Belgian Catholic Church, which – with support from the Pope – decisively intervened against
radicals in the movement. The fragmented, decentralized religious field of Sunni Islam, however, prevented moderate
Muslims in the Algerian movement from doing the same. Democratization, ironically, was “facilitated by a hierarchical
and autocratic religious structure and hindered by a decentralized and democratic religious structure" (393).
Casanova notes a similar paradox: the Catholic aggiornamento – the striking and rapid shift towards accepting liberalism,
democracy, and modernity associated with Vatican II – was decisively facilitated by the hierarchical and centralized
structure of the Church. The pluralization and democratization of the religious sphere in Sunni Islam, on the other hand,
have at best ambiguous implications for political liberalism, pluralism, and democracy (100-101).
18
This is consistent with the suggestion of Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu (2013:204) that religious nationalism involves the
“synchronization of ‘principles of vision and di-vision’ across the religious and nonreligious fields, such that the religious
and national principles became more salient and more closely aligned…[as a result of] strategic alliances between elite
groupings across the relevant fields.” For a field-theoretic analysis of religion and politics in Saudi Arabia, see Lacroix
2011.
19
On the variable institutionalization of the "twin tolerations" that protect the autonomy of religion vis-à-vis politics and the
autonomy of politics vis-à-vis religion, see Stepan 2001, chapter 11.

9
 Rogers Brubaker

powerful emotions, generate commitment, resocialize and reorganize the self, radically devalue the
existing order, impose obligations, offer rewards and sanctions, furnish justifications, and intensify
threats and dangers. It links cognitive definitions of ultimate reality with structures of feeling and
obligation. In so doing it can authorize, legitimate, enable, and even require violent action in the face
of urgent threats, profanations of sacred symbols, and extreme otherhood.
That religion can do so does not of course mean that it will do so. And the very same
mechanisms that can enable religiously informed political conflict to turn violent can also enable
powerful forms of nonviolent solidaristic or humanitarian social action (Stamatov 2013). The social
production of hyper-committed selves can nurture moral heroism; the construction of urgent threats
can radically delegitimize social evils such as exploitation, slavery, or even war itself; transnational
religion can serve as a vector of expansion of humanitarian campaigns such as the anti-slavery
movement in the nineteenth century; and fragmented and hypercompetitive religious fields may
generate stances (such as that of the Quakers) that categorically reject violence.
There is, then, no intrinsic connection between religion and political violence. But religion
does provide a potent assemblage of moral, ideological, and organizational resources that can, in
certain contexts, inform, legitimate, or sustain violent conflict, just as they can inform, legitimate, or
sustain the most admirable forms of moral and political engagement. The analytical challenge, for
students of conflict and violence, is to specify the conditions and contexts in which particular religious
practices, discourses, fields, organizations, and structures of sentiment can contribute to the
production, reproduction, and transformation of political conflict and violence. Taking up that
challenge is beyond the scope of this lecture. Doing so would require a different mode of analysis, at
once historical, comparative, and contextual – in short, a Weberian mode of analysis – geared toward
specifying when, where, how, and why the modalities, mechanisms, and dynamics outlined here are
activated in ways that play into political conflict and violence.
My aim in this paper has been a more modest one: to contribute to the development of a more
nuanced and qualified particularizing account of the distinctive ways in which religion can enter into
political conflict and violence. Such a qualified particularizing account, I have suggested, should be
understood as a complement to, not as a substitute for, a generalizing account. We should be attuned
to the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious
understandings of right order that are expressed in claims for the substantive regulation of public life
in accordance with religious principles; and we should also be sensitive to the distinctiveness of
religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that can – in certain contexts –
contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes of the conflict are not distinctively
religious. Yet at the same time, we should recognize the ways in which many putatively religious
conflicts – or conflicts in which the parties are identified in religious terms – are fundamentally similar
in structure and dynamics to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic
recognition, or cultural reproduction.

10
 Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence

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