War on Sacred Grounds

Cornell University Press

Ithaca & London

Für Meine Omi

Contents

Preface to the 2025 Edition

Prologue: A Terrifying and Fascinating Mystery

1. On Sacred Grounds

Part One: Understanding Conflicts over Sacred Spaces

2. What Is Sacred Space?

3. The Indivisibility Problem

4. Conflict over Sacred Places

5. Mismanaging Conflicts over Sacred Places

Part Two: Managing Conflicts over Sacred Spaces

6. The Foundations and Limits of Religious Authority

7. Successful Conflict Management: Jerusalem, 1967

8. Successful Conflict Management: Mecca, 1979

9. Lessons from Conflicts over Sacred Places

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface to the 2025 Edition

Why do cemeteries have walls, when those outside do not want to get in, and those inside do not want to leave? I recently found ample opportunity to contemplate this puzzle while trapped overnight in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. The maps lied. The cemetery is not a good pedestrian shortcut from Brentwood to Westwood, especially not at sunset. It is surrounded on all sides by eight-foot-tall cast-iron fences and its only gate is shuttered and locked at dusk. I searched the boundaries of the fourteen-acre compound for an hour, as darkness fell around me, and could find no way out. Eventually, an alarmed guard equipped with a flashlight spotted me among the tombstones and escorted me off the premises, chiding me as he went. Why does a cemetery need fences, locks, and guards in the first place? The guard did not care. My curiosity struck him as an insufficient excuse for trespassing.

The answer has little to do with grave robbers (or zombies) and much to do with religion. Cemeteries, like all holy places, are valuable. They are unlike other land. Humans employ complex rituals to turn secular land into consecrated land. When necessary, they employ similarly complex ceremonies to deconsecrate cemeteries and turn them back into secular land. Once sanctified, these places perform important religious and social functions that no other place can perform. They provide access to the world beyond. Our dead are safe there, treated with reverence and care, and may pass from this world to the next. We can visit them there and converse with them. We can remember them there, pray for their well-being, and ask them for protection. The land right next to the cemetery, though made of the same soil, cannot fulfill that function. We talk, dress, and act differently when we enter holy places.

Fences, walls, and gates demarcate where one kind of space ends and the other begins. Their primary function is symbolic, to signal that a society has set this place aside for a unique purpose and that, consequently, one’s behavior must change upon entering. It matters to groups who controls this holy ground, who may enter and who may not, and who monitors behavior within. For example, some Jews who believe themselves descended from ancient priestly family lines refrain from entering cemeteries altogether. Jews accused of the gravest crime against their religion, such as apostates or suicides, may not be buried within the boundaries of the community cemetery. They are interred beyond the fence, a term synonymous with beyond the pale. The cemetery fences symbolize our social borders, much in the way that the structure of a church encompasses and symbolizes the body of the Church community that worships within. The cemetery is designed to contain all members of our society. Its borders, our borders, require clear demarcation and constant vigilance. Only a fool would treat a cemetery as if it were a pretty park for meandering across at sundown.

Because our holy places represent us and our religion, we are prepared to defend them, by force if necessary. This book explores why so many holy places around the world are targets of conflict and how these conflicts can be managed. In brief, I argue that the tools that societies use to resolve most conflicts over land cannot be employed in conflicts over holy land. The clearly defined and demarcated boundaries leave no room for flexibility when it comes to defining the disputed space. We all know where a cemetery starts and ends and what it would mean to possess all of it. The high value that societies assign to their holy spaces gets in the way of side deals and exchanges. We will not accept any other land as a substitute for this cemetery. The elements of sacred places are interdependent, making it difficult to sever off chunks of land. The cemetery chapel, the columbarium, the ceremonial plaza, and the graves themselves all provide crucial functions in relation to one another. Those three factors—crisp boundaries, high value, interdependent components—render a space indivisible. Most territory is divisible because borders, price, and components are always negotiable. Holy places are the exception. Because they are indivisible, competing parties must resort to force.

