This week we’re exploring the relationship between religion and violence. What are the circumstances in which organisations motivated by religious ideas resort to violent methods? And how can such violence best be prevented?
The relationship between religion and violence is a subject of enduring debate. Religion is often portrayed as a force for peace and compassion. Yet history is littered with instances where religious actors have been involved in conflict. What conditions make religious organizations more likely to engage in violence? And what lessons can policymakers learn to prevent it?
In this episode, Prof Alan Renwick dives into these questions with Dr. Manuel Vogt, Associate Professor of International Security at UCL. Drawing on new research, he explores how both global forces and local factors shape the relationship between religion and violence.
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Alan Renwick: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're exploring the relationship between religion and violence. What are the circumstances in which organizations motivated by religious ideas resort to violent methods, and how can such violence best be prevented?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
The relationship between religion and violence is a subject of enduring debate. Religion is often portrayed as a force for peace and compassion, yet history is littered with instances where religious actors have been involved in conflict. So, what can we say about how these tensions work out in practice? What are the conditions in which religious organizations are more likely to use violence? And are there lessons for policy makers who want to prevent violence? A new article [00:01:00] explores exactly these questions, and it finds that a mix of grand transnational forces and local factors operating countries is involved. One of the co-authors of that article is Dr. Manuel Vogt, Associate Professor of International Security here in the UCL Department of Political Science. I'm delighted that Manuel joins me now. Manuel, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. Would it be helpful, maybe just to clarify what sorts of activity should listeners have in mind when we're focusing on that in this discussion?
Manuel Vogt: Thanks so much, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Religion-based violence could be observed in various ways and with different types of actors. We could look at individuals, we could look at states. In this paper, we're looking at non-state organizations that may use violence, or not, and that might have religious agendas. What we do is look at the use of violence by non-state organizations [00:02:00] against state governments, and we look at the relationship between these organizations, political agendas, which might contain religious ideas or not. We also look at their likelihoods of engaging in violence against state governments.
Alan Renwick: When we’re thinking about real violence as being related in some way to religion, we're thinking about the organization that is behind the violence and the degree to which its agenda is religion related.
Manuel Vogt: Exactly right. It's always very difficult to identify the causal role of religion in the violence that is perpetrated. Ultimately, we look at a correlation between the ideas or agendas that organizations embrace and the behaviour they engage in.
When I use the term organisations, I'm referring to a rather broad set of entities, [00:03:00] these are non-state entities that are outside the state apparatus. They have a name, they recruit members, and they make some political claim. Adopting this broad definition allows us to look at very different organizations that can make very different political demands or embrace very different political ideas. Furthermore, they can decide whether to engage in violence or not.
Now, when we think of examples of such political organizations that have embraced religious ideas and then subsequently engaged in political violence. We could perhaps think of militant insurgent organizations such as Hamas in Israel/Palestine, the Turkistan Islamic Party in China, some Caucasian organizations in Russia, such as the Caucasian Confederation in Russia that have used violence both against the state and civilians but also organisations that were engaged in broader armed conflict you could think of [00:04:00] Serbian or Croatian organizations participating in the Bosnian Civil War.
Alan Renwick: That's an interesting example, because that's partly a kind of national divide that happens to be defined in religious terms. So, there's a kind of national identity that is caught up with religion there. It’s not necessarily religious ideas that are motivating violence. It may be that other aspects of identity are just intertwined with religion in some cases.
Manuel Vogt: Yeah, that is very interesting, right? Because in this paper, we are indeed looking at a specific subset of political organizations. We're looking at ethno-political organizations. These are political organizations that represent specific ethnic groups within a country. That can be the Castilians and Catalans in Spain, the German versus Italian versus French speakers in Switzerland, African Americans or Caucasians or whites in the US, can be Shiites and Sunni in Iraq, right? These are ethnic groups and we're looking [00:05:00] at political organizations that represent or claim to represent such ethnic groups within a given country. We do that because if you think of the kind of examples people have in mind when they think of religion-based violence, many of these examples, such as the example of Hamas that I mentioned before, really fall into that category, right?
