Abstract
Keywords
Situating the issue: Religion, violence, and contemporary turbulence
The persistence of violence in human societies—from localized communal conflicts to genocides and transnational terrorism, from domestic abuses shaped by moral codes to structural patterns embedded in law, culture, or memory—remains one of the most formidable challenges of the contemporary world. Religion, in this landscape, constitutes both a key prism through which violence is sometimes narrated, legitimized, or contested, and a space from which actors, symbols, ritual forms, narratives, institutions, and theological grammars can mobilize resources either for escalation or for the transformation and exit from violence.
Public debate often oscillates between sensationalist oppositions—“religion causes violence” versus “religion promotes peace”—and academic research has sometimes followed similar binaries. Yet the apparent simplicity of those claims conceals a deep conceptual and empirical complexity. Religious traditions, communities, clerical institutions, systems of belief, theological discourses, and symbolic repertoires have historically intersected with violence not as monolithic causal forces, but as multidimensional formations embedded in political power, social structures, identity configurations, moral hierarchies, forms of belonging, memory systems, legal regimes, and cosmological imaginations.
It is precisely the ambition of this special issue—Religions and Acts of Violence—to confront these complexities. In strategic alignment with the intellectual orientation of the call for papers issued under the auspices of the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, this issue seeks to deepen theoretical, methodological, and empirical inquiry into the manifold articulations between religions and acts of violence, while simultaneously foregrounding the processes through which religious configurations contribute to the exit from violence, reconciliation, repair, justice, and transformation.
At the heart of the call lies a double imperative: • To compare and analytically examine how various religious formations become implicated in violent phenomena—whether as legitimizing forces, symbolic matrices, identity grammars, institutional actors, or ritual frameworks; and • To investigate how these same religious resources, imaginaries, institutions, or moral vocabularies may contribute to responses to violence—to its limitation, redirection, sublimation, or overcoming.
By grounding this special issue in the intersection of violence and religion(s), we are invited to explore a terrain both ancient and urgently contemporary: from sacrificial mechanisms in archaic societies to confessional wars, from persecutions framed through theological justification to revolutionary upheavals, from sectarian massacres to religiously coded political conflicts, from identity movements invoking sacred texts to transitional justice processes relying on ritual and faith-based notions of forgiveness, reconciliation, or remembrance.
If much has been written on religion and violence, what persists is a need for a more integrated, comparative, interdisciplinary, and reflexive grammar—one capable of articulating the symbolic, structural, discursive, institutional, ritual, historical, and political dimensions of both religion and violence. This issue seeks to respond to that need.
Conceptual clarifications: Defining “religion,” “violence,” and the “sacred”
Any serious inquiry into the relationship between religions and acts of violence must begin by dismantling conceptual certainties. “Religion” and “violence” are neither neutral nor universal categories. Their definitions have been historically constructed, politically charged, culturally situated, and academically contested.
Religion as social formation, discursive regime, and power configuration
Classical sociological theorists such as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber both emphasized the constitutive relationship between religion and social order—Durkheim describing religious practice as a collective framework that constitutes the sacred and delineates moral community; Weber identifying religious ethics as vectors shaping social organization, economic patterns, and forms of authority (Durkheim, 1915; Weber, 1978). In more recent decades, Talal Asad has insisted that religion must be understood not as an abstract, transcendent domain, but as a historically embedded discursive formation shaped by power, law, institutions, bodies, and disciplinary practices (Asad, 1993).
From these perspectives, religion is never merely a set of private beliefs nor an inert cultural heritage. It is an intertwined system of imaginaries, moral expectations, symbolic boundaries, identity markers, discourses, ritual practices, institutional structures, legal norms, and forms of authority. To understand the relation between religion and violence, it is thus essential to move beyond notions of innate theological injunctions and examine the socio-political contexts in which religious symbols, doctrines, clerical institutions, and narratives of purity, salvation, or sacrifice intersect with systems of domination, conflict, exclusion, mobilization, or resistance.
Defining violence: Physical, ritual, structural, symbolic
Similarly, violence must be treated as a multidimensional concept. Narrow definitions focused on bodily harm, war, or coercion obscure subtler but no less potent forms: symbolic violence (Pierre Bourdieu, 1998), structural violence (Johan Galtung, 1969), ritualized sacrificial violence (René Girard, 1972), or discursive and institutional mechanisms that reproduce moral hierarchies, exclusions, stigmatization, or segregation.
