When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends

By Mark Juergensmeyer

A gripping study of how religiously motivated violence and militant movements end, from the perspectives of those most deeply involved.
 
Mark Juergensmeyer is arguably the globe’s leading expert on religious violence, and for decades his books have helped us understand the worlds and worldviews of those who take up arms in the name of their faith. But even the most violent of movements, characterized by grand religious visions of holy warfare, eventually come to an end. Juergensmeyer takes readers into the minds of religiously motivated militants associated with the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, the Sikh Khalistan movement in India’s Punjab, and the Moro movement for a Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines to understand what leads to drastic changes in the attitudes of those once devoted to all-out ideological war. When God Stops Fighting reveals how the transformation of religious violence manifests for those who once promoted it as the only answer.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780520384743

Mark Juergensmeyer

Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies and Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A scholar and writer best known for his studies of religious violence and global religion, he has also written on conflict resolution and on South Asian religion and society. He has authored or edited over twenty books, including Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State and the UC Press best-seller Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Book preview

When God Stops Fighting

When God Stops Fighting

HOW RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE ENDS

Mark Juergensmeyer

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Mark Juergensmeyer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Juergensmeyer, Mark, author.

Title: When God stops fighting : how religious violence ends / Mark Juergensmeyer.

Description: [Oakland, California] : [University of California Press], [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index..

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021120 (print) | LCCN 2021021121 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520384729 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780520384736 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520384743 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Religious aspects—Islam. | Violence—Iraq—Religious aspects. | Violence—Philippines—Religious aspects. | Violence—India—Punjab—Religious aspects. | Religious militants—Interviews. | BISAC: RELIGION / Religion, Politics & State | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society

Classification: LCC BP190.5.V56 J84 2022 (print) | LCC BP190.5.V56 (ebook) | DDC 297.2/7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021120

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021121

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

1. The Trajectory of Imagined Wars

2. The Apocalyptic War of the Islamic State

3. The Militant Struggle of Mindanao Muslims

4. The Fight for Khalistan in India’s Punjab

5. How Imagined Wars End

Notes

Interviews

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The war is over, the former ISIS fighter told me. When I talked with him he was incarcerated in a prison in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. He had been convicted of being a jihadi warrior with the Islamic State, but now he expressed disillusionment with the movement and its leadership.¹

I had asked him whether the ISIS struggle was still attractive to some people. He looked at me in disbelief, and then said quietly, the war is over. Without admitting that he ever was fully in it, he was acknowledging that this battle was now a thing of the past. What he did not admit, however, was that the apocalyptic imagery of conflict at the end times and the rise of a Caliphate was no longer valid. The battle was over, but the ideas remained. It was a sentiment that he shared with many of the old ISIS fighters, as I was to discover in other conversations. Yet for now, he sadly acknowledged, the war was over.

It is not an easy thing to slip out of war. Perhaps it is more difficult than slipping into it, considering all of the personal, social, and spiritual aspects of a commitment to a struggle that have to be abandoned. Yet war ends. Violent movements, even those informed by religious visions of great warfare, terminate, or are transformed into more peaceful elements within the broader society.

In this book I want to try to understand how this happens. My motive is to complete my own understanding of the rise of movements of religious nationalism and religion-related violence around the world, a project in which I have been engaged for decades. The natural conclusion of these studies is to understand how such movements end. As it turns out, it is also a timely one.

As I prepared this book for publication, the news media fixated on the assault on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, provoked by then-president Donald Trump. Though not overtly religious, the White supremacists who were among the most ardent members of that insurrection privileged Christian culture. The conspiratorial mythology of the QAnon movement to which many of the participants adhered borrowed heavily from the imagery and end-times rhetoric of millenarian evangelical Protestant Christianity. Many of the participants regarded their involvement as part of a godly crusade—the kind of cosmic war that is in the minds of similar religious activists of various faiths around the world who see worldly confrontations as expressions of a metaphysical struggle between good and evil, right and wrong.

It is of timely importance then, to understand not only how such movements arise—the mood of alienation and marginalization that has propelled people to imagine themselves in a great righteous war—but also how they might end. As the case studies in this book will indicate, the way that governmental authorities respond to these movements can make all the difference. It can exacerbate the situation or alleviate it. But such movements do end.

