Mara Redlich Revkin & Elisabeth Jean Wood
In “Forum: How Religious Are ‘Religious’ Conflicts?” International Studies Review 25: 19–22 (2023)
Abstract
Scholars of armed organizations with ideologies that claim to be based on religion have increasingly documented micro-level variation in the attitudes and conduct of individual members of the organization who sometimes but do not always comply with the organization’s ideology, i.e., its official interpretation of religion (Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood 2014; Leader Maynard 2019). It is now well-established that ideology—as expressed through an organization’s official policies and doctrines—is a causal factor in the violence wielded by members of armed organizations, although scholars disagree about its importance relative to other factors including economic incentives (Weinstein 2006), changes in the relative military power of competing organizations leading to “side-switching” (Christia 2012), and territorial control (Kalyvas 2006). However, there is more to be learned about how and why individual members of an organization vary in their level of commitment to the ideology, whether religious or secular, and the role that commitment plays in the divergence between violence prescribed as policy and that observed on the ground. In this essay, we briefly review our findings and discuss fruitful avenues for further research.
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