Violence can take the form of: • Institutional discrimination justified through religious norms; • Theological narratives that rationalize domination or persecution; • Ritualized mechanisms channeling communal tensions; • Liturgical codifications of purity and impurity; • Moral discourses sustaining gendered violence; • Legal persecution of minorities framed through sacred texts.
Religion, in this sense, can act not only as a cause of violence, but also as a structuring framework through which violence is imagined, given meaning, justified, ritualized, remembered, or resisted.
The sacred: Scapegoating, mimetic desire, and ritual transmutations of violence
René Girard’s seminal thesis—that human societies were historically founded upon mechanisms of mimetic rivalry, culminating in ritual scapegoating and sacrificial violence—remains a cornerstone of analysis (Girard, 1972). For Girard, religious representations and rituals emerged to contain, channel, or sublimate what he posited as inherent violent tendencies, transforming chaotic rivalries into regulated sacrificial systems that restore order. Violence, paradoxically, is at the origin of the sacred: it produces the mechanisms through which collective unity is re-established.
Girard’s work continues to shape contemporary scholarship because it reveals religion not as an external cause of violence but as a symbolic technology for its regulation, projection, or displacement. His thesis calls scholars to examine how rituals, taboos, sacred narratives, and theological frames might operate to manage, distribute, or legitimize violence—and under what political, historical, or institutional conditions these mechanisms fail or become catalysts of conflict.
State of the art: Religion and violence in the literature
The academic field addressing religion and violence has expanded significantly over the past three decades. Yet it remains fragmented, polarized, and often limited by disciplinary silos.
Mark Juergensmeyer, in Terror in the Mind of God, argued that certain violent acts presented as religious express a cosmic struggle in which perpetrators inscribe themselves within metaphysical narratives, sacralizing violence as purifying or redemptive (Juergensmeyer, 2000). R. Scott Appleby, in The Ambivalence of the Sacred, emphasized that religion is neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful, but historically ambivalent, capable of justifying cruelty as well as inspiring reconciliation, compassion, and non-violence (Appleby, 2000). Jan Assmann, in contrast, distinguished between “primary religion” (embedded in cultural lifeworlds) and “secondary religion” (textual, doctrinal, exclusive), suggesting that the emergence of exclusive monotheism created new regimes of truth and error, potentially intensifying conflict and dogmatic violence (Assmann, 1997).
Karen Armstrong, in Fields of Blood, offered a historiographical counterpoint to narratives equating religion with violence, arguing that most wars labeled “religious” were driven fundamentally by political power, territory, state formation, and economic tensions—with religion serving as a symbolic language rather than a causal engine (Armstrong, 2014). Scholars in political science and sociology such as Olivier Roy (2004) and Scott Atran (2010) have further argued that acts often portrayed as religious violence derive from generational ruptures, identity anxieties, social marginalization, or geopolitical contexts rather than theological imperatives.
Meanwhile, Talal Asad’s genealogical critique dismantles the category of “religious violence” itself, pointing out that the secular West has historically constructed the notion of religion-as-violence to assert its own monopoly over legitimate coercion, and to depict religious systems as irrational, dangerous, or backward (Asad, 2013).
What emerges from these divergent perspectives is a complex picture: religion is neither innocent of violence nor reducible to it. Violence mediated through religious symbols often arises from tensions between doctrine and interpretation, institutional authority and dissent, identity formation and political power, memory and trauma, collective ritual and social control, purity and transgression.
Identifying the gaps: Why this special issue is needed
Despite the richness of existing scholarship, important gaps remain:
Insufficient comparative and cross-cultural analysis
Most studies focus on single religious traditions or localized conflicts. Few offer diachronic, transnational, or cross-religious comparisons capable of revealing convergences, divergences, or structural patterns across time, geography, and tradition.
Overemphasis on visible violence
Research has often prioritized armed conflict, terrorism, or political persecution while neglecting structural, domestic, gendered, symbolic, or mnemonic violence grounded in religious norms, institutions, or discourses.
Lack of integration between violence and “exit from violence”
The call for this issue insists on examining how religious formations participate in reconciliation, forgiveness, mediation, remembrance, peacebuilding, post-conflict ritual reconstruction, or transitional justice. This dimension remains under-documented.
