There are strong calls to give UN peacekeeping operations more robust mandates to engage in counter-terrorism tasks. But the idea of UN peacekeepers conducting counter-terrorism operations is not without its problems.

Terrorist attacks have been increasing rapidly over the last decade. According to the Global Terrorism Index, 29,376 people were killed in terrorist attacks in 2015. This was the second deadliest year after 2014, when 32,765 people were killed. The spike in 2014 and decline in 2015 is largely a result of the rise and subsequent weakening of Boko Haram and the Islamic State (IS).

Fatigue after long engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and the continued impact of the financial crisis has significantly dampened the interest in new out-of-area operations among Western member states. At the same time, the threats of terrorism and migration remain at the top of the foreign policy agenda. It is in this environment that policy makers are turning to the UN, to see what role it can play in the global security burden-sharing. This means a more transactional relationship with the UN, not necessarily considering the longer-term impact of undermining its impartiality and legitimacy.

UN peacekeeping operations have, during the last decade, been deployed to protect civilians in increasingly unstable conflicts, most often without a peace to keep. However, although the conflicts have been asymmetrical in nature, armed groups have seldom perceived the UN as a party to the conflict, and pursued a strategy of strategic targeting of its troops, police and civilians.

The Case of Mali

Image credit: MINUSMA/Flickr.

In March 2012, a coalition of rebel and Islamist groups took control of the north of Mali in the wake of a coup. On April 6, 2012, the rebels proclaimed the independence of the ‘Republic of Azawad’ and the imposition of sharia law in northern Mali. 412,000 persons had fled their homes and had become internally displaced or moved across the border to Mauritania, the Niger and Burkina Faso. By November 2012, Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had taken control of Timbuktu and Tessalit, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) had taken control of Douentza, Gao, Menaka, Ansongo and Gourma, and Kidal was under the control of the Islamist group Ansar Dine (“defenders of the faith”).

The Islamists and rebel groups were quickly conquered and fled to the far north of Mali after a short and swift intervention in the beginning of 2013 by the French Opération Serval, in cooperation with the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA). To avoid being stuck in a long and bloody counterinsurgency, the French had pushed for a swift handover to the UN.

On 1 July 2013, AFISMA handed over authority to the UN multidimensional integrated stabilisation mission in Mali (MINUSMA). However, the Islamist groups have proven resilient and the operation has been struggling to deploy and implement its mandate. From its inception in 2013 until 31 January 2017, it has endured 72 fatalities due to hostile actions, including suicide attacks, mortar attacks and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The mission has been given increasingly robust mandates, and its most recent mandate ordered the mission to “…to stabilize the key population centres and other areas where civilians are at risk, notably in the North and Centre of Mali, and, in this regard, to enhance early warning, to anticipate, deter and counter threats, including asymmetric threats…”.

The mission is actively supporting counter-terrorism actions, as it has been preparing “targeting packs” and has been informally sharing information with the French parallel counter-terrorism operation Barkhane  (the French follow-on mission from Serval). This follows a trend towards peace enforcement that started with MONUSCO, where the UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is now being mandated to “neutralize” identified rebel groups.

Future missions may be deployed to Libya, Syria and Yemen – countries that are also marked by asymmetric conflict and violent religious extremism. Against this backdrop, many member states are now arguing that UN peacekeeping operations need to reform to not only deal better with the challenges it faces in Mali, but also in future operations.

The high-level panel on peace operations, nominated by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, strongly underscored that UN peacekeeping operations should not undertake “counter-terrorism operations”. However, the report left the back-door open, insofar as it argued that “UN peacekeeping missions, due to their composition and character, are not suited to engage in military counter-terrorism operations. They lack the specific equipment, intelligence, logistics, capabilities and specialized military preparation required, among other aspects.” Disregarding the principled arguments against moving UN peacekeeping in such a direction, this could indeed be read as a list of areas where reform is needed to enable UN peacekeeping to take on counter-terrorism tasks.

