Getting Religion Right in Civil Wars

• Published date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002721997895
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Monica Duffy Toft
• Subject Matter: Data Set Feature

Data Set Feature

Getting Religion Right in

Civil Wars

Monica Duffy Toft

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Abstract

Surveying civil war in the world today is striking in terms of how often religious

cleavages and grievances have become central to armed conflict. How are the causes

and outcomes of religious civil wars different than other civil wars, if at all? Is Islam

implicated for the contemporary surge in religious civil war? The first section

reviews the literature and addresses the importance of religion for civil war. I then

introduce a dataset and describe key trends in religious civil war in the third section,

while in the fourth section I present tests of whether Muslim or Arab Muslim

societies in particular are more prone to religious strife. The paper concludes with a

discussion of the implications of the main findings.

Keywords

civil wars, religion, ethnicity, dataset

Surveying contemporary civil wars, it is striking how often religious cleavages and

grievances become central to armed conflict. The new religious civil war (RCW)

dataset employed here documents 28 civil wars ongoing as of the end of 2014,

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with

twenty conflicts, making up 71 percent of the sample, featuring religion as a central

or peripheral factor. By contrast, only eight ongoing civil wars in 2014 had no

religious dimension, of which only five were classic ethnic wars involving identity

politics but not involving a significant religious dimension As a result, religious civil

wars today pose some of the biggest strategic challenges to the global order, from the

1

Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Medford, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Monica Duffy Toft, Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 160 Packard Avenue,

Medford, MA 02155, USA; Global Scholar, Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway.

Email: monica.toft@tufts.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2021, Vol. 65(9) 1607-1634

ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002721997895

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intractable conflicts over Kashmir and Palestine, to the Sunni insurgencies in Afgha-

nistan and Iraq, to the sectarian Syrian bloodbath that has claimed an estimated 300

to 400,000 lives since 2011.

How are the causes and outcomes of religious civil wars different than other civil

wars, if at all? Is Islam implicated for the contemporary surge in religious civil war?

Does the rise of religious civil war indicate a “clash of civilizations?” The next five

sections take up these questions. The first section contains a review of the literature,

noting that although there have been some advances made, there is much work to be

done. I then introduce the RCW dataset and describe several key trends in religious

civil war in the third section, while in the fourth I present tests of whether Muslim

societies in general or Arab Muslim societies in particular are more prone to reli-

gious civil war. The final section summarizes the major findings and relates the

implications of those findings.

The Literature

The literature on religion and civil war is not much more developed than the liter-

ature on ethnic civil war when van Evera (1994) codified hypotheses on nationalism

and war or Sambanis (2001) asked whether ethnic and non-ethnic civil wars have the

same causes. It has also been much less studied than modern religious terrorism.

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Just over a decade ago Toft (2007) made an early contribution to the study of religion

and civil war by theorizing how bidding dynamics among religious elites contribute

to the rise of religious civil war. That article also proposed an explanation for why

Islam in particular appeared to account for so many contemporary religious civil

wars. Since then, both the phenomenon of religious civil wars and the literature on

religion and civil war has grown quickly. However, heated debate on the most basic

questions persists. This article investigates several major claims often made about

religion and civil war. This empirical “brush-clearing” exercise seeks to move the

literature forward both theoretically and empirically, and to point to a more pro-

gressive research paradigm in this area.

Literature on the topic of religion and conflict can be methodologically broken

down into two broad categories. The relevance of religion can be measured as an

issue or as an identity (Pearce 2005; Isaacs 2016). Toft (2007) defines a religious

civil war “as a war in which religious belief or practice is either a central or per-

ipheral issue in the conflict,” therefore falling in the issue-based methodological

group (p. 97).

Further studies have analyzed the r elationship between religion and v iolence

looking at both issue and identity definitions of religion. Generally, identity was

not found to have a significant effect on the onset or characteristics of civil war,

while issue-based definitions of religious conflict are found to have a significant

relationship. Isak Svensson (2007) found that civil conflict where at least one side

made overt religious claims—an issue-based definition—were less likely to be

resolved by negotiated settlements. However, when looking at identity-based

1608 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(9)