Weak reflexivity regarding conceptual categories
The notion of “religious violence” is often used uncritically, leading to essentialization of traditions, politicized stereotyping, or occlusion of the social and historical conditions under which religious symbols become implicated in violence.
Fragmentation of disciplinary approaches
The field remains divided between theology, anthropology, sociology, history, and political science. The absence of integrated frameworks limits our ability to conceptualize the structural links between religion, violence, memory, power, and symbolic order.
Limited attention to actors, institutions, and agency
Many studies abstract religion into doctrine and overlook the agency of clerics, believers, religious organizations, missionary networks, or institutions involved in conflict escalation or in peacebuilding and reconciliation.
This special issue responds to these lacunae by offering: • A multidimensional framework integrating symbolic, institutional, ritual, doctrinal, political, and structural analysis; • A comparative horizon across traditions, regions, and historical periods; • A focus on exit from violence, memory, reconciliation, and social repair; • A reflexive examination of concepts and categories; • An interdisciplinary dialogue bringing together the full spectrum of social sciences and humanities.
Mapping the scholarly landscape: From causal hypotheses to genealogical critiques
The contemporary scholarly landscape addressing the relationship between religion and violence is marked by remarkable expansion, yet also by deep fragmentation. Several distinct research traditions coexist: doctrinal and theological analyses, sociological and anthropological studies, political science approaches, cognitive research on radicalization, and historical investigations of conflicts framed through religious language. These literatures have produced a multiplicity of theses, from essentialist claims to genealogical deconstructions.
A first major strand consists of attempts to identify causal relationships between religious belief, doctrine, or institutional forms and specific violent outcomes. These works often emerge from political science, conflict studies, and sociology, seeking to correlate religious rhetoric with escalations of intergroup conflict, insurgency, or sectarian warfare. Many such studies, however, have gradually retreated from simplistic causal claims toward more nuanced, conditional models that locate religious variables within broader structural, political, and socio-economic matrices (Toft et al., 2011).
A second strand, more sensitive to symbolic systems, focuses on the interpretive dimension of religious meaning, examining how myths, sacred narratives, ritual structures, liturgical codes, eschatological expectations, and moral grammars shape the imaginaries of conflict, sacrifice, martyrdom, purity, or redemption. These works do not posit religion as the “cause” of violence, but as a discursive space through which violence is represented, justified, ritualized, sublimated, or contested (Lincoln, 2006).
A third, genealogical and critical strand, represented by scholars such as Talal Asad, interrogates the category of “religious violence” itself, arguing that it is historically contingent and politically charged. Such critiques show that the modern West constructed the notion of religion-as-violence in order to validate its own claims to legitimate coercion, sovereignty, and control over violence, rendering religious systems suspect, irrational, or dangerous (Asad, 1993). This perspective highlights the need for reflexivity in the scholarly endeavor: the task is not merely to study violence “in religion,” but to interrogate how religious actors, symbols, and institutions are named, politicized, and interpreted within broader regimes of power.
Across these strands, a central methodological conclusion has emerged: religion is neither sufficient nor negligible as a variable in the analysis of violence. Rather, it operates in interactive conjunction with regimes of political authority, social structure, identity formation, historical memory, trauma, and symbolic order. This awareness lays the foundation for the intellectual ambition of this special issue: to study religion neither as the origin of violence nor as a passive vessel, but as a complex space where meaning, power, and conflict intersect.
Core theoretical controversies in the study of religion and violence
The literature on religion and violence is structured by several persistent controversies. Three, in particular, demand explicit engagement in the context of this special issue: (1) the causal question, (2) the essentialist question, and (3) the normative question.
The causal question: Does religion “cause” violence?
Many early approaches sought to isolate religion as an independent causal driver, attempting to link theological principles to collective aggression, intolerance, or persecution. This line of inquiry was particularly salient in debates surrounding monotheism and exclusivism (Assmann, 2009). Yet scholars such as Karen Armstrong have demonstrated that the label “religious violence” is often applied retrospectively to conflicts fundamentally driven by territorial, dynastic, economic, or political motives (Armstrong, 2014). Similarly, empirical research on insurgency and terrorism has shown that religious references frequently mask identity crises, political grievances, state repression, social marginalization, or geopolitical pressures (Roy, 2017).