A Desirable Shift?

But what may the consequences be of taking UN peacekeeping operations in such a direction? First, UN peacekeeping missions are not likely to be able to perform counter-terrorism tasks in a satisfactory manner, militarily speaking. They are composed of troops from many different countries, and although they should provide a military deterrent against armed groups, they are not likely to be able to protect themselves against asymmetric attacks. Even small attacks can lead to the withdrawal of troops by troop-contributing countries, as most of these do not have the political interest needed to be able to sustain losses. The exception to this are neighbouring countries, as these may have a political interest in the conflict, but precisely because of this fact they may also be interested to use force only against some and not all parties that threaten the peace.

The UN has been strongly criticised for not taking action to protect civilians, and the continued inaction has been used as an argument to make the UN more robust, as well as able to take on counter-terrorism tasks. However, this argument confuses the ability of the UN to protect civilians with counter-terrorism. In Mali, the mission is much busier protecting itself than protecting civilians. In fact, the recruitment to the terrorist groups is increasingly moving south in the country, as local populations are not experiencing a peace dividend or improving levels of participation and inclusion after the deployment of MINUSMA. Rather, they are experiencing a government that is continuing to marginalize significant groups of the population such as the Tuaregs in the North and the Fulani (also known as Peul) in the central regions of the country, and employ draconian counter-terrorism tactics.

The inclusion of neighbouring countries’ troops in UN peacekeeping missions was previously considered a red line. As seen with the example of MINUSMA, as well as UN peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan (to mention a few), this principle has fallen by the wayside. Taken together with the move towards UN peacekeeping missions taking on counter-terrorism tasks, this shows a trend towards a more partial UN in these situations, which may increasingly be rendered unable to play its vital good offices and humanitarian roles, and be a UN for all the people, not only the government of the day. The UN and member states should reverse this trend, and make sure that UN peacekeeping operations can serve in their most effective way – as a tool to keep the peace while institutions, service delivery and an inclusive and participatory state is being built.

John Karlsrud is the Manager of the Training for Peace program. He is on Twitter at @johnkarlsrud.

The Lord’s Resistance Army is seriously depleted as a fighting force, but it still continues to exist as an armed group. This resilience is driven by several key factors.  

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has carved a path of violence and disorder throughout East and Central Africa for nearly three decades. Led by Joseph Kony, the rebel group has directly and indirectly killed more than 100,000 civilians, has abducted upwards of 66,000 children, and has displaced hundreds of thousands more across five countries. While formidable in the past, the LRA is now a threadbare non-threat from a conventional military standpoint. With the group’s numbers at less than 200 (down from at least 5,000 active fighters in the 1990s), attacks and abductions are steadily trending downwards.

Yet the LRA has also proven to be distinctly resilient, surviving as a collection of semi-autonomous units in sparsely populated peripheries that put up no resistance. Nevertheless, LRA fighters still pose a tangible threat as they loot and harass civilians, while Kony evades detection in Sudan’s Kafia Kinji region. While many observers describe the group’s current behavior as “survival mode,” its complex history shows this to be its modal pattern of organization and behavior based on an on-going ability of the group to adapt to shifts in its politico-military environment through distinct organizational endowments and resource acquisition strategies.

Understanding LRA Resilience

Most of the prevailing literature on the LRA has provided key insights into its history, organization, and behavior. However, the research that has focused on the group’s motives and the drivers of its violence has not addressed the distinct question of its resilience. The LRA’s resilience comes down to its organizational structure and shrewd resource strategies that have developed within autonomous bush sanctuaries and vis-à-vis the group’s wider political environment.