To understand how this happens, I’ve tried to get inside the minds and mindsets of individuals involved in specific cases. I have chosen case studies where violent movements have largely come to a close. In deciding on which cases to focus I considered a range of possibilities. I could have chosen the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland, though I have elsewhere already analyzed how this conflict ended.² Or I could have examined the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, though that movement, even in a diminished state, continues its savage warfare in the region. The list of cases of terminated struggles goes on, though many imagined wars are still continuing and it is too early to examine how they might end.

Out of the range of possibilities I have chosen three case studies, selected in part because they show the range of possibilities in bringing violent movements to a close. One of them is the Islamic State, based in Iraq and Syria, which reigned over large sections of both countries from 2015 to 2017 and was territorially defeated by 2019. This is a movement that I have studied since its inception, through multiple visits to the region, and is an example of attempts to crush such uprisings through military destruction.

The second case is the Moro Movement for a Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines, a Muslim separatist movement that persisted from 1969 to 2019, when a peace agreement was finally ratified by a plebiscite in the region. This was a new movement for me to study, but I chose it in part because it showed the possibilities of the transition from violence to nonviolence through skillful negotiation—much like the Northern Ireland case.

The third case I have chosen is the Khalistan movement for Sikh separatism in the north Indian state of Punjab. The Sikh movement was involved in a deadly conflict with the Indian government throughout the 1980s and finally came to an end in 1995 for a variety of reasons, including an all-out assault by the Indian police. This is a movement that I know well, since I lived for a time in the region, and it was the rise of religious nationalism in the 1980s in the Punjab that first sparked my interest in studying the relationship between religion and nationalism in strident new movements of opposition. It also interested me because it was an example, like ISIS, of militant suppression, but also of the collapse of popular support for the uprising. Hence these three cases provided me with a range of ways in which violent movements end.

I realize that in choosing two Muslim cases out of the three I may be giving a false impression that Islam is more prone to violence and movements of religious nationalism than other religious traditions. This is not the case. For a more balanced view of the rise of religious violence that occurs in all religious traditions one may consult my earlier books, Global Rebellion: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.³ For this book, I have chosen these two cases because they provide an interesting comparison with each other and with the Khalistan case regarding how such movements end.

I say that each of these movements came to an end, though in each case aspects of the struggle linger on. Occasional acts of violence associated with them continue. Moreover, like the former ISIS soldier I met, the sense of militancy, the vision of great war, that animated each of them has endured among some supporters. Among many others, however, the idea of war was over long before the hostilities ended. That loss of faith in the war effort may have been a major factor in the ending of each of these movements.

How much of a factor was it? This is what I wanted to find out by looking more closely at each of these cases. I have traveled to these three regions on multiple occasions over several years and talked with a variety of former supporters and others knowledgeable about the situation. By looking at different cases I hoped to find elements that were common to all three, as well as those that were not. I hoped to develop the range of patterns regarding how visions of warfare come to an end. I also wanted to understand what factors propelled the movement towards abandoning the idea of war, factors that were both internal to the movement and that came from outside, including the actions of government authorities who were trying to control or crush the movements. Which of these actions were helpful in bringing an end to the hostilities and which were counter-productive?

This book is the culmination of thirty years of studying the rise of religious violence around the world, a project that has resulted in a series of books. The first was The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, published in 1993; it has been revised, expanded, and re-issued as Global Rebellion.⁴ This book explored the rise of movements of religious nationalism around the world; it found similarities in the loss of faith in secular nationalism, and attempts to recreate national community through ethnic and religious loyalties.

The next book in this series was Terror in the Mind of God. This focused on the violence often associated with the rise of strident new movements of religious nationalism, including disturbing acts of public violence characterized as terrorism. The book surveyed such movements in every religious tradition, and found similarities in their use of acts of terrorism as performance violence, symbolic empowerment, and imagined cosmic wars.

Though in some ways the present book, When God Stops Fighting, is the completion of this trilogy, two other books of mine helped to illumine aspects of the phenomenon of religious violence and nationalism. One was a co-authored work based on a five-year Luce Foundation-funded project assessing the role of religion in public life around the globe. This book, God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society, found similarities among different forms of public religion in both destructive and positive ways.⁵ It showed that even religious authority has eroded in the global age and explored the potential for a global civil religion.

A direct companion to the current volume is God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare.⁶ In fact, that book began as the opening chapter of the book you are reading now, When God Stops Fighting. I wanted to explain how religion was related to imagined wars in order to understand how those images could be domesticated and contained. But the more I thought about it the chapter became a separate book, based in part on lectures I had given on the topic at Princeton and Muenster. God at War explored two basic impulses of the human imagination, the longing for religion and the tendency to war, and tried to understand what they have in common. These impulses are sometimes fused in the minds of those who have imagined apocalyptic images of cosmic war. It is this kind of heightened religious warfare that I have found to be frequently the mental template that accompanies violent acts related to religion.