The religious logic of sacred space produces a violent political outcome. In that sense, this book is very much a product of September 2001. Though I began my research into conflict over holy places two years before 9/11, when the scholarly interest in religion and conflict was still a niche pursuit, the book achieved its current form in a period of growing interest in the causes of religiously motivated violence. Prior to 2001, a handful of scholars had explored the disruptive influence of religion on politics, inspired by wars, insurgencies, and terrorism in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Israel, Algeria, and Yugoslavia in the 1990s. They provided a variety of insights, often superficial and contradictory, into religion as a source of disorder. The terror attacks of September 11 focused attention onto narrower questions: How does religion provoke conflict? What sort of motivation does religion provide to extremist non-state actors?

The scholarship on religion and conflict has matured significantly. It now asks a richer variety of equally important questions that do not end where conflict begins, including questions about the conduct and resolution of wars, and about the religious motivations of moderate combatants, including state actors. Most importantly, to my mind, scholars have expanded their interest beyond religion as an idea (often treated as an extreme and irrational idea) and onto religion as a set of institutions, practices, and symbols. I tried to contribute to that next wave in Religion in the Military Worldwide and Religion on the Battlefield, published eight and ten years after War on Sacred Grounds, respectively. The events of 9/11 and resulting academic focus do much to explain why War on Sacred Grounds is so deeply concerned with the causes of conflict and its roots in religious belief.

Were I to rewrite the book now, I would recant little and moderate much. The urge to soften the argument stems from the insight, lost on many scholars (myself included) twenty years ago, that religion is not merely a set of absolute ideas held in the collective minds of believers. It is also, and more importantly, a range of practices inspired by those ideas. Not all cemeteries are surrounded by fences, though all are demarcated in some way. Not all holy places are equally indivisible or eagerly fought over, though most are. Religious principles are important but require interpretation. Religious ideas are trumped by the decisions of religious communities to implement some aspects more than others, flexibly adjust outdated ideas, introduce new ideas, and ignore other religious notions altogether. In sum, War on Sacred Grounds describes religiously motivated behavior as an abstract ideal, which is not how humans treat their religion. On second reading, I find it to be a little too neat.

Consider my confident claim that sacred spaces have clear and crisp boundaries. Logically speaking, that has to be an overstatement. All physical borders have width. They are not one-dimensional lines on a map. The thresholds, alleys, stairs, passages, or ramparts around a holy place (often the site of heated conflict): Are they sacred too or are they part of the secular realm? In practice, holy places have messy boundaries. A simple example: At the Fushimi Inari shrine, just south of Kyoto, as at all Shinto shrines, a large torii (symbolic gate) marks the boundary of the temple complex. The path to the gate is crowded with small souvenir and food stalls, supposedly up to but not beyond the gate. But when I first visited Fushimi Inari, I noticed one food stall jutting beyond the gate into the compound. Nobody seemed to mind. Pilgrims knew and valued the religious principles that governed the site. But they were also hungry.

The occasional ambiguity of sacred boundaries can cause real problems. In 2007, Israel began construction of a wooden bridge to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to replace an older bridge that had collapsed in 2004. The construction caused violent protests and threats of a Palestinian uprising.¹ Attempts to replace that temporary bridge in 2014 were halted due to international protests and the wooden bridge remains in place.² Similarly, in 2017, Israel placed metal detectors outside the Temple Mount after Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli policemen on the mount. The placement led to a string of deadly terror attacks in Israel and violent riots that wounded dozens of Palestinian protestors before the Israeli government relented and removed the metal detectors.³ Neither the bridge nor the metal detectors were placed inside the sacred space yet in both cases worshipers and political activists chose to interpret their placement as infringing on the sacred site.

In sum, the basic premises of this book hold and are anchored in sound religious logic. Holy places are indivisible, and this explains the challenge of compromising and the high likelihood of conflict. The practice, however, may diverge from the letter of the law when political, economic, or social interests clash with religious principles.

Fans and Critics

War on Sacred Grounds elicited a positive response from two very different scholarly communities. One group consisted of scholars of religion who, like this volume, sought to contribute to the post-2001 wave in the study of religion and conflict. Prior work on the topic had assumed a narrow political science vantage point that portrayed religion as an irrational force that interfered with rational policy. In contrast, the scholars in this second wave sought to anchor their analysis in an appreciation of religious thought and scholarship, especially comparative religion and sociology of religion. In the case of conflict, this meant tracing violent behavior to a systematic analysis of religious ideas, principles, practices, texts, symbols, and hierarchies.