Its organizational structure is based on a distinct combination of two factors. First, LRA recruitment and retention strategies relied on Acholi beliefs in spiritual and cultural symbols, such as viewing Kony as a medium for the “holy spirit,” and the common use of rituals. Such beliefs and practices, undergirded by violence, helped socialize Acholi youths familiar with them into fighters. Second, a more traditional military hierarchy was built around an initial committed core, which formed the basis for a flexible, decentralized structure that, while slowly degrading over time, has remained remarkably sturdy. In addition, the group’s resource acquisition strategies have adapted to periods of both abundance and scarcity. This configuration of factors has remained more-or-less intact for more than three decades as the LRA has interacted with regional geopolitical shifts and in the face of multiple challenges of maintaining an insurgency.

LRA Resilience Over Three Phases

Uganda soldiers part of the 2008–09 Garamba offensive against LRA. Image credit: Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock/Wikimedia.

The LRA grew directly from a homegrown Ugandan People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), made up from the dominant Acholi faction of the national army overthrown by the National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1986. Led by Bazilio Olara-Okello and other military strongmen, the UPDA rebellion ended with the Pece Peace Accord of 1988. Yet senior officer Odong Latek and intransigent junior officers from the former military remained in the bush fearing criminal punishment. While this rump of the UPDA retained a military structure, it began to rely on alternative strategies for mobilization. During the UPDA’s war, head of the Holy Spirit Movement Alice Lakwena and Joseph Kony developed factions that attracted fighters with an appeal to the salvation for the Acholi people through military victory, using unorthodox military practices (e.g. believing shea butter would make fighters bullet-proof and that rocks would explode as hand grenades). Following the 1987 defeat of Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF), Kony’s faction became dominant. By late 1988, Latek’s more conventional force merged with the sizable “cosmological” faction controlled by Kony, signaling the rise of his absolutist vision of Acholi society that sought to purify through violence anyone deemed government loyalists. This vision, which drew heavily on elements of elements of Acholi spiritual identity, quickly became an organizing principle and a source of resilience.

With Latek killed in 1989, Kony asserted authority, rebranding the rebellion several times until it became the LRA in September 1993. Here the group established its organizational structure, with “Control Altar” directing its operational brigades – named Gilva, Sinia, Trinkle, and Stockree – which remained intact for years and adapted to changes in manpower and resource availability. Yet the decline of the LRA’s first phase began as the Ugandan state expanded into northern Uganda. The counterinsurgency campaign Operation North weakened the LRA while militarizing Acholiland. The government also expanded the Resistance Council (RC) administrative system while recruiting Local Defence Units (LDUs) as the RC’s coercive arm. However, when military action failed to eliminate the group, peace talks began in late 1993. These talks broke down in early 1994 amidst boycotts and accusations of dishonesty. Tired of the LRA’s mounting demands, President Museveni gave the group seven days to surrender or face a military solution. Meanwhile, Kony had used the talks to conceal clandestine negotiations with Sudanese intelligence. Following Museveni’s ultimatum, the LRA withdrew into southern Sudanese garrison towns for reorganization and training. By February 18^th 1994, the group re-emerged heavily armed and newly equipped.

Thus began the LRA’s second phase in the mid-1990s when it became part of a proxy war as the Sudanese government provided it with weapons and military training to fight the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and territorial sanctuaries from which to attack Uganda. The LRA’s experience in southern Sudan consolidated the group’s structure, hardened its fighters (largely abducted Acholi youth as young as 12), and taught them how to survive in borderlands for years of operations that kept northern Uganda in almost permanent humanitarian crisis. Yet, while Sudanese support was a decisive factor in the LRA’s military strength and the intensification of the conflict, it was not always seamless. Kony’s priorities in Uganda often put him at odds with Khartoum and this led to periodic ruptures in the LRA’s resource pipeline, and the group was often expected to fend for itself in terms of day-to-day survival. As such, the LRA developed a diversified strategy of resource acquisition – maintaining military stockpiles while creating self-sustaining agrarian communities. These experiences with intermittent access to resources promoted the LRA’s self-sufficiency and resilience.