Alan Renwick: Yeah.
Manuel Vogt: Even beyond that, if there is something specific about religion and violence, as some scholars have claimed, and we're challenging this notion in our paper, right? But some scholars have claimed there's a special relationship between religion and violence.
If that's the case, we should find that same pattern among this important subset of ethno-political organizations, right? So yes, the examples I mentioned are very much in that kind of a subset of organizations.
Alan Renwick: And it's interesting what you're saying there about the existing literature.
Do you want to say a bit more [00:06:00] about what's in the existing literature that you're seeking to respond to in the paper that we're talking about?
Manuel Vogt: So that's a very important point here, Alan, right? It's not only the scholarly literature, but there is also this idea that religion and violence have become a very prominent one in the public mind. The public debate, not least because of it being voiced by certain intellectuals and politicians, but then there are also parts of the scholarly literature, perhaps going back to Samuel Huntington's famous idea of the clash of civilizations. There are parts of social science literature that make this kind of general argument about a special relationship between religion and violence.
What does that mean? There's something about religion that makes it particularly prone to causing violence among human beings, right? And people have argued that religion is uniquely capable of removing human beings’ moral constraints? Or perhaps [00:07:00] inspiring martyrdom in individuals, fighting and dying in the name of God, some people have argued that it makes compromises inherently more difficult. Of course, the example is always Jerusalem. How do you divide Jerusalem, right?
So, there is a part in the scholarly literature that has quite prominently advanced this argument of having this unique force to cause violence. We're challenging this, we're taking issue with this idea on kind of two grounds, right? On the one hand, we say that these perspectives or these arguments often lack a historical perspective. I mentioned Huntington's influential thesis, Clash of Civilizations, before, but then the other watershed events that kind of shaped people's thinking was 9/11, of course, right?
Then there was this whole terrorism literature, that came out of that, is also connected to the religion violence idea. But if you go back, for example, even [00:08:00] focusing on the terrorism literature, if you go back and look at earlier contributions to this literature, it was always very clear that, terrorism, which is a particular form of political violence has been related to different kind of ideological forces throughout history, you think of anti-colonial movements, some of which are engaged in violence, some of which even engage in violence against civilians, right? Leftist organizations did the same, and religion is just a new, ideological force that can become related to violence in a particular historical period. The idea that there would be something unique about religion and violence needs to be tested systematically across different periods in time, and not just looking at the most recent events.
On the second point, one of the things we were very unhappy about is that when many of these studies talk about religion, [00:09:00] they remove moral constraints in individuals or inspiring martyrdom. Instead, they just focus on religious organizations and do not compare them to other organizations. You could think of nationalist organizations. It seems obvious that a lot of nationalist organizations or ideas have inspired similar idea of martyrdom, the idea of fighting and dying in the name of the nation. Furthermore, this could also include removing moral constraints from individuals. We need to compare organizations with religious agendas to other organizations with other types of agendas. And we need to do that across different historical periods. That’s exactly what existing studies, we think, did not do sufficiently. And that's the contribution of our paper, we have unique data that allow us to precisely do that.
Alan Renwick: Fascinating. And just before we get to the data, to dig a little bit further into the theoretical framework, you've mentioned the idea of these different periods in historical [00:10:00] time where there's different ideas out there and you refer to transnational ideology, as these kind of forces of ideas during different periods tends to shape the degree to which different kinds of organization might be willing to use violence. Do you want to develop that a little bit further? And then there's some other ideas that you have in the theoretical framework for the paper as well.
Manuel Vogt: Yeah. So, in the paper we use the term zeitgeist which comes from my native language. And it means it refers to this prevailing or dominant ideological spirit, right?
Alan Renwick: Spirit of the time.
Manuel Vogt: Exactly. The literal translation would be a ghost.