Primary among this group were, of course, scholars of conflicts over holy places. Some scholarship on particular conflict sites had preceded and inspired War on Sacred Grounds but few scholars had offered comparisons or generalizable lessons. The study of conflicts over sacred space has now become a cottage industry within the broader religion and war universe.⁴ The focus on sacred space was soon followed by analyses of parallel themes, including conflict and religious time, religious leadership, religious rhetoric, myth, and symbolism. Students of religion and war found inspiration in the methods and ideas proposed here as they sought to explain religious mobilization in war, the timing and goals of religiously motivated conflict, the nature and characteristics of that conflict, and the role of religion in conflict resolution.⁵ More broadly yet, scholars of religion and international relations theory borrowed from the theoretical material in this book to propose ways in which existing political science theories (particularly rationalism and constructivism) could take account of religion.⁶

This summarized some of the impact that this volume has had on the study of religion. A second community that found interest in War on Sacred Grounds consisted of scholars interested in the concept of indivisibility. Indivisibility had long since featured as an important theoretical argument in the bargaining literature on war, but its practical relevance had been easy to dismiss. Sacred places offered a pragmatic example and led analysts to think of the many ways in which intangible and highly salient issues affect conflict. These scholars now incorporated the idea of indivisibility more heavily into their studies of conflict initiation, escalation, and resolution.⁷ Foremost among these were scholars of territorial disputes who recognized that even conflicts with very material foundations, ostensibly easy to resolve, could carry symbolic meaning that impeded resolution.⁸ Conflicts over sacred space thus functioned as a special and extreme case of conflicts over secular space. The relationship between indivisibility and conflict also piqued the interest of terrorism and insurgency scholars,⁹ students of nationalism,¹⁰ those interested in cultural heritage and war,¹¹ and others.

War on Sacred Grounds also received its fair share of criticisms, some more fundamental than others. The slighter disagreements took the form of empirical evidence to counter my claim that sacred places could not be shared.¹² The examples offered, however, were interesting but minor. Some consisted of folk shrines (usually natural, such as caves, springs, or peaks) at which small groups of informal worshippers had, so far, managed to gather without incident. Conflict had not erupted yet because these shrines attract few visitors, see no involvement by organized religious movements, and are not yet regulated. There are no formal entrances, structures, or rituals that need regulating. As these shrines undergo formalization and begin to attract larger number of pilgrims, and with them the religious rules and actors that monitor behavior, conflict becomes inevitable.

A second group of empirical critics proposed instances in which governments successfully fostered coexistence at sacred sites. These accounts often sidestep the religious dimension of the conflicts altogether, treating sacred places as standard territorial disputes and viewing the logic of indivisibility as a distraction from the true dynamic at play, namely the logic of power politics. Because they ignore the religious motivations that propel these conflicts, and the agency of the religious communities involved, these analyses tend to portray the secular state either as a hero, who saves the pious from their own violent fanaticism, or as a villain, who fails to take an obvious course of action that would lead to peace or, worse, manipulates sacred sites and benefits from conflict.¹³

In the chapters that follow, I explore some of the cases in which governments have experimented with sharing arrangements at holy sites. I accompany these attempts with a warning: Divisions of sacred space by fiat might temporarily prevent violence but they resolve nothing. They coerce conflicted parties into sharing arrangements that last only as long as the ruling party is willing and able to impose its will. At no point do these arrangements satisfy all the religious groups involved, though they may satisfy one of those groups at the expense of the other.¹⁴ This is not tolerance, it is coercion. It forces the conflict under the surface by threat of sanction. When conflict reemerges, as it must, it does so with a vengeance.¹⁵

More poignant criticisms have targeted the theoretical underpinnings of War on Sacred Grounds, primarily its claim that authentic, and often ancient, religious beliefs drive these disputes. The claim that conflicts are in large part a function of contemporary political bargains is best articulated by Stacie Goddard.¹⁶ She argues that the intractability of disputes is a social construct, a function of the rhetoric that elites employ as they build coalitions. The language that leaders use, in an effort to outbid and delegitimize opponents vying for the same holy sites, transforms their political networks and traps them in zero-sum bargaining situations.

This critique is more sophisticated than the political logic pursued by some empirical critics. It attacks the primordialism of War on Sacred Grounds by arguing that, traditional and embedded as religious beliefs may be, their political implications are the product of modern secular processes. This is an important point that is not in full tension with the claims in this book but that shifts the weight of its argument away from religious actors and interests and onto political actors and interests. Because it sought to contribute to a new literature on religion, War on Sacred Grounds may well have given insufficient credence to the influence of secular elites.