The decline of this period began with the December 1999 Nairobi Agreement, which committed Sudan and Uganda to end their proxy war. Attacks in northern Uganda declined, but the LRA remained in southern Sudan. At times, the group received Sudanese support. But Khartoum signaled its commitment to push the LRA from its territory in early 2002 when it authorized the UPDF to launch Operation Iron Fist, designed to dislodge the LRA from its Sudanese bush camps. While Iron Fist delivered some tactical successes, it did not deliver the desired knockout blow to the LRA. Instead, in 2003 the group re-entered Uganda and started a fresh conflict characterized by high profile violence and a humanitarian crisis that the Ugandan government largely outsourced to international aid agencies. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ended the civil war in Sudan and ejected the LRA while a revitalized UPDF blocked the group’s re-entry into Uganda.

From 2005, the LRA shifted into its third phase, best described as roving banditry. Facing military threats and the geopolitical closure of northern Uganda and southern Sudan, the group shifted to DRC’s Garamba National Park. For the following two years, the Juba peace process allowed the LRA to regroup while coalescing more tightly around Kony’s security. During this period, there was a relative lull in LRA violence, limited abductions, and the suspension in abductee training. Yet while support from Khartoum had ended, the LRA’s military capacity remained intact. Juba ultimately collapsed in 2008 due to ceasefire violations, walkouts, the LRA’s refusal to gather in the assembly areas, and Kony’s repeated failure to sign the accord’s final documents of the accord. The LRA soon resumed violence in DRC as the UPDF led Operation Lightening Thunder against Kony’s Garamba hideout. Intelligence failures led to an unsuccessful operation, and UPDF ground troops arrived at an empty camp. Shortly thereafter, the LRA unleashed a series of reprisal killings against civilians.

The LRA’s sanctuaries in DRC, CAR, and Sudan have provided permissive conditions for survival – few state institutions and a new set of resources. As such, the group has since engaged its resilience strategies in two key ways. First, the LRA has managed to maintain its hierarchy despite the outflow senior commanders, extended periods of geographical separation, and sporadic communication between units, which are expected to act independently and fend for themselves. Although this organizational structure is decentralized, core members still carry out Kony’s long-term strategic orders while maintaining an explicit LRA identity. Second, while looting remains a way of obtaining resources, the LRA has become a small player in regional illicit networks in natural resources, particularly ivory, diamonds, and gold. The group’s renewed informal relationship with Sudanese officials in the Kafia Kinji border region shelters Kony and his inner retinue and provides markets for looted items and commodities.

Conclusion

In sum, the LRA has survived by virtue of its organizational cohesion, resource use, and the ability to read its political terrain in order to exploit regions without state structures. However, such strategies may not be sufficient to sustain the LRA indefinitely. The Ugandan-led Regional Task Force (RTF) has killed and captured senior commanders from the battlefield and increased fighter defections. To be sure, the hunt for the LRA has been hamstrung by logistical and political difficulties. Above all, RTF operations are currently at risk of losing their logistical support from the U.S. Special Forces, which have larger consequences for regional peace and security in central and eastern Africa.

Christopher Day is an Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. He joined the Department of Political Science in August 2012. His teaching and research interests are in Comparative Politics, with a particular emphasis on African politics, political violence, and civil wars. His research interests extend to international security, counterinsurgency, proxy warfare, and the institutional role of different armed state actors in Africa. A former disaster relief worker with Médécins Sans Frontières, he is also interested in humanitarian affairs. He offers courses on the Politics of Africa, the Model African Union, Global Political Theory, and World Politics.

Since the September 11 attacks, the NYPD has seen a rapid expansion into counterterrorism activities. But how effective have these practices been in keeping New York safe?

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is America’s largest police force and emulated by agencies across the globe. For many, the NYPD represents innovative and effective policing. But in the decade following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the NYPD’s rapid expansion into new counterterrorism practices under ex-Commissioner Raymond Kelly raises important questions about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential harms caused to the department’s legitimacy.