The core conclusion of these newer studies is that religion rarely functions as a primary cause of violence. Instead, religious symbols and narratives often serve as powerful frameworks for moral justification, identity formation, emotional mobilization, memory construction, and symbolic boundary-drawing. Through these functions, religion can amplify, legitimize, or ritualize conflicts whose underlying causes lie elsewhere.
The essentialist question: is religion intrinsically violent (or peaceful)?
A second controversy concerns essentialism. Some critics portray religion as intrinsically violent, anchored in dogmatism, fanaticism, rigid moral codes, or imaginations of purity. Conversely, apologetic narratives present religion as intrinsically peaceful, compassionate, or oriented toward harmony and reconciliation. The scholarly consensus has progressively shifted away from both essentialisms.
Jan Assmann’s thesis, for example, argued that certain forms of exclusive, scriptural monotheism introduced new regimes of truth, potentially intensifying conflict (Assmann, 1997). Others countered that violence cannot be linked intrinsically to monotheism: historical research reveals complex negotiations of tolerance, exegesis, coexistence, and adaptation within monotheistic traditions (Stroumsa, 2009). Comparative research confirms that religions have inspired both persecution and humanitarian endeavors, both sectarian violence and solidarity networks (Appleby, 2000). The ambivalence of religious formations stands as an empirical fact requiring analytical attention rather than normative judgment.
The normative question: Can religion serve in the exit from violence?
A third, increasingly salient controversy concerns the capacity of religion to support peacebuilding, reconciliation, transitional justice, or memory work. Scott Appleby famously articulated the “ambivalence of the sacred”: religious actors, institutions, rituals, and symbolic repertoires can indeed produce legitimations for violence, but can also mobilize moral and communal resources for conflict resolution, apologies, forgiveness, reparation, and solidarity (Appleby, 2000).
The call for paper at the origin of this issue explicitly invites scholars to examine the role of religion in the exit from violence—a dimension that remains underrepresented in current scholarship. Works on post-conflict ritual practices, interfaith mediation, memory rites, and clerical interventions in reconciliation processes offer promising directions, but systematic theoretical integration is lacking (Philpott, 2012). This issue is designed to contribute to filling that gap.
Empirical problematics raised by the call for paper
The call for contributions emphasizes a set of unresolved empirical questions that this special issue seeks to bring to the forefront.
Under what conditions do religious formations participate in violence?
Rather than assuming religious causes, this issue invites research into constellations of conditions: • State–religion entanglements facilitating persecution or legitimizing coercion; • Crisis contexts (economic, demographic, identity fractures) activating religious narratives; • Transformations in religious landscapes (competition, fragmentation, reform, new movements) intensifying boundary-making; • Instrumentalization by political elites seeking sacred legitimacy or mobilization; • Collective memory structures framing violence as inherited trauma; • Doctrinal disputes and heresiology fueling intra-religious tensions.
These conditions demonstrate that religion acts as a symbolic matrix within broader systems of conflict.
How do religious concepts, myths, or rituals shape the imaginary of violence?
This issue invites exploration of: • Sacrificial narratives; • Myths of purity and contamination; • Martyrdom symbolism; • Eschatological imaginaries; • Liturgical codifications; • Moral vocabularies of guilt, forgiveness, justice, and punishment.
Such elements can sustain narratives of exclusion, legitimation, or redemption through violence—or, conversely, facilitate reconciliation, ritual repair, and moral transformation.
What role do religious institutions and actors play in violence or its resolution?
Research questions include: • How do clerics, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, or missionary organizations position themselves in conflicts? • Do they act as mediators, legitimizing authorities, moral regulators, or mobilizers? • How do religious elites produce authoritative discourses in relation to violent acts?
Empirical studies might address religious mobilization during civil wars, doctrinal responses to sectarian conflict, clergy as peace brokers, memory rites after mass violence, or forgiveness rituals in transitional justice.
How does religion contribute to processes of exit from violence, memory, and repair?
This represents one of the most original axes of the issue. Promising avenues include ritual reintegration after conflict, liturgies of remembrance, theological articulations of repentance and forgiveness, religiously framed truth commissions, symbolic reconstruction after massacres, pastoral care for trauma victims, and sacred spaces as arenas for collective healing. The comparative potential is vast: truth commissions in African contexts, rituals of mourning in post-genocide societies, interfaith mediation in ethnic conflicts, or religious organizations in restorative justice.