At the same time, it is important not to overemphasize this top-down view of conflict creation and attribute too much power to elite rhetoric. After all, if sacred spaces were not an extremely valuable commodity in the first place, why would leaders legitimate their claims based on these constrained religious justifications rather than rely on secular justifications that can provide bargaining flexibility? The indivisibility of Ayodhya, Jerusalem, and Mecca is not a recent invention. It predates current sectarian conflicts by centuries, perhaps millennia. Is that indivisibility as predetermined as this book proposes or could wiser choices by political leaders have mitigated these disputes? I will leave that to readers to decide. This question about elite agency matters a great deal since conflicts over holy places are a continuing source of sectarian tension and intercommunal violence.

Contemporary Relevance

Recent cases illustrate the continued salience of the phenomena explored in this book. Consider this selection of incidents from the year 2023 alone. In Ukraine, the Russian military assault continued to target churches. Over 120 religious sites have been damaged in the war so far.¹⁷ In Daegu, South Korea, Christian protests over the construction of a mosque by Muslim students provoked mass rallies. Outraged residents posted Islamophobic pamphlets and placed severed pig heads at the entrance to the makeshift mosque.¹⁸ In Newark, California, Sikh separatist defaced a Hindu shrine, the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, with graffiti calling for an independent Sikh homeland.¹⁹ In Hyderabad, Pakistan, Muslim mobs burned nineteen churches and attacked the homes of local Christians in response to rumors that a local Christian had desecrated a Qur’an. Similar reports of blasphemy had led to violent attacks against Christians in Pakistan in 1997, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2015.²⁰

Because sacred places come to represent their religious communities, they are frequently targeted in sectarian attacks. The most moderate attacks take the form of vandalism or partial destruction whereas the most intense involve harm to worshippers inside the shrine. In 2023, the most violent of these attacks targeted coreligionists, dominated by Jihadist attacks on the holy sites of Shi’as and other Muslim minorities. Members of Pakistan’s Ahmadi minority experienced nearly three dozen attacks on their holy places in 2023 alone, including the desecration of graves and destruction of minarets. Pakistani law prohibits the members of this minority Muslim sect from referring to their places of worship as mosques or designing them with traditional mosque features, such as domes or minarets.²¹ In Pakistan, a jihadist attack on a mosque in January 2023 killed eighty-four people.²² A second attack on the same mosque in September killed at least fifty-nine individuals who had assembled to celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.²³ In Iran, jihadists attacked the Shah Cheragh mausoleum, a Shia shrine in the Iranian city of Shiraz, in August 2023. A prior attack on the same shrine in October 2022 had killed thirteen worshippers.²⁴ In Afghanistan, an Islamic State attack on a mosque in Faizabad killed nineteen worshippers and wounded thirty-nine others. The assault targeted Taliban officials who had gathered at the mosque for a memorial service to a slain deputy governor.²⁵ Later that year, the Islamic State (ISIS) assaulted a Shi’a mosque in northern Afghanistan killing seven and wounding fifteen.²⁶ The reach of ISIS extended all the way to Bangor, Maine, where a court found nineteen-year-old Xavier Pelky guilty of plotting an attack on behalf of the jihadist group. Pelkey and his co-conspirators had gathered firearms, ammunition, and explosives for a mass shooting at a Shi’a mosque in the Chicago area.²⁷

While some groups targeted their opponents via their sacred sites, others engaged in disputes over the ownership of contested sites. Four disputes in India in 2023 illustrate this trend. In Anuchal Pradesh, India, Sikh leaders accused Buddhists of converting a historical Sikh shrine into a Buddhist shrine. Sikhs claim that the Neh Pema Shelpu Drupkhang is a gurdwara linked to Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism. The local Buddhists Memba community reveres the cave as a pilgrimage site, marking the location where the medieval Guru Padmasambhava meditated.²⁸ Elsewhere in India, Sikh sects competed with one another over sacred space. Two militant factions laid conflicting claim to the Gurdwara Sri Akal Bunga in Sultanpur Lodhi, culminating in a gun battle at the shrine that killed a police guard.²⁹ Meanwhile, in Varanasi, a civil court gave Hindu petitioners permission to initiate worship in the cellar of the Gvanyapi Mosque. Archaeological excavations had identified temple pillars and Hindu sculptures under the foundations of the mosque.³⁰ In parallel, Hindu nationalists have filed suit to claim another mosque in Mathura arguing that it too was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple.³¹