Expanding into Counterterrorism

Image by mpeake via Flickr.

Kelly’s tenure as Commissioner from 2002 to 2013 was in large part defined by the creation of an aggressive counterterrorism programme to combat Al Qaeda (and now ISIS) inspired terrorism. While supporters assert the NYPD counterterrorism programme’s effectiveness during this period is self-evident because it stopped numerous post-9/11 terror attacks in New York, critics counter that the programme was ineffective, involved significant infringements on civil liberties, made New York City much more militarised, and contributed to the further erosion of police legitimacy in targeted communities. One thing that can be agreed is that the NYPD became the first American police force to spend over a billion dollars and countless man-hours to implement a host of new terrorism fighting measures in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

How then did the NYPD become seen as the national leader in domestic counterterrorism? The reasons appear straightforward – after the Al Qaeda attacks in 1993 and 2001, and Kelly and his supporters vowed that New Yorkers would be kept safe from future terror attacks. But the evidence suggests the situation was more complex. Indeed, the NYPD adopted a significant role in defending New York City against terrorism amidst already strained relations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s traditional lead agency on counterterrorism. Kelly and others asserted that the FBI could not be solely responsible for protecting New York City, which paved the way for the NYPD’s vast expansion into counterterrorism.

Building an NYPD Counterterrorism Model

Insights from former colleagues show Kelly believed the NYPD could create the foot soldiers of its new counterterrorism programme building from the ground up. The programme was structured around what has been described as Kelly’s confidence that effective counterterrorism work was not ‘rocket science’. According to one former NYPD official, Kelly thought effective counterterrorism required neither primary reliance on specially trained elite terrorism personnel nor community-based countering violent extremism officers, but could instead be accomplished through old fashioned police work like recruiting sources, using confidential informants, chasing leads, obtaining search warrants, and following anywhere their information might lead. The NYPD’s initial post-9/11 counterterrorism programme therefore focused significantly on using hard-nosed police work to address the complexities of Al Qaeda inspired radicalisation and plot disruption.

And what NYPD officers did not know about counterterrorism, they could learn. Kelly’s counterterrorism programme was forged through close links with then-current or recent members of the Central Intelligence Agency, including 35-year veteran David Cohen, who sought to blend NYPD know-how with high policing intelligence tradecraft. The data shows that changes within the NYPD’s Intelligence Division and Counterterrorism Bureau included stationing officers overseas from London to Hamburg to Amman, and sending detectives to gather intelligence in Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, among others. The hiring of intelligence analysts with language skills in from Arabic, to Pashto, to Urdu also allowed the NYPD to monitor communications and media accounts that might signal terror threats to New York City. The Intelligence Division also developed independent strategies for identifying vulnerable individuals and potential terrorists. The Intelligence Division also engaged in additional covert surveillance and infiltration operations, the scope and effectiveness of which remain unclear. However, documents leaked in 2011 suggest that the Intelligence Division’s Demographics Unit was likely involved in monitoring and sometimes infiltrating mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, Muslim university associations, community meetings and public libraries, among others. The Demographics Unit was scrapped by Kelly’s successor in 2014. Supporters and critics within and outside law enforcement offer varying opinions about how successful Kelly’s counterterrorism model proved to be.

Measuring Effectiveness

Measuring the true effectiveness of Kelly’s programme is difficult. Much of the information about the scope of potential terror attacks or numbers of vulnerable individuals in New York City remains confidential. But Kelly and his supporters have frequently pointed to 16 allegedly foiled terrorism plots between 2002 and 2013 as evidence of his programme’s effectiveness (as of July 2016 the number stands at 20). Specifics of the thwarted plots cited include plans to detonate explosives on the New York City subway, Times Square, John F. Kennedy Airport, local synagogues, and on the Brooklyn Bridge. Critics, however, have disputed these figures, arguing that the numbers are grossly inflated given that many of these so-called plots did not involve suspects taking substantial actions to put them in motion, and frequently involved entrapment.

