Violence against Religion in Civil Wars

• In Event: Religion and Political Violence

Abstract

Religious groups and their property are often targets of violence during civil wars, even when these conflicts are not primarily about religion. Religious groups can play a critical role in constraining violence against civilians, providing humanitarian aid, and negotiating peace settlements, so this type of violence may be distinctively pernicious. Yet violence against religion has so far received far less scholarly attention than religiously motivated violence. In this paper, I explore how and when combatants target religion in non-religious conflicts through an in-depth analysis of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000). Relying on an original dataset based on thousands of testimonies collected by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I show that insurgents, paramilitaries, and state forces all engaged in various forms of anti-religious violence, and that the spatial distribution of violence depended on the extent of territorial contestation, the marginality of local populations, and the strategies adopted by religious authorities.

Author

• Luis Felipe Mantilla, University of South Florida