How can these images of warfare be ameliorated? How can confidence in them erode, and how can those who gain power by conducting them be seen as less legitimate? These are some of the questions behind the present book. As I have said, it is in some ways the culmination of a series of works in which I have tried to understand how and why imagined warfare has emerged as a global phenomenon at this moment of history, and what religion has to do with it. Now the time has come to try to understand how these movements wind down and how their visions of grand warfare are abandoned.

In working on this project I have been indebted to the Resolving Jihadist Conflicts project hosted by the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. I have appreciated its support for travel and research, and been stimulated by the interaction with my team members, Mimmi Söderberg Kovaks, Desirée Nilsson, Ebrahim Moosa, Emin Poljarevic, and Mona Kanwal Sheikh, as well as the able director of the project, Isak Svensson.

With regard to the ISIS case, in several trips to Kurdistan and elsewhere in Northern Iraq I appreciated the arrangements and translation assistance of Ibrahim Anli and Dilshad Ahmad at Ishik University, Erbil; Rabeen Fadhil of the Middle East Dialogue Center, Erbil; and Shahid Burhan Hadi from Suliamaniya. Monitoring online jihadi conversations with ISIS supporters on social media was conducted by my diligent research assistants Mufid Taha and Saba Sadri.

In the Philippines I was grateful for the support and hospitality of the faculty and staff of Notre Dame University, Cotabato City, especially the Vice-President for Administration, Sheila Algabre, and the President (before 2018), Fr. Charlie M. Inzon, OMI, and (after 2018), Fr. Francis Zabala, OMI. In Manila, Mike Saycon was helpful in providing contacts, and the fluent Tagalog of my colleague Collin Dvorak proved to be invaluable.

In India, I relied on my old Punjabi friends, including Harish Puri, Mohinder Singh, and Gurinder Singh Mann, for contacts in the Punjab and elsewhere. In Amritsar, Jagrup Singh Sekhon was generous in his time and expertise in accompanying me on research visits to meet with former militants. Paul Wallace was gracious in providing me copies of his reports and publications on the uprising. In the Punjab, as in all three cases, I am deeply appreciative of all those whom I met for taking time to talk with me and being so open in sharing with me their perspectives on the rise and fall of religious-related violent movements in their regions.

I am grateful for the University of California Press for taking this project on, as it has for many of the other books I have published on this topic. I appreciate the role of Eric Schmidt in shepherding it through the publication process. And as always I am grateful for the support of my friend and spouse, Sucheng Chan, whose own writing is a model of elegance and clarity. She endured my frequent research trips, sometimes wondering if I would ever return. I hope that she will feel that it was all worthwhile.

In this book I want to bring the reader with me into the worlds imagined by supporters of each of these three movements. We will try to understand how sensible people could be drawn into a state of remarkable war, and how in time they lost faith in that vision and found ways to extricate themselves from the movements that had fostered it. It will be a remarkable journey to three quite different locales, but in each case the end will be the promise of enduring peace.

1

The Trajectory of Imagined Wars

Maybe the war is over, one of the former militants in the Moro separatist movement in the Philippines told me. The hesitancy in his optimism reflected the uncertainties in the peace process between the Philippine government and the main militant movement, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. A peace agreement that had been negotiated in 2015 was finally signed by President Rodrigo Duterte in 2018 after years of stalling that fueled the opposition and led to a major military confrontation in the city of Marawi in 2017. So despite the continuing tension, he now had reason to at least hope that the war was coming to an end.

What he meant by the ending of the war was not just a matter of militants in his movement capitulating to the overwhelming strength of the Philippine government and laying down their arms. He meant a change in attitude towards the conflict. He was talking about the shift in worldviews from a situation of absolute opposition to one where opponents were not foes. They were not yet friends, but there was now the potential for a working arrangement in which they would be able to negotiate differences and build a common future.

That was a big change indeed. If the peace process holds in the Philippines—and it is still a big if—it will be an interesting example of how the warfare that characterizes terrorism comes to an end. In this case, it will end relatively peacefully. If the peace process does not hold, however, there might be a revival of Moro separatist militancy.

Outside Mosul in Northern Iraq, a