Community responses to Kelly’s decade of hard-nosed post-9/11 counterterrorism tactics have been sharply divided. While many New Yorkers supported the NYPD’s aggressive counterterrorism practices, vocal critics including members of New York City’s South Asian, Arab and Muslim American communities, civil liberties groups and even law enforcement officials at other agencies, have argued that the NYPD’s initial counterterrorism model was poorly conceived and ineffective because it was discriminatory, violated civil liberties, and alienated communities with important roles to play in fighting terrorism. Indeed, some went so far as to argue that the NYPD’s approach had actually made New York City less safe from terrorism. The limited data lends support for some of these assertions, as it shows that some members of New York area South Asian, Arab and Muslim American communities became less trusting of the NYPD, less willing to cooperate with NYPD investigations, activities, or less willing to report crimes or suspicious behaviour related to terrorism to the NYPD as a result of its counterterrorism practices during this period.

Conclusion

While the first decade of the NYPD’s post-9/11 counterterrorism programme created under Raymond Kelly remains controversial, it undoubtedly opened the door for local police departments across America to take much more active roles in counterterrorism, roles they will continue to play for the foreseeable future. But the experience of the NYPD’s first decade of its counterterrorism programme should give pause to local policing agencies expanding their duties to include greater terrorism fighting efforts, for it important that they not lose sight of the core Peelian policing tenets of community engagement and community service. For as much as we all share a collective desire to fight terrorism, without police legitimacy across communities, cities may potentially become more vulnerable to terrorism in the longer term.

Dr. Quinlan is a Lecturer in Law and Diversity at University of Sheffield’s School of Law. Dr. Quinlan’s research focuses on policing, terrorism, security and criminal justice, and often involves comparative research between the United Kingdom and the United States. Dr. Quinlan recently completed an empirical study comparing the development of post-9/11 counterterrorism policing programmes in London and New York City. Prior to taking up a role in academia, Dr. Quinlan practiced law in New York City. Dr. Quinlan earned her Doctorate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, her Master of Laws from King’s College London, and her Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law.

Author’s note: In this article, I use the terms “war” and “civil war” interchangeably. They refer to a contested armed incompatibility involving a government and a non-state actor that generates at least 25 battle-related fatalities annually. Whereas ethnic civil wars refer to those armed conflicts that include ethnic challengers that are at odds with the identity of a state, seek to redefine or divide the state itself, or strive for major changes in their relationship with the state ( see Sambanis 2001).

Under what conditions can religion play a constructive role in peacebuilding and what are the obstacles to this process?

Religion, war, and peace are among the “thickest” and multifaceted concepts. Thus, tackling the relationship between them is a daunting task and calls for a greater scrutiny.

A great deal of existing scholarship on civil war, particularly those statistically examining the effects of various social, economic, and political factors on war dynamics, almost exclusively refer to the term “peace” in the negative sense, i.e., the absence of violence. This “narrow” approach to peace is in part driven by its simplicity that allows for large-n cross-national comparison. While useful in reaching generalizable findings, such an approach could potentially mask the underlying causes of war, preventing us from addressing the root causes of conflict eruption.

Here I refer to peace in the positive sense, or the absence of “structural violence” that calls for going beyond the mere absence of physical violence and points toward “social justice” (see Galtung 1969). This positive or “quality peace,” in the words of Peter Wallensteen, requires the creation of postwar conditions that not only prevent countries from relapsing back into another episode of violence but also allows for security and dignity for the members of the war-torn society.

How does religion help or hinder the creation of such circumstances? Under what conditions can religion as a powerful, potent force help reinforce and strengthen peace? What are the obstacles to religion playing such a constructive role in peacebuilding?