Then you could think of a ghost that is haunting a particular historical period. So, this is a prevailing ideological or moral climate that affects individuals’ thinking and behaviour in each period.
Now, in this paper, we're mostly concerned with the [00:11:00] transnational zeitgeist concerning political conflict. In what kind of ideas are political conflicts cast? In a period especially following the Russian Revolution and then in Latin America, for example, following the Cuban Revolution.
In this kind of Cold War world, where two different economic systems confront each other, a lot of political conflicts in different countries across the world are more likely to be cast in this kind of confrontation between economic systems and in class terms, right? Our argument in this paper is that in the late 20th century, a new kind of zeitgeist developed that was much more centred on religion and the idea of religion or religious morality juxtaposed [00:12:00] against the moral fallacies and the moral illegitimacy of secular slash liberal governments that dominated across the post-colonial world, right?
Alan Renwick: So why does that happen? Why should we expect to see that kind of shift?
Manuel Vogt: Yeah, that's not necessarily something that we explore in the paper, right? But as a social scientist, I would think that such new zeitgeists are relevant to conflict and develop as more people become unhappy with the status quo and existing ideas are perhaps too close to power to serve as a new compass.
So, then people need a new anti-status quo ideology that allows them to embed their grievances, explain why they are unhappy and tell them how their [00:13:00] grievances can be addressed, right?
Alan Renwick: You have an increasingly secularizing status quo, secularizing establishment during the 20th century, and then people are reacting to that in the late 20th century, is that right?
Manuel Vogt: I would think so, and in many countries, especially the post-colonial world, you would expect citizens to be somewhat discontented with the progress made after decolonization. You could also think of the non-colonized world, citizens becoming increasingly uncomfortable with secular forms of government and attributing failures of government to a lack of moral guidelines in those who rule, right?
You’re unhappy with your circumstances. You're unhappy with the system, what it does for you, and you're trying to pinpoint the fallacies of the existing system towards the end of the 20th century, these fallacies all across the world became more [00:14:00] seen in secular versus religious terms and the failures of governments being seen as the illegitimacy of secular government. How can you counter that? You embrace religious morality and advocate for a radical transformation of the current system into a more religiously proper government. That develops over time, both the number of unhappy people and the degree of unhappiness, at some point such a new zeitgeist reaches a critical mass with enough followers who believe that this is the way government needs to be transformed. As the defenders of the status quo, they resist attempts for reform, and this desire to transform the system leads to a conviction that this thing can only be changed if there is a radical [00:15:00] transformation. The system needs to be revoked. A new system needs to be introduced that is based on new moral principles.
Alan Renwick: We've got the part of the theoretical framework that you offer in opposition to the idea that religion and violence are just inherently related. So, you're arguing that in fact, or you're hypothesizing that in fact that relationship varies over time in response to the transnational zeitgeist, as you call it.
But then you also argue in a kind of further layer of pointing out the contingency of the relationship between religion and violence. You argue that local factors, country specific factors are also going to make a difference here, which I guess relates to what you've just been saying about the factors that lead to religion based violence in the first place, suggesting that the degree to which those factors play out in [00:16:00] different countries shapes the degree of violence that we should expect to see.
Manuel Vogt: Yeah, two points here are crucial, right? This kind of trend that developed in the late 20th century came to a culmination, with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The Iranian Revolution fulfilled a similar role for this new transnational zeitgeist that propagated the role of religion in advancing an alternative political system.
I mentioned before parts of the scholarly literature made this general argument about religion and violence, but other scholars noted that certain context conditions shape the relationship between religion and violence. Now what our paper does is integrate different existing arguments into a more comprehensive picture, right? People have mentioned that the Iranian revolution brought about a change, people also looked at certain [00:17:00] local conditions that shaped the relationship between religion and violence. Some noted that religion becomes particularly relevant in self-determination conflicts. Others talked about political exclusion. Scholars have noted these contextual factors. What we do in this paper is integrate them into one comprehensive theoretical argument.