Methodological crossroads: Interdisciplinarity, comparison, reflexivity
The call for paper insists on interdisciplinary method. Religion and violence cannot be studied adequately within a single disciplinary paradigm. This issue encourages contributions from: • Sociology (institutions, identity, symbolic power); • Anthropology (ritual, cosmology, embodiment); • History (memory, conflict, transmission); • Political science (state power, militancy, security discourse); • Theology (interpretation, doctrinal dispute, hermeneutics); • Law (religious norms, persecution, transitional justice); • Memory studies (ritual commemoration, narrative repair); • Gender studies (religious norms, violence, patriarchy).
Comparative approaches are especially needed: across religious traditions (Abrahamic, Dharmic, animist, syncretic); across geographies (Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas); and across time (pre-modern, imperial, colonial, post-colonial, contemporary). This cross-disciplinary ambition corresponds directly to the call’s insistence on a more global, transversal understanding of religiously inflected violence and its possible transcendence.
Toward a new grammar for thinking religion and violence
The preceding sections have mapped the conceptual terrain, the state of the art, and the unresolved empirical questions that shape contemporary scholarly approaches to religion and violence. What emerges is a two-fold imperative: first, to resist the lure of essentialisms—whether those attributing violence intrinsically to religion, or those denying any relation between religious formations and acts of violence; and second, to understand religion not as a static, self-contained system of belief but as a complex space where imaginaries, rituals, institutions, doctrines, memories, politics, and symbolic grammars interact with lived realities, structures of power, collective identities, and the social fabric.
It is precisely in this sense that religion cannot be treated merely as a “variable” to be inserted into causal models. Instead, religion constitutes a field of formation—conceptual, moral, institutional, and symbolic—that shapes horizons of justification, hope, redemption, sacrifice, purity, meaning, reconciliation, commemoration, and social repair. Religion offers a repertoire through which humans narrate and interpret suffering, loss, guilt, salvation, justice, forgiveness, or trauma—and, just as importantly, through which acts of violence, whether interpersonal or structural, are narrated, remembered, legitimized, contested, or transcended.
Studying religion and violence, therefore, requires a theoretical grammar that moves from causal thinking to relational thinking; from doctrinal content to social practice; from ideational abstractions to institutional dynamics; from theological norms to lived religion; from purely textual traditions to embodied rituals, collective identities, and symbolic economies. It is within this broader interpretive horizon that this special issue situates itself: not merely to catalogue instances of “religious violence,” but to understand how religious formations mediate violence, reflect on it, ritualize it, resist it, transform it, or offer routes toward its exit.
Religion and the “exit from violence”: Memory, reconciliation, forgiveness, repair
One of the most innovative dimensions of the call for paper at the origin of this issue—and one that distinguishes it from the majority of scholarship on religion and violence—lies in its explicit focus on processes of exit from violence. Whereas the literature has often devoted enormous attention to violent conflicts marked or framed by religious imaginaries, much less has been written on the role religion may play in the aftermath of violence: reconstruction, commemoration, ritual repair, transitional justice, apologies, collective mourning, the reintegration of former perpetrators, reconciliation between formerly opposed communities, and narrative work around guilt, repentance, shame, or pardon.
It is here that religion, through its symbolic and ritual resources, reveals a potential that modern secular political frameworks sometimes lack: the capacity to articulate narratives of forgiveness, healing, reparation, or moral regeneration. Concepts such as grace, redemption, atonement, reconciliation, covenant, repentance, or purification are not merely abstract theological terms; they are embedded in collective practices—confession, liturgy, pilgrimage, commemorative rites, days of remembrance, gestures of apology, symbolic reparations, rituals of reintegration or reconciliation—and have historically served as powerful mechanisms for rebuilding the social fabric torn by violence.
Paul Ricoeur’s analyses of guilt, memory, and forgiveness provide a powerful illustration of this potential. For Ricoeur, forgiveness is not erasure, negation, or amnesia; it is a form of ethical labor through which past violence is acknowledged, named, narrated, and integrated into a shared horizon of meaning. Forgiveness, as he insists, presupposes memory, not oblivion—a capacity to recall without repeating, to testify without vengeance, to mourn without perpetuating antagonism (Ricoeur, 2000: chap. 5). In this respect, religious narratives and rituals often offer languages that allow communities to transform the meaning of violence, to bring fractures into symbolically habitable form, and to prepare the ground for reconciliation.