A complicated relationship

Photo credit (edited): murdelta/Flickr. 

A number of scholars have identified religion to be the cause of deadlier, longer, and more intractable civil wars (see Svensson 2007; Fox, James, and Li 2009; Basedau et al. 2011). Yet others have drawn attention to “the seeds of tolerance, justice, compassion, and peace” in religious traditions and argued that religion can help bring about peace and democracy (Johansen 1997, 53; see also Appleby 2000; Driessen 2010).  Religion, as Philpott states, “devastates not only New York skyscrapers but also authoritarian regimes; it constructs not only bellicose communal identities but also democratic civil society.” Thus, this group of scholars concludes that religion can also be used in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes (see Abu-Nimer 2001; Alger 2002).

These contradictory findings stem from a number of sources. First and foremost, the literature on the relationship between war, peace, and religion often conceptualizes and measures these concepts from different points of view. In addition to the narrow conceptualization of peace noted above, the question of what entails a civil war and how it should be operationalized has caused much controversy. While scholars often agree on what a civil war is, the casualty threshold used to mark the onset of a civil war, ranging from 25 to 1,000 annual battle-related deaths, has resulted in a number of civil war datasets on which most of empirical findings are based, and that are not always comparable.

Second, the peacebuilding capacity of religion is applied to cases that are not necessarily analogous. For example, as Nichols argues, religious actors played a positive role in bringing about peace in the conflict between the Sandinistas and East Coast Indians of Nicaragua in the late 1980s through helping to develop a common language of conciliation and infusing Christian values into the negotiating process. Appleby, drawing on the case of Northern Ireland, maintains that religious leaders can gradually “saturate” the society by transforming the conflict environment and issues, condemn violence, and thus foster cross-communal cooperation. However, Appleby warns that such an outcome requires special situations characterized by a strong civil society and democratic tradition as well as assistance from the international community. Partly because of the lack of agreement on the casualty threshold noted above, current literature on civil war often treats the case of the Sandinistas vs. East Coast Indians within the broader conflict between Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Contras, making it a somewhat “marginal” case. Whereas, the Northern Ireland conflict, as Appleby aptly warns, is characterized by some unique characteristics that are that are rarely present in many war-torn countries.

Third, existing literature is still in the process of identifying the complex and complicated causal mechanisms between religion and peacebuilding. This is in part due to the ambivalent, contextual nature of religion. Religion and politics are connected in complicated ways that make it nearly impossible to disentangle one from another. A religious tradition as Armstrong summarizes is “never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way.” Instead, religions and religious interpretations “are susceptible to different readings in different contexts and become entangled in or influenced by newer sociopolitical context”. In the context of civil war, religion often becomes a part of the political arsenal to sustain the fight. As religion turns into another instrument of legitimation and mobilization in the hands of political actors it loses its power as a peacemaker.

Finally, and relatedly, the politicization of religion is most prevalent in ethnic civil wars in which fighters are lined up along identity lines and rebels are by and large secessionist in goals or desires. Therefore, the effect of religion on conflict processes in a case like Chechnya where Muslim Chechens fought destructive civil wars against Russia dominated by Orthodox Christians needs to be distinguished from the role religion plays in ethnic conflicts that involve groups hailing from the same faith, as in the case of Kurds vs. Turkey. While civil war between groups hailing from different faiths can contribute to identity formation in such a way that fuels the violence, war between co-religionists does not necessarily help foster peace. Instead, religion as the common denominator is often subsumed to ethnic, national identities and interests. The war realities often constrain, if not shape, religion, rendering religion an ineffective peacemaker (Gurses 2015).

