Religion, Politics and Violence

While a general scholarly consensus held it to have been on the wane in the 1960s and 1970s, religion today has clearly reemerged as a crucial socio-political force and is a key component of some of the most hotly contested political struggles around the world. Much of the now burgeoning body of work on the relationship between religion and political conflict, however, suffers from two major shortcomings: It lacks integration across the disciplines and it is too narrowly focused on one single aspect of the relationship between religion and political conflict, namely the role of religion as the root cause of violent political conflict. This project proposes a corrective to this by offering to stretch our understandings of religion and conflict each as individual concepts, and then by augmenting the range within which the relationships between the two are conceived. The project will combine a social science based approach of international relations and security studies with a humanistic perspective rooted in cultural history and the study of cultures broadly conceived to understand the changing relationship between sacred and profane as they shape contemporary political, social, cultural, and military conflict—and the interface between them.