Similarly, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on forgiveness—in The Human Condition—reveal its political significance. Arendt argues that forgiveness breaks the logic of irreversibility that violence imposes on human action (Arendt, 1958: 236–243). When injury appears definitive, forgiveness reopens the realm of possibility; it interrupts the chain of retaliation, revenge, and reciprocal humiliation. Here again, the proximity with religious imaginaries is striking: forgiveness, in many traditions, is framed not as weakness but as ethical strength and as the highest expression of justice.
It is precisely these articulations—between memory, forgiveness, justice, repair, and reconstruction—that the call for paper urges researchers to investigate. Religion is not only implicated in violence; it is also implicated in the re-making of worlds after violence.
Memory, trauma, and the symbolic management of violence
Collective memory is one of the most powerful conduits through which religion and violence intersect. Religious narratives of origins, martyrdom, suffering, persecution, or deliverance often become frameworks through which communities make sense of violent pasts, interpret traumatic wounds, or ritualize their persistence. These memories can be mobilized for antagonism—constructing opposing identities, reviving old grievances, legitimizing exclusions—but they can also be mobilized for reconciliation, through shared rituals of remembrance, gestures of mourning, symbolic recognition of past atrocities, or collective lament.
Jan Assmann’s work on cultural memory reminds us that communities do not simply remember; they ritualize, narrate, interpret, forget, and reconfigure the past according to structures of meaning that are often religious (Assmann, 2006). Memory is never merely descriptive; it is normative, shaping belonging, destiny, identity, and legitimacy. To study relations between religion and violence, therefore, is to examine the ways in which communities construct narratives of victimhood, heroism, guilt, repentance, sacrificial suffering, or redemptive transformation—and how these narratives distribute moral meaning across past, present, and future.
The call for this issue thus invites investigations into the ritual forms of memory: commemorations of massacres, mourning rites after civil wars, theological interpretations of genocide, liturgical practices of contrition, or symbolic gestures of reconciliation between former enemies.
The institutional dimension: Authority, boundary-making, and mediation
Religious institutions—churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, convents, councils, missionary organizations, religious NGOs—are often overlooked when it comes to the analysis of violence. Yet they are critical actors in the construction, mediation, or transformation of conflicts. The social authority of clerics, the doctrinal power they exercise, the liturgical spaces they manage, the moral vocabularies they produce, and the symbolic legitimacy they confer all make them central to understanding how religious formations relate to violence.
Max Weber, in his studies of domination, highlighted that religious authority is not merely spiritual; it can be legal-rational, charismatic, or traditional (Weber, 1978). Such authority can be mobilized to inflame conflict, to justify the sacrificial necessity of violence, to legitimate exclusion—but also to inhibit aggression, to discipline passions, to encourage truth-telling, to secure mediation, to protect minorities, or to reconstitute trust. In empirical terms, this means that case studies focusing on specific institutional actors—bishops, imams, rabbis, monastic teachers, spiritual elders—can reveal the concrete mechanisms through which religion functions as either accelerant or restraint upon violence.
Moreover, religious institutions frequently situate themselves at the frontier between public politics and private conscience. Their involvement in peace negotiations, community dialogue, post-conflict reconstruction, or transitional justice councils demonstrates the relevance of studying these actors as mediators. That dimension, central to the call, remains insufficiently theorized and demands attention.
Violence as sacralization and de-sacralization
Returning to Girard, the notion that sacrificial violence emerged as a mechanism for preserving communal cohesion allows us to ask a critical question: under what conditions does the “sacralizing” capacity of religion turn destructive, and under what conditions does it become generative, reparative, or redemptive? Girard famously argued that Christian revelation unmasks the scapegoat mechanism by revealing the innocence of the victim (Girard, 1972). Whether one accepts or disputes this interpretation, the question remains essential: how do religious imaginaries of innocence, guilt, punishment, sacrifice, redemption, or divine justice transform the meaning and legitimacy of violent acts?
This special issue encourages contributions that analyze how the categories of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure, the chosen and the rejected, are mobilized to interpret violence. And, inversely, how those same categories might be reinterpreted to disarm violence, dismantle sacrificial logics, or de-ritualize hostility.