Religion and ethnic civil war

Nicolas Rost and I have shown that due mainly to this “politicization of religion,” the hypothesized peacemaker role of religion does not hold against a global sample of ethnic civil wars. War and country characteristics, rather than shared religion, are better predictors of peace duration after ethnic civil wars. While the peace duration in our study refers to the absence of violence, in further support of studies that have pointed to discriminatory state policies as the culprit behind ethnic civil war onset and recurrence (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min 2010; Gurses and Rost 2013), we found that the level of discrimination faced by members of ethnic groups that rebelled against their government after the end of the war is the most robust predictor of peace duration. Thus, state policies that address the demands of aggrieved minorities and re-adjust their relationship with the state that could make them a part of the system are more likely to help build sustainable peace. Resorting to a shared religion to help reconcile warring groups without addressing the root causes of conflict is more rhetoric than reality.

Observations 

• There is a need to clarify the terms in order to delineate the religion-peacebuilding nexus. The terms war, religion, and peace are multidimensional and hence defy reaching a consensus on the exact nature of religion’s relationship with peacebuilding. Avoiding law-like, general explanations is more likely to be fruitful. Just as religion’s role in identity formation varies, so does the role it plays in conflict onset, duration, outcome, as well as building peace in postwar environments.
• The role religion plays in peacebuilding should be qualified. Religion in conflicts fought over government, also known as ideological civil wars, could take on a dramatically different role than in conflicts involving competing identities which are often secessionist in nature. While it is much easier for religious actors to mediate between warring groups that share the same ethnicity, speak the same language, and believe in the same “God,” their role is likely to be diminished, tarnished by political considerations in situations where protagonists use religion to either distinguish themselves as a group from one another (e.g., Palestinians vs. Israel) or religion as a common denominator ceases to be a marker that separates members of warring groups (e.g., Acehnese vs. Indonesia, 1976-2005; Kurds vs. Turkey, 1984-Ongoing). Thus sharing the same faith in the context of such ethnic civil wars often results in relegating religion to a secondary role as the war dynamics help bring ethnic identities front and center.
• Sustainable peace requires addressing structural causes of violence. Merely stressing shared faith as a solution to conflict without undertaking reforms that can re-adjust the warring groups’ relationship with the state is not likely to be effective.

Conclusion

Religion is a potent force and can serve as a peacemaker. Its role, however, is contingent upon characteristics of the civil war and the nation in question. It is worthwhile to note that “ethnic conflict remains one of the prevailing challenges to international security in our time” and “conflicts that in some way involve an ethnic dimension can be found across each of the world’s continents”. Furthermore, as Fox notes, of 268 politically active ethnic minorities worldwide for the 1990-1995 period, 163 (61%) are not religiously distinct from the dominant group. Gurses and Rost, building on datasets drawn from two different sources, find that in about half of the ethnic civil wars that started and ended between 1950 and 2006 ethnic rebels shared the same religion as the governing ethnic group. Thus, it is essential to differentiate such cases in which religion is likely to be politicized and used as an instrument of legitimation and mobilization than those cases involving groups hailing from the same ethnicity, culture, and faith.

Still, religion can serve as a peacemaker by injecting “meaning” and repair social ties that were destroyed during the war. Ideally a change of mind should coincide with a change of heart in order to reach positive or “quality” peace. However, given the discriminatory state policies toward ethno-national minorities that account for armed conflict, concrete measures, a change of mind, should precede a change of heart to build and sustain the peace in the aftermath of seemingly intractable ethnic civil wars. Sustainable peace is a dignified peace. Religion can help bring about sustainable peace only after ethnic minorities’ relations with the state are re-adjusted to a degree that minority groups feel secure and certain of their future.

Mehmet Gurses is an associate professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. He received his B.A. degree in political science and international relations from Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his doctorate from University of North Texas. His research interests include democracy and democratization, ethnic and religious conflict, post-civil war peace building, post-civil war democratization, Kurdish politics, and the emergence and evolution of the Islamist parties in the Middle East. His publications have appeared in International Interactions, Social Science Quarterly, Civil Wars, Defense and Peace Economics, Democratization, Party Politics, International Journal of Human Rights, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Political Research Quarterly.