All this in 2023 alone. Other conflicts over holy places, hundreds of years in the making, continue unabated. Since the first edition of War on Sacred Grounds appeared in print, the Temple Mount conflict, documented in chapters 7 and 8, provoked violent clashes in 2009, 2017, 2021, 2022, and 2023.³² The Ayodhya crisis, analyzed in chapter 5, reached a dramatic turning point in January 2024 when Indian prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple dedicated to Ram on the ruins of the demolished Babri mosque. Twenty-thousand security personnel stood guard as Modi prostrated himself before an idol of Ram. He later said: Our Lord Ram has arrived after centuries of wait… . Jan. 22, 2024, is not merely a date but marks the dawn of a new era. Much of India commemorated the event as a public holiday. The seventy-acre temple complex is expected to receive one hundred thousand worshippers a day.³³

Meanwhile, in Turkey, the five-hundred-year-old Muslim-Christian dispute over the Hagia Sofia exemplifies the dangers of dispute resolution by fiat. Once the largest church in Christendom, the Hagia Sophia became a mosque during the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In 1934, Kemal Atatürk secularized the mosque and turned it into a museum, thus forcing a neutral religious status on the disputed site. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decreed in 2019 that the shrine would become a working mosque once again and the government that had been responsible for maintaining the peace suddenly abandoned its neutral stance. Turkish authorities began barring tourists from entering the shrine during prayer times, required appropriate Islamic attire for all visitors, and covered Christian relics and imagery in the building.³⁴ The move met with vociferous protest, particularly from neighboring Christian Orthodox countries. Russian Orthodox patriarch Kirill declared that a threat against Hagia Sophia is a threat to all of Christian civilization, meaning (a threat to) our spirituality and history.³⁵ This marks the fourth Byzantine church that was converted into a mosque under Erdoğan’s rule.³⁶

In January 2024, the US prepared to launch its first lunar craft to the moon in five decades. The Navajo Nation objected that the mission would desecrate the moon’s sanctity. In addition to its scientific mission, Peregrine Mission One also carried the human remains of sixty-six persons for burial on the moon. Customers had paid for the privilege of having small capsules containing their DNA or cremated remains carried into space for lunar internment.³⁷ The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology, explained Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren. The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations. The CEO of one of the private companies providing the lunar burials pushed back: We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon… . Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence.³⁸

It seems, then, that war on sacred grounds is not a passing fad. As for the spacecraft, it failed to reach the moon due to a technical fault. After six days in orbit, the lunar lander and its contents burned up over the Pacific Ocean.

Notes

1. J’lem Engineer to Order Mughrabi Bridge Closed, Jerusalem Post , December 8, 2011, https://www.jpost.com/national-news/jlem-engineer-to-order-mughrabi-bridge-closed .

2. Herb Keinon, PMO Orders Dismantling of Unauthorized Foot Bridge to Temple Mount’s Mughrabi Gate, Jerusalem Post , September 3, 2014.