At first, we're noting something culminates in the 1979 Iranian revolution. We would expect the relationship between religion and violence to change after 1979 compared to before. But, as in every other of these historical periods, not all organizations pertaining to a particular ideological strand will engage in violence.
Why do some organizations do, and others do not? Even within the same historical period of transnational zeitgeist? That is where these local conditions come into play. We are looking at three [00:18:00] different contextual factors. One is the relationship between the country and the Iranian revolution. The avowedly open Islamic character of the Iranian revolution, you would expect the revolution to have a more pronounced effect in countries closer to Iran. That's what we find. We also find that countries where political corruption is ripe, and countries where religious organizations are repressed are more likely to engage in violence against the state post 1979 than before.
Alan Renwick: So we've set out the theory, and you've hinted that you see a change from pre-1979 to post-1979 and that you see variation in which religious organisations in which countries are involved in these kinds of activities, we should say a bit about how you get those findings.
You mentioned earlier that you use this big data set to test this. Do you want to describe that data set and what analysis you [00:19:00] did?
Manuel Vogt: So, this is probably one of the main advantages that our paper offers compared to previous literature. The data set we use, which I collected over various years, covers many countries over a large period. More specifically, it's 40 countries. For the time between 1946, so immediately after the Second World War, until 2013.
So, there is a very broad geographic and temporal coverage that we can exploit in our study, which means we have the means to test both the historical and national level conditions that we theorize. The other advantage is that our data set includes a very broad variety of organizations, not only violent organizations. That's a common mistake that people just look at the most violent, most prominent cases of violence, right? And then they see the agenda of these [00:20:00] organizations and then they come to wrong assumptions, right? When we test the relationship between religion and violence, we need to look at organizations that engage in violence, but also at organizations that do not engage in violence. We need to look at organizations that make religious claims or have a religious agenda, and organizations that do not have a religious agenda. We always need, so to speak, a control group, right? The counterfactual. And that's what our data offers, right? So, we have about 700 organizations in 40 different countries over about 70 years. Our data set provides yearly coding of these organisations’ political demands towards the government and their violent and nonviolent actions. Then we can use statistical methods to probe the relationship between religion and violence by comparing [00:21:00] organizations that make religious claims to those that do not.
And we can control for other demands that organizations might advance. One of our findings is, for example, the organizations that make self-determination claims are more likely to engage in violence, so our data set provides this opportunity to compare religious demands to others.
Alan Renwick: Do you want to just sum up what the overall findings from the paper are?
Manuel Vogt: The key findings are organizations that make religious demands or have a religious agenda are more likely to use violence post 79 compared to before.
If we look at the whole historical period, there is no systematic relationship between religion and violence, which emphasizes this kind of historical dependency. This new transnational zeitgeist that came to the fore with the Iranian Revolution influenced the relationship between [00:22:00] religion and violence.
Alan Renwick: Before that period, religious organizations are less likely to engage in violence than non-religious organizations, I think. Whereas after the switch over point, religious organizations become more likely to engage in violence.
Manuel Vogt: If you look at the percentages of religious organizations that use violence, it spikes just shortly after the 1979 threshold and in the whole period before organizations that have no religious demands are more likely to engage in violence against the states.
Alan Renwick: I should let you get onto that.
Manuel Vogt: Exactly. But then this transnational zeitgeist is not uniform across context. And what we find here is really that in contexts where religious organizations are repressed, you can think of Egypt as an example. The regime embraces religion, but the regime goes against independent religious organizations that could [00:23:00] incubate opposition. So, they go against independent religious organizations. They repress such organizations. That's exactly the kind of context where these religious organizations are more likely to engage in violence in this new historical period. And we also find that in countries with high levels of political corruption, this idea of the illegitimacy of secular government finds more fertile grounds, right? Precisely where citizens know that their governments do engage in corruption to a high degree. These citizens are more likely to embrace a religious alternative to the secular regime, and organizations are more likely to use violence, to try to overcome such corrupt regimes. This points to the importance of local contextual factors that determine whether the transnational zeitgeist resonates [00:24:00] with actors on the grounds.