Methodological and ethical responsibilities
Studying violence, especially when it intersects with religious memories, rituals, and symbolic economies, imposes a set of ethical responsibilities on the researcher. One must avoid sensationalism, stereotyping, racialization, confessional bias, political exploitation, or narrative oversimplification. Pierre Bourdieu’s criteria for rigorous reflexivity remain instructive: researchers must examine how their own categories, identities, and disciplinary frameworks shape their interpretations (Bourdieu, 1990).
This responsibility is heightened when engaging with vulnerable populations—survivors of massacres, victims of persecution, communities wounded by war, individuals bearing traumatic memory. In such cases, the strictest precautions are needed: ensuring consent, protecting anonymity, acknowledging the risks of re-traumatization, recognizing the moral weight involved in narrating violence, and avoiding any form of symbolic re-victimization.
The call for papers also stresses the importance of contextualization. Religious dynamics cannot be abstracted from political, historical, cultural, economic, and institutional conditions. Nor can one speak of “Islam,” “Christianity,” “Judaism,” or “Hinduism” as monolithic entities. Traditions are internally plural, contested, fragmented, and evolving. Institutions disagree, doctrines conflict, and believers interpret differently. To ignore these pluralities is to distort the empirical terrain.
Future research directions and suggested axes for contributions
Based on the state of the art and the intentions of this issue, several promising research directions present themselves: • Comparative studies across religious traditions on the ritual management of violence, forgiveness, apology, or commemoration; • Historical inquiries into how doctrinal disputes, liturgical reforms, or religious revivals influenced patterns of violence or reconciliation; • Sociological analyses of religious authority, institutional power, and charismatic leadership, and their roles in legitimizing, inhibiting, or redirecting violence; • Anthropological research on ritual forms of mourning, lamentation, purification, or reintegration after mass atrocity; • Political-theological reflections on sovereignty, martyrdom, sacrifice, divine justice, or eschatology in contexts of conflict; • Studies in memory and transitional justice on religious rituals of testimony, contrition, recognition, and truth-telling; • Investigations into gender and religious norms, examining how religious imaginaries sustain, challenge, or transform gendered violence; • Ethical and philosophical contributions exploring pardon, repentance, accountability, and moral regeneration.
Such a plurality of directions reflects the interdisciplinary spirit of the call and the ambition of this special issue: to open spaces of inquiry rather than closing them; to invite interpretive experimentation rather than dogmatic reduction; to shape a scholarly horizon commensurate with the complexity of human realities in situations of violence.
The contributions to this special issue
The three articles that compose this special issue approach the question of religion and violence from markedly different angles—textual, legal, and empirical–comparative—yet together they trace a coherent arc across the frameworks developed in the preceding sections. Each contribution engages a distinct dimension of the overall problematic: discourse, law, and place. Each draws, in its own way, on the conceptual vocabularies of symbolic and structural violence introduced in this introductory section; each moves beyond single-cause explanations toward more integrated accounts; and each opens specific avenues for thinking about the conditions under which religiously coded violence may be generated, amplified, resisted, or transcended.
Ali Mostfa, “from doctrine to action: The discursive construction of violence in radical Islamic writings”
The first contribution engages directly with the conceptual and methodological concerns laid out in the various sections of this introduction. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of two ideologically divergent but rhetorically potent works—Abū Muṣʿab al-Ṣūrī’s The Call to Global Islamic Resistance (2004) and Aïssam Aït-Yahya’s De l’idéologie islamique française (2015)—Mostfa demonstrates how violence is constructed not as a deviation from religious normativity but as its necessary and even redemptive expression. Moving deliberately beyond the “radicalization” paradigm, which the author shows to be analytically unstable, the article treats religious violence as a semiotic and performative construct, produced through rhetorical strategies such as the contract of veridiction, the universalization of grievance, sacrificial rhetoric, and the affective mobilization of sacred authority. By revealing the interpretive tensions at the heart of radical narratives, the analysis also points to potential openings for disengagement. The essay thus responds directly to this issue’s call for reflexive, discursive, and symbolic analyses of religiously coded violence, and to the need for interpretive tools capable of reading violence as a mode of world-construction rather than merely as physical harm.