3. Isabel Kershner, Deadly Violence Erupts in Standoff over Mosque in Jerusalem, The New York Times , July 21, 2017.

4. See for example Benjamin Isakhan, The Islamic State Attacks on Shia Holy Sites and the ‘Shrine Protection Narrative’: Threats to Sacred Space as a Mobilization Frame," Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 4 (2020): 724–48; Richard Sosis, Why Sacred Lands Are Not Indivisible: The Cognitive Foundations of Sacralising Land, Journal of Terrorism Research 2, no. 1 (2011): 17–44; Gurharpal Singh, The Control of Sacred Spaces: Sikh Shrines in Pakistan from the Partition to the Kartarpur Corridor, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 16, no. 3 (2020): 209–26; Yitzhak Reiter, Contested Holy Places in Israel–Palestine: Sharing and Conflict Resolution (London: Routledge, 2017); Daniel H. Olsen, The Symbolism of Sacred Space, in Tourism, Pilgrimage and Intercultural Dialogue: Interpreting Sacred Stories , ed. Dolors Vidal-Casellas, Silvia Aulet, and Neus Crous-Costa (Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2019), 29–42; Yitzhak Reiter, Feminists in the Temple of Orthodoxy: The Struggle of the Women of the Wall to Change the Status Quo, Shofar 34, no. 2 (2016): 79–107; Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez, Governing the Sacred: Political Toleration in Five Contested Sacred Sites (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Shiri Landman, Barriers to Peace: Protected Values in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in Barriers to Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict , ed. Yaacov Bar-Siman Tov (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2010), 135–77; Deborah F. Shmueli, Noga Collins-Kreiner, and Michal Ben Gal, Conflict over Sacred Space: The Case of Nazareth, Cities 41, Part A (2014): 132–40; Lihi Ben Shitrit, Women and the Holy City: The Struggle over Jerusalem’s Sacred Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Lihi Ben Shitrit, Gender and the (In)Divisibility of Contested Sacred Places: The Case of Women for the Temple, Politics and Religion 10, no. 4 (2017): 812–39; Marshall J. Breger, Yitzhak Reiter, and Leonard Hammer, eds., Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013); Lior Lehrs, Jerusalem on the Negotiating Table: Analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks on Jerusalem (1993–2015), Israel Studies 21, no. 3 (2016): 179–205; Sriya Iyer, Anand Shrivastava, and Rohit Ticku, Holy Wars?: Temple Desecrations in Medieval India (January 19, 2017), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2907505 ; Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey, eds., Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Robert M. Hayden with Tugba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Aykan Erdemir Devika Rangachari, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Enrique López-Hurtado, and Milica Bakić-Hayden, Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016); Wendy Pullan, Maximilian Sternberg, Lefkos Kyriacou, Craig Larkin, and Michael Dumper, The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).

5. See, for example, Michael C. Horowitz, Long Time Going: Religion and the Duration of Crusading, International Security 34, no. 2 (2009): 162–93; Isak Svensson, Fighting with Faith, Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 6 (2007): 930–49; Ron E. Hassner, Blasphemy and Violence, International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2011): 23–45; Matthias Basedau, Mora Deitch, and Ariel Zellman. Rebels with a Cause: Does Ideology Make Armed Conflicts Longer and Bloodier? Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 10 (2022): 1826–53; Isak Svensson, One God, Many Wars: Religious Dimensions of Armed Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa, Civil Wars 15, no. 4 (2013): 411–30; David C. Kang, Why Was There No Religious War in Premodern East Asia? European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 4 (2014): 965–86; Michael Freedman, Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel, Journal of Conflict Resolution 63, no. 10 (2019): 2262–88; Matthew Isaacs, Sacred Violence or Strategic Faith? Disentangling the Relationship between Religion and Violence in Armed Conflict, Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 2 (2016): 211–25; Matthias Basedau, Birte Pfeiffer, and Johannes Vüllers, Bad Religion?: Religion, Collective Action, and the Onset of Armed Conflict in Developing Countries, Journal of Conflict Resolution 60, no. 2 (2016): 226–55; Isak Svensson and Desirée Nilsson, Disputes over the Divine: Introducing the Religion and Armed Conflict (RELAC) Data, 1975 to 2015, Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 5 (2018): 1127–48; Ron E. Hassner, Religion on the Battlefield, in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), 155–66; John F. McCauley, The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Chad M. Bauman, Anti-Christian Violence in India (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); Mora Deitch, Is Religion a Barrier to Peace?: Religious Influence on Violent Intrastate Conflict Termination, Terrorism and Political Violence 34, no. 7 (2022): 1454–70; Naomi Johnstone and Isak Svensson, Belligerents and Believers: Exploring Faith-based Mediation in Internal Armed Conflicts, Politics, Religion & Ideology 14, no. 4 (2013): 557–79; Abigail S. Post, Words Matter: The Effect of Moral Language on International Bargaining, International Security 48, no. 1 (2023): 125–65; Matthias Basedau and Carlo Koos, When Do Religious Leaders Support Faith-based Violence?: Evidence from a Survey Poll in South Sudan, Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2015): 760–72; Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

6. See, for example, Jonathan Fox, An Introduction to Religion and Politics: Theory and Practice (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018); Nukhet Sandal and Jonathan Fox, Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013);