Alan Renwick: Finally, then, what are the implications for policy makers? Presumably, policy makers who want to counter religious violence. What should they do?
Manuel Vogt: Yeah. One thing that I haven't mentioned so far is, why does this kind of new transnational zeitgeist that embraces religion as an alternative to secular government, lead to violence? It brings these actors who advocate these ideas on a coalition course with the power holders, with the defenders of the status quo. And ultimately this is likely to produce violence at some point, it also has a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic here in this new transnational zeitgeist, governments are likely to see these actors as having a religious agenda as particularly dangerous. So, what do governments do? Oftentimes, they engage in pre-emptive repression against these organizations. And that is a [00:25:00] recipe almost for violence.
Alan Renwick: So, you find in the paper that higher violence takes place where there is greater repression. You're positing that repression leads to violence. A reader might be worried that it goes the other way around and that violence prompts repression. But you're clear that is not what's happening.
Manuel Vogt: Yes. So that's something that we tested, this issue of reverse causality. We have various robustness tests. Focusing on countries or organizations that never used violence before, various statistical techniques are used because that's an important concern. But we also find that repression against religious organizations does increase after 1979 compared to before.
That suggests one reason why we see this change post versus pre 1979 is that governments became scared of organizations with religious agendas, even organizations that never used [00:26:00] violence before. And so, they engaged in pre-emptive repression out of fear that these were the troublemakers.
Then this kind of pre-emptive repression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with these organizations engaging in violence. That brings us back to your question of the policy implications. One key takeaway is not to single out organizations and political actors based on their political agenda and subject them to particularly harsh treatment, right? Just because certain organizations advocate certain political agendas, state government should not single these out for persecution, sanctions, or repression more generally, because that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing more on substantive questions that these organizations have in mind is a more promising approach. [00:27:00] That's certainly one key policy lesson.
Manuel Vogt: Then, of course, when it comes to corruption, we know that corruption has several undesirable social consequences in general, right? Now, our study suggests that it's often in these contexts where citizens and organizations come to the point where they feel like violence is the response. Anti-corruption initiatives have positive consequences in general, but they also might have this additional benefit of proving to citizens that existing governments do have legitimacy and can provide to ordinary people.
Alan Renwick: It's interesting because it sounds like what you're saying is that to avoid religious violence, it's better to have an open society and inclusive political discourse and political structure and avoid corruption.
We might think these are the things that you would expect to lead [00:28:00] to a healthier political system in general, and not just a reduced religious violence. But I guess in a way, that's your point. There's nothing special about religion here. Religious violence is a manifestation of other problems in society that just happens during this historical epoch to be associated with religion. The fundamental drivers are elsewhere.
Manuel Vogt: Yes, exactly. And that's precisely what we would argue in this paper, right? That every historical period has its kind of ideological alternative to the status quo. And in the current historical period, although that might be changing now. Religion and religious ideologies have provided the material for people to imagine an alternative form of government, an alternative society, and the more problematic the [00:29:00] situation is on the ground, the more likely people then are to embrace this alternative vision of the world, and the more likely they are to engage in violence to make this vision happen.
Alan Renwick: Thank you so much, Manuel. This has been a great conversation on some of the most important dynamics in world politics, international politics over recent decades, and bringing real and important insight and policy implications as well that policymakers can get their teeth into.
So thank you for such an interesting conversation. We have been discussing the article, When Do Religious Organizations Resort to Violence? How Local Conditions Shape the Effects of Transnational Ideology, by Constantino Piscera and Manuel Vogt, published in the latest issue of the journal Ethnopolitics.
Next week we'll be exploring another very topical issue, namely the role of AI and data science [00:30:00] in delivering public services. To make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe.
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