Roya Kashefi, “when law becomes violence: Structural and symbolic harm in Iran’s religious state”
The second contribution brings the theoretical vocabularies of Bourdieu and Galtung—introduced in Section 2.2—into sustained empirical engagement with the legal architecture of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Through a close reading of constitutional provisions, penal-code articles, and state directives, Kashefi shows how a specific interpretation of Shiʿa jurisprudence has been institutionalized as binding law, producing systemic harm against women, children, and religious minorities. The article develops extended case analyses—among them the killing of Romina Ashrafi, the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini and the subsequent Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the flogging of Roya Heshmati, and the documented persecution of the Bahá’í community—to demonstrate that violence here is neither aberration nor excess but is written into the fabric of law itself. In doing so, the essay speaks directly to Section 13’s concern with religious institutions as actors in the construction of violence, to Section 7.1’s axis on state–religion entanglements, and to the issue’s broader insistence on examining how religious authority can sanctify inequality as divine order. It also opens important questions about the limits of reform, the international-law dimension of religiously legitimated violence, and the moral dissonance through which populations come to contest the symbolic authority that once upheld such regimes.
Rasha Nagem, Séraphin Alava, and Eleni Spanou, “the rise of violence against places of worship in Europe: Trends, dynamics, and challenges for social cohesion”
The third contribution presents the findings of the European PARTES project on violence against places of worship. Combining a quantitative database of 620 documented incidents (2010–2023) with twenty-eight semi-structured interviews conducted across six European countries, the article provides an empirical counterpart to the theoretical and conceptual reflections developed elsewhere in this issue. It maps the diversification of threats—from vandalism and arson to cyber-attacks and coordinated online hate campaigns—and analyses the differential targeting of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities through distinct but interlocking mechanisms of geopolitical instrumentalization, algorithmic amplification, and ideological polarization. Of particular significance is the authors’ articulation of a digital-to-physical escalation mechanism that links online radicalization and disinformation to acts of physical violence. The article also advances the PARTES Guardian Approach, a participatory governance model in which protection protocols are co-designed with religious communities rather than centrally prescribed. In so doing, the contribution directly addresses Section 7.4’s concern with exit from violence, Section 8’s call for interdisciplinary and comparative method, and the issue’s broader commitment to research that moves from diagnosis toward policy-relevant intervention.
A coherent arc
Taken together, these three contributions speak to the ambitions outlined at the beginning of this introduction. They move between the discursive construction of violence (Mostfa), its legal institutionalization (Kashefi), and its empirical manifestation in contemporary European public space (Nagem, Alava, and Spanou). They draw on qualitative and quantitative methods, on case analysis and critical theory, and they engage a range of traditions—Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Bahá’í—without reducing any of them to caricature. Although a single volume cannot exhaust the comparative and cross-cultural horizon sketched in Section 4, these three studies mark significant steps toward the more integrated, reflexive, and interdisciplinary grammar the field requires. Each, in its own register, confirms a claim that has structured this introduction throughout: that religion and violence are not linked by any simple causal relation, but are bound together through language, institutions, and practice—and that it is precisely at those sites, and not elsewhere, that scholarly and civic responsibility must be exercised.
Conclusion: A collective intellectual responsibility
In bringing together contributions from multiple disciplines, traditions, geographies, and methodological approaches, this issue aims to offer a conceptual and empirical map of the relations between religion and violence that is both more nuanced and more comprehensive than those currently available. Its goal is not to rehabilitate religion, nor to indict it, but to understand it: as source and remedy, as grammar of justification and horizon of repair, as symbolic matrix and institution of meaning, as site of trauma and possibility of reconciliation.
The study of religion and violence is inseparable from the study of humanity itself: of our capacity for destruction and for forgiveness, for exclusion and for recognition, for cruelty and for compassion, for vengeance and for repair. If religion remains a crucial laboratory in which these tensions are articulated, confronted, ritualized, mourned, or transformed, then the scholarly task is to think these tensions with rigor, honesty, reflexivity, and ethical responsibility.
This issue thus stands not only as a contribution to academic research, but as a space of intellectual and civic responsibility. In a world still marked by violent conflict, polarization, wounded memories, injustices past and present, and religiously coded antagonisms, to think deeply about the relations between religion and violence—and about the paths by which societies might exit from violence—is both an academic and a